As English garden designer Ann Marie Powell put it Gates are the portal between public street and a secret garden space They are the visitor s first and last interaction...
Photograph by Britt Willoughby-Dyer for Gardenista.
...with a garden and so a good gate one that is beautiful useful and in keeping with the style of the space where it stands sentinel will leave a lasting impression
The term “gate” originates from the Old Norse word gat, meaning opening or passage.
Borderline Gate
The half-moon design on this borderline gate elevates it to something charming: as Stafford Cliff writes in his book 1000 Garden Ideas, gate design should be thought of as “a chance to add a little design flourish that would be inappropriate on a larger scale—like a stamp on a letter.”
Five Bar Wooden Gate
The five-bar field gate with diamond bracing, shrunk down for a domestic setting, lends this garden a rustic, solid air that is in keeping with the timber-clad house beyond. One fully expects a gaggle of geese to poke their heads through at any moment.
Scalloped Picket Gate
The sage green of this gate melds beautifully with the mellow color of the high stones walls alongside.
“Secret Garden” Gate
In the classic children’s book The Secret Garden, the locked boundary to the garden in question is in fact described by writer Frances Hodgson Burnett as a door rather than a gate.
Arched Gate
An arch is a triumphal symbol, and the style this gate references its ancient antecedent, the rounded Roman arch that offered quiet support to a surrounding structure.
This gate has a touch of the Gothic about it, with a pleasing echo of the front door of the house.
English Cottage Gate
Half-moon gates are generally inviting to the casual snooper, but this one has a sting in the tail, with wrought iron spikes filling in the empty space.
Half-Moon Gate
Garden access is a thorny problem, as anyone who has tried to do significant building work on a plot will attest.
Double Gate
Traditional Picket Gate
The cheerful, traditional picket gate is unpretentious, welcoming, and thrifty. It may not last as long as the home whose boundary it marks, but it is the perfect perimeter marker for cottage gardens.
Woven panels offer tantalizing glimpses through willow or reed, but won’t give passersby a chance to ogle your grubbiest gardening gear.
Woven Panel Gate