The Evolution of a Garden Gate

Please bear with me if I seem to be documenting all the little minutiae of the changes that have been going on in my garden altely. I hope I'm not boring all of you!

I knew before they installed the new gravel garden that I wanted a new garden gate and fence between the front and back. It would be hard, if not impossible, to install this retroactively, after the new garden was in. The old gate was too narrow and to me, it looked cheap. It was still functional, none of the wood was rotten, but it was cedar painted to look like redwood. I wanted cedar that looked like cedar.

While in the "dreaming of" state, I pinned lots of examples of gates that I loved -- here, and here, and here, and here. I also have lots of pins of old gates, cool gates made of repurposed doors, etc. I love that kind of stuff. But they didn't seem like the right fit for my still basically brand new garden.

I don't have very good before photos.

You can see the old "faux redwood" gate and fence in the back of this photo.

Here are the old panels that were set aside after they were removed.

The new plan called for the gate to have stone pillars on each side, so new foundations had to be dug out and poured for those.

Then the pillars were constructed from cinder blocks.

For a while, that's all there was while the gravel garden went in.

Then the gate construction began.

The contractor took over my garage for several days.

Now, finally, I can unveil the new gate and fence!

The gate has a stained glass window in it, which I found at an antique store in a nearby town.

And the fence has these scrolly iron see-through windows.

You can see into the garden through the stained glass window. The beveled pieces of stained glass act like prisms.

And when you look through the scrolly iron windows from the other side, you can see the almost finished gravel garden (it just needs gravel mulch)

Voila! The gate!

And the fence panel!

The whole shebang!

And here it is from the other side.

The view through my new garden gate