Outdoor Rooms with a View in Cape Porpoise, Maine

All the best gardens have rooms—and hallways and windows and doorways too.

Creating gardens that give you a sense of moving from one outdoor living space to the next is the goal of the landscape designers at Kennebunk, Maine-based Snug Harbor Farm. Here’s how they accomplished it in nearby Cape Porpoise, taking advantage of a shingle style house’s expansive views of the deep water harbor:

Photographs courtesy of Snug Harbor Farm.

Above: Plants in the crevices of the granite front path make visitors feel as if they are walking through a garden.

Above: Perennial beds that blocked the view from the house were removed; chairs at the shoreline create a separate, distant destination.

Above: The pond, with a permeable terrace that aids drainage, is another separate “room.”

Above: A container of succulents at the edge of the pond; across the water, a mini wildflower meadow draws the eye toward the horizon.

Above: A low stone wall undulates, like the waves at the shoreline, and creates two disctinct levels of lawn.

Above: Looking through the frame of trees is like looking through a window at the view.

Above: Planted in 2010, the vegetable garden was created to add another outdoor room to the property.

(N.B.: This is an update of a post originally published on July 20, 2012.)