By Katie Lamar Jackson | March 2007
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Click photos to enlarge and learn more. | |||
Intro
Gates have always been a big part—sometimes a bedeviling part—of my life. When I was a child, I learned to open and close those wobbly post-and-wire Texas gaps from horseback. I discovered that a little bump of the hip and a just-so lift would open those sagging metal gates on my grandfathers’ farms wide enough to let the pickup truck through. And it was ingrained in me from an early age to make sure each gate was latched behind me to keep the dogs, horses or cattle that populated our lives and lands from escaping.
These days, however, the only gate I deal with is a fuss-free chain-link one that leads to the pen of our three-legged dog, Oscar. We learned the hard way that, despite his disability, Oscar is swift-footed and prone to dashing through an open gate, so I am thankful that it’s an easy gate to manage. But I have been dreaming this winter of another kind of gate, one to welcome the world rather than keep something in or out—a garden gate.
Now gates, by nature, are supposed to be utilitarian. They were developed, according to historians, at the same time that humans began to erect walls for protection (no big surprise there, eh?), so gates originated as tools that controlled access or shut out the world.
While a garden gate may serve the very same functions—an outdoor doorway that provides access to the garden while also keeping out the riff-raff—it has the lovely advantage of also being an element of art in a landscape and has potential to be ever-so welcoming. A garden gate may provide a line of view into a garden or serve as a transition between outdoor “rooms,” and it can be the focal point of your garden or landscape. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want, ranging from two sentinel posts with no real gate, to close to a trellis, to a roofed pergola and a bench for relaxing.
| top |