Searching for mystery

When I was a teacher in China, we spent a lot of time on the four learning styles: visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic. I was a strong auditory and kinesthetic learner, meh in visual and tactile.

This does not serve me well in the arty/drawy/just-picture-it process of garden design.

After making my birds-eye swirly whirly mass-space diagram for the parking strip, I got concerned. About how it would look from the ground. About how it would look in the context of the whole yard, which I just don't have time to map.  About whether I would end up throwing away good instincts and impulses just to stick to my original diagram.

So I'm going to hang on to my swirly whirly. But I'm also going to start another design looking at the site from ground level and trying to get an in-person sense of where mass and space just feel right.

The Landscaping on the New Frontier book points to research by the University of Michigan's Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, who identify four elements that make a place feel right. They are:

• Mystery
• Legibility
• Complexity
• Cohesion 

The one I understand best is mystery -- basically, that the landscape should direct your attention to places you can't see or experience yet. Visual pathways make the viewer wonder about obscured views they lead to.

This makes more sense to me than my swirly whirly mass-space diagram. I can't envision the obscured views from that birds-eye drawing. My skills of spacial reasoning are far from intuitive.

But I can imagine experiences pretty well.

Time to get kinesthetic. Time to imagine I'm one of the many pedestrians on my street, seeing my parking strip for the first time.

Time to go for a walk.

Like I said, the parking strip is LOOONG. For scale, here is the entire length with Dragon at the end.



Dragon's end is the one I'll be starting with. There is rabbitbush, which I intend to keep.



Here's my canvas.



Aaaand from the other side.



I kind of feel like this would be a decent mysterious path:



So how about a larger shrub around here to hide it?



Now, which shrub to choose ...

...??

It's a mystery. I'll think about that later.