Landscaping Project Valladolid
- ÁBATON Landscaping
In Project Valladolid the garden does not surround the house: the house rests on the garden. The brief asked us for a sustainable single-storey home, and the slope of the plot and the views of the nearby holm oak wood decided the orientation. We began the landscape design on that same drawing, as a vegetal envelope that grows against the façades and reaches the glass.
“This is one of the most personal and special landscaping projects.”
That closeness is the key decision. The sliding windows of the bedrooms open directly onto a meadow of lavender and salvia; the living room, to the south, onto the pool and the willows. There is no gravel strip or transition zone: the planting begins where the interior floor ends, and privacy comes from the plants, not from walls.
We organised the palette by flowering season so that something is always open. More than sixty varieties, among them Phlomis russeliana, whose yellow whorls dry on the stem and last all winter; Stipa tenuissima, the grass that moves with any breeze; Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’, with its almost black purple spike; and Nepeta, which spills over the paths. In the shaded areas the register changes: Japanese maples and rhododendrons beside a pale concrete path, and stepping stones beneath a wisteria that leads to the pergola.
The water has a garden of its own. The pool, with its wooden fence and a weeping willow, is surrounded by lavender and perennials right up to the edge, with loose slabs among the planting for arriving barefoot.
These are resilient species which, once established, ask for little watering, and the garden has grown denser over the years. For those who live there it is, besides, the reason for the house: the motive for choosing the plot and the first thing they see on waking.
