Garden ruins and follies add more to your garden than you think!
If you look up garden ruins or follies in the dictionary, you will be told that they are ‘costly ornamental buildings with no practical purpose.’
However, the dictionary clearly wasn’t written by gardeners. Garden ruins and follies have several practical uses in your garden.
They can be a focal point. They may be used to divide up the space in a garden.
And, according to William Dyson, curator of Great Comp Garden in Kent, they can create a ‘micro-climate’ for growing different plants.
Ruins and follies also add height to your garden, he says. You can grow climbers up them or use them to display plants.
And they can help protect tender plants from the prevailing wind.
You could even turn your garden shed into a folly. You could still use it as a garden shed, as Roger Lloyd did in an evergreen garden with a touch of grandeur.
And on top of all that, garden ruins and follies add drama and fantasy to your outdoor space.
Garden ruins and follies don’t have to be expensive
Follies are part of the design language of the great historic French and English gardens, with their Classical or Gothic temples, pavilions and ‘ruins’.
But they don’t have to be expensive.
Great Comp Garden is famous for its follies and garden ruins. They make the garden feel magical and mysterious, but they were created in the last half of 20th century by Eric Cameron.
When he dug out the borders at Great Comp, he had to remove a huge amount of Kentish ragstone and flint. So he created the ‘ruins’ to use up the materials. He also kept a sharp eye out for salvaged materials and ‘job lots’ he picked up as bargains. He even did most of the work himself.
So I asked William Dyson about what garden ruins and follies could do for our own gardens.
