Garden design has been described as artistry. Indeed it is, but it is different from most other art forms.

Redecorate a room, design and build a house, even paint a picture, and the result will be there for you to see relatively shortly.

Design and plant a garden and - save for perhaps an annual patch - years, or even centuries, could pass before it achieves its goal.

Stourhead in England, a vast landscape garden, is into its third century. Some of the original trees (including the world’s largest tulip poplar) are still there, the backbone of all the garden’s appurtenances, be they plant, stone or water.

None of us has the inclination, or wherewithal, to plant on that massive a scale, and certainly not for the centuries to follow. We want results here and, preferably, now (now in this case being, say, one to 10 years).

In the case of slow-growing trees, which include mostly the best kinds, even 10 years is out of reason. A white oak is still an infant in 10 years. Also, some slow-growing shrubs aren’t at their best until later than that.

Time, nevertheless, is of the essence when planning and planting a garden, even one designed for the long term. The quicker you get those oaks and Japanese maples into the ground, the quicker they will embark on their perilous and slothful crawl toward maturity. You won’t be around to see much result from those kinds of things, but your children (and more likely, grandchildren) might.

Of course, that depends on the remote likelihood there will be someone remaining who is willing to see that the garden continues. Chances of that are virtually zip. Most noteworthy private gardens begin to deteriorate around the time rigor mortis sets in on their owners. It will be no time before someone is sodding over fine flower borders or dismantling troublesome stone walls to simplify maintenance.

This disconcerting thought shouldn’t crimp your ambition to be a great gardener. With a new property or an old one to be redone, those slow-growing trees and shrubs are precisely where you should start. Quicker stuff can be added as time (and dollars) permit. All the while, the slow growers will be getting the bit between their teeth, establishing roots, so that later, when furnishings are added, the backbone already will have been placed.

A plant collection does not a garden make.

Would that it did. Everything would be much simpler. Just buy the plants you like and plant them.

One of my grandmothers, from whence spring spring other of those genes, had less time to garden and less plants to work with, but she had an inherent knack for plant placement. Her stately hollyhocks in front of a fence laden with heavily fruited boysenberry canes created a picture that could have made the cover of Country Gardens.

The plant collector grandmother’s ground, on the other hand, encompassed an encyclopedia of ornamental genera, species and varieties, but it was a here, there and yonder setting. Any opening in the lawn was fair game for the next shrub or tree.

The most interesting gardens are a rare combination of such zest for plant collecting but severly mitigated by restraint and proper placement and design. Remember, we’re talking about gardens, not just landscapes, though some of the same rules apply to both. There is, however, a difference. Most people equate gardens with flowers and color and landscapes with the greenery of shrubs and trees.

Ideally, gardens should be designed from the ground up, so to speak. That is, the "hardscape" (walks, decks, walls, fences, etc.) should be placed first, then the plant ingredients added. It is not an ideal world, I learned long ago (and so did you). Most gardens "just grow," like ours has at Tennessee Dixter. Because of that, every addition or change to the ground entails extensive re-working of surrounding areas that would have been prevented with overall plans early on.

For instance, I have added several walks over the years, both concrete and stone, and in each instance established plants had to be yanked out and moved or destroyed.

Our lot drops quite severly from northwest to southeast. It should have been terraced and cut-and-filled in the beginning, with retaining walls here and there to make for some level areas. With no funds and less inclination for such niceties when we built 23 years ago, the result has been a constant war against erosion and futile efforts to get grass to grow on the steep slopes. Oh, for more stone retaining walls like the one that I did get around to building 15 years ago.

So then, most of us are stuck with past mistakes, either of our own making or of those who preceded us on the land. We have work with what’s there and get on with it.

The majority of American gardens, particularly in the hinterland (and that’s here) are informal. These generally consist of a lawn wide open to prying eyes at the street, evergreen foundation plantings and little else. Color and privacy are reserved for back yards, though with ever-shrinking lot sizes viable privacy is becoming almost extinct. Developers, to large degree, are interested more in making money than anything, else, including esthetics.

It is remarkable, in fact, what elaborate and sizable homes are being built on postage-stamp lots. Some of the most desirable building areas are chopped into itsy-bitsy plots. You have $200,000 homes on some of these. The old formula of spending a tenth the cost of the house on landscaping is ignored. Often these pretentious homes have but a minimal smattering of greenery futilely trying to set them off.

Many homesites in this area are sloping. This, in itself, is contribution toward informal plans. It is difficult to arrange a formal garden on a slope.

Informal gardening will more than likely feature paths with curves, few 90-degree angles, either in plant placement or hardscape, and little evidence of such things as sheared hedges and straight lines. Neither will there be many things planted or placed in pairs. Matching pairs always lend a formal air. As a matter of fact gardens with little design at all are usually referred to as "informal."

A properly designed informal garden, however, is often more difficult to achieve than a formal one. Anyone can lay out squares and rectangles, while informal schemes with proper balance and not jarring effects can prove elusive.

Formal designs, with those squares and rectangles, are most often seen on flat topography. Rectangular lots in open situations are perfect candidates for formal gardens, though formality outdoors is virtually nonexistent here.

The French and Italians are masters at formal design, and the English blend it to perfection with informal planting within frameworks of formal "bones." For instance, most English gardens are rife with sheared hedges, immaculate old stone or brick walls and paths that almost always are straight, not crooked. Within these hedges and walls, however, there abound luxurious plantings of shrubs, perennials and annuals that literally overflow their perimeters and spill out thither and yon to delightful effect.

While American gardens will continue in their vein and so will the English ones, there is a perceptible change on this side of the water toward more English style, particularly among discerning gardeners.

I once had the opinion that formal gardens were too static and rigid for almost any residential application. That was before a trip to England in 1992, when we visited more than 20 great English gardens. Practically all of them were formal in design but overflowing with luxuriant, even turbulent, plantings of perennials, annuals, flowering shrubs and vines. My outlook on the subject was drastically modified.

An example of informal design could be taken with a group of plants, whether flowers, shrubs or trees. These would be set in random groupings, usually of an odd number, and never in rows, squares of any other way with straight lines.

In fact, when planting informally it is best to not set any plant in a group an equal distance apart from any other. They will then mature into a setting as befits nature. When have you seen three or more trees in a woods in a perfect row or triangle?

In an informal garden, there will be few straight lines in any ingredient, save perhaps for the property lines and the walls of the house. Even retaining walls and hedges can be constructed or planted in undulations, as are the "crinkum-crankum" brick walls sometimes seen with a series of serpentine curves.

Just about the ultimate in informality is seen in rock gardens. These are never formal. That would be an anomaly. Rocks (preferable boulders) are "arranged" as nature would have them, and seldom in straight lines for any distance at all.

They should, however, be placed so that they are protruding from the ground at a believable angle and not simply piled and jumbled at random.

Trees and the resulting shade are equated with informality. Shade provides just a setting and conditions for plants that are generally informal in effect. Perennials such as hostas, hardy begonias, ferns, turtlehead, lobelia and bugbane are difficult to use in formal situations, but are perfect for the informality of a shade garden.

Even some shrubs (i.e. sweet pepper bush, hydrangeas, witch hazels, etc.) will provide structure and color and will grow into looser and more casual specimens than they will when grown in sun.

Many people go on about the problems of shade, but in blistering summers the shade is a blessing. It is just a matter of using plants that thrive there.

Flower beds in informal gardens will seldom be confined within straight lines. In our own garden, mowing strips of flagstone and concrete, constructed by the sweat of our brow over the years, are all in flowing and gentle curves. The beds inside them follow those lines and nowhere is a border with a formal format.

Formal gardens, generally considered the bailiwick of the upper-crust gardening world, can fit humble situations just as effectively.

Well, almost. There’s no garden milieu that can match such as the gardens at Versailles in France. Those carpets of green hedges, meatballs and teepees surrounded by smooth slabs of colored gravel wouldn’t be for you anyway. Formality, however, you can use, even if only superficially.

For instance, a pair of pots on the porch, filled with similar or even identical plants, provides an air of formality, even if all the rest of your place is informal. For just a bit more of a feature, a simple parterre (plants set in patterns) in the middle of a lawn or patio, can add a lofty touch to an otherwise informal situation.

Few of us want anything resembling Versailles, but we could stand just a tad of it in tiny doses. I do believe, also, that age brings with it a higher appreciation of formal situations, in gardens or elsewhere. You often see this in homes (interior and exterior) built by those of advancing years.

This has been our experience. As I have added to our gardens over the years, more formal features have crept in, even within an otherwise totally relaxed situation. Most garden designers say that kind of thing won’t work, but in all modesty I have it has for us. Maybe it’s just my jaded (and biased) eyes.

One illustration is a woodland edge planted up to azaleas and featuring self-seeded impatiens in summer. This faces our back "lawn" (as it were) and is seen from both the house and deck. Smack in the middle of the azaleas is a statue, some 5 feet tall and on an 18-inch pedestal, of a somewhat fetching lass, well detailed with the healthy appurtenances that become her.

Most definitely a formal feature in a most definitely informal setting. Again, I think it works. (She does look a little frigid in a picture I made of her and the azaleas covered with snow. It appears Lady Di is standing in the middle of a cotton field.)

It doesn’t have to be statuary. A large pot or urn, even remaining empty the year-round, will have the same effect. Garden tours I recently attended in and around Raleigh, N.C., found this used with great panache again and again. Of course, any old washpot or dishpan won’t work. It has to be just the right shape and size, and generally of terra cotta or stone, to ad the right stuff to the situation.

Garden structures can add formality to most any situation. Even rustic pergolas and arbors, when well built and placed, seem to do the trick (and a trick it is). A long, rambling shrub or perennial border, for instance, when stopped by such as this, seems altogether different.

Formal or informal? You take your pick and live with the result. But even if you’re locked in to one or the other, I hope we have seen here over the past few weeks that modification isn’t a sin.