The Problem with Narrow Borders

The term ‘less is more’ is used a lot, we say it ourselves for many reasons, however, when it comes to borders, more is most definitely more!

Narrow Border Constraints

We are often asked to develop a planting scheme or suggest plants for people that haven’t had their garden designed but have had their garden changed and built by landscapers who’ve ‘left the garden borders ready for planting’. Unfortunately, what we sometimes find are very narrow borders, often just placed around the perimeter of a garden.

Whilst this is by no means a criticism of landscapers, or clients, very narrow borders do make it difficult to create an impactful planting scheme. Sometimes narrow borders are simply due to either landscapers or home owners not realising or understanding the potential for borders to be used to as part of our garden design toolkit to change the whole look and feel of a garden; to bring ambience, for instance, or create surprise, to draw the eye or direct it, to create balance and proportion to the space. They don't appreciate that it is usually far better to have one or two large garden borders than lots of really tiny ones. Then again, it could be that homeowners want a low maintenance scheme and think that a narrow border means lower maintenance, when actually, a very narrow border can make it difficult to achieve lower maintenance status.

No Room for Growth

To illustrate this final point let’s consider an evergreen shrub such as a Choisya – a great, low maintenance shrub that flowers in spring – once you plant it, there is very little to do to it. Whilst there are a number of Choisya varieties available, for this example our shrub will naturally grow to around 1m width once the plant is established. Now imagine a 30-40cm deep border - which isn't unheard of - which means that if we did use it, our poor Choisya would have roughly a third pushed up against a fence and another third hanging over the border edge often getting in the way of a lawn mower resulting in the plant never really looking that attractive and homeowners never being that happy with it. As such, so many garden staples that are lower maintenance just can't be used in narrow borders and if they are, would outgrow the available space in no time at all. Had the borders been wider a lower maintenance scheme can be more effectively achieved.

Sentries in a Row

Picking up on some of our earlier design points too, narrow borders make it impossible to, quite literally, create any sense of depth in a border which, if available, brings with it opportunities to utilise other design principles such as using various textures, sizes and shapes of plants to create drama and visual impact. Instead, in a very narrow border a row of similar shaped plants - or indeed the same plant - might need to be used in the space in order to make the best of the available space and create some sort of cohesion, but the down side of that strategy is that it can often end up looking a bit like peas in a pod or sentries in a row. Even a very contemporary garden – which often uses a more limited planting palette – would still benefit from deeper borders.

Expand the Border

When faced with narrow borders we do usually try to convince a homeowner to 'expand' at least one border if it is at all possible to allow for a richer tapestry of shapes, form and colour in the garden, as well as to bring more balance to the overall feel of the space. And when we design a garden, we will always design it with a more balanced proportion of planted to non-planted areas, utilising deeper borders and the positioning of them to allow us to create a planting scheme that delights the client and wildlife/pollinators too.

So, if you are designing the layout of your own garden do try to consider the size and positions of your borders a little more because where they are concerned, more is most definitely more!

Colour in the Garden - The Benefits of Blue

When it comes to using colour in the garden, did you know that blue is a fantastic colour to use because it's so versatile? It has a recessive quality to it which some people may find ambiguous but it is that exact quality that makes it such a useful colour to use in a garden design. Simply by receding, it can be used to blend other colours together in planting; or to create an illusion of depth be that in planting or within the landscaping materials; it also has an ability to pick up the mood of its neighbouring plants too.

Blue can add depth and space to a garden so it’s a great colour to use at the back of a border to make it seem like the vista is extending even further. There are so many different hues and tones of colours - pale blue for example, can bring lightness, through to intense saturated hues – think of the vibrancy of cornflowers on a hot summer's day! Blue also works really well in shady areas as it picks up the light and is a colour well known for creating calm, restful and contemplative spaces. So, with that in mind blue can offer you opportunities to help obtain the right feel and ambience that you are trying to create.

Some well known blue plants you might think of immediately are Ceanothus, Muscari, Iris and Geraniums but here are a few others that we use in our planting schemes:

Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’ is popular for its globes of blue flowers which contrast so well with other plant forms, they stand around 1m in height and 45cm in width so are ideally suited to the middle or back of a sunny border. Echinops are magnets for lots of pollinating insects to your garden too which can only be an added bonus!

Salvia x sylvestris ‘Mainacht’ has indigo blue flowers on spikes that liven up a border in early to mid summer; it stands around 80cm in height and 50cm in width. It looks great in an herbaceous border and is a reliable perennial which will keep coming back year after year making it a good investment. It prefers well drained but moist soil, plant this and you’ll notice pollinating insects visiting your garden!

Salvia 'Blue Spire' (previously classified as Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’) is also known as Russian sage, (see main pic) it has aromatic leaves and upright silvery grey spires with blue tubular shaped flowers. Often mistaken as a perennial it is in fact a shrub and will typically flower in August and September. It can get to around 1.2m in height and 1m width and is happiest in full sun. Plant it near a pathway where you can enjoy its fragrance.

Don’t forget you don’t have to just have blue flowers in the garden to create that blue theme; you can match your gates, doors or even paint obelisks in this colour too which will create dynamism, cohesion and flow right through your garden.

We’ve created a Pinterest board for ‘Blue’ in the garden, take a peek here www.pinterest.com/bluedaisyuk/colour-wheel-blue/

Good Bones - Structure in the Garden

If you’ve been looking out at a garden that gives you very little to hold your interest, it’s likely it could do with a serious injection of ‘structure’.

It’s probably fair to say that garden designers are a tad obsessed with structure in the garden because it is the key to a great garden; it is the framework upon which the fleeting or seasonal elements of a garden hang on, the skeleton or ‘bones’ of a garden, if you will; the thing that holds everything together, strongly and in place. As such, structure in a garden can be made up of many things, both hard and soft landscaping elements (including, confusingly, ‘garden structures’, like buildings and pergolas!). For the most part the defining quality of any structural element in a garden is one of permanence or persistence – they are the things that are there throughout the year; they might change through the year (like a deciduous tree) or not (like a patio or pathway) but they will be a constant, so regardless of season, they still bring something to the garden.

So, where do you start with structure in your own garden?

Well, if you’re designing a garden from scratch good bones or structure starts with the shapes you use for the different elements of your garden (patios, pathways, lawns, ponds, beds and borders, etc.) and how you lay them out in relation to each other and to your home. Regardless of the season this layout is the constant foundation of the garden, it underpins everything. And whilst you can make this layout interesting in and of itself with the application of different materials and textures, when you start to think in 3D the magic really begins to happen.

Elements such as trees, walls, pergolas, gazebos, arches, hedges, obelisks, sculpture, shrubs, etc., that operate on the vertical plane, offer up a gold mine of infinite structural possibilities, that when integrated effectively with the structural foundation of your garden layout can ensure that every season in a well structured garden is a season of interest. Take our main image as an example, this was taken in October at Scampston Hall in Yorkshire, and you can see that there's still plenty of interest going on to hold the eye even without any flowers to speak of, and you also know that even later in the year and well into winter the structural elements will still continue to work well.

Whether starting from scratch or adding extra layers of structure to an already existing garden when deciding which structural elements to include in your design simplicity is often the key. Consider the function, size and scale, materials, colour, style and positioning of each element; too many elements or materials, style and colour for instance, can result in visual overload whilst misjudging the size and scale of an element can lead to confusion and disproportion.

If you’re working with an existing garden most people tend to have a lawn, patio, pathway, borders and a shed or greenhouse. These are all structural elements – hopefully organised well already – so you wouldn’t want to overload it with too many more structural things but you might be amazed at the difference one or two small well placed specimen trees and some low level evergreen hedging could make!

Don’t forget the more seasonal elements of your garden in relation to the structure too. Your structure should support the whole, not take it over! It should offer a dependable backdrop to the high impact stars of the growing season. Those seasonal showstoppers will take centre stage when cued but when their star has faded it will be the good bones; the strong structural elements of a garden that will carry the mantle of interest through the whole year.

Garden Design Principal Principles

Clipped box balls repeated alongside water feature

Garden Design Principal Principles

Garden design – the clue is in the name – we design gardens, and like all disciplines of design, the best examples of our work – and that of other garden designers – can always be traced back to the creative application of a few fundamental principles – or rules – that underpin all we do.

Rather unhelpfully, there isn’t a universally accepted specific, set number of these rules; one camp may cite 5, another 12, yet another 9 or 7 but if you were to read all of them you would see a commonality between them.  Just as Shakespeare’s “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” so too for garden design principles – nuances may influence numbers but regardless of what you call them or how you count them – they do all seem to coalesce around a few fundamental ideas; principal principles, if you will.

  1. Cohesion – other names might be unity, harmony, repetition, colour, style – but this is all about creating something that works as a cohesive whole.  Themes work well for cohesion, for instance a contemporary garden or a cottage garden – putting a name to that theme or style brings with it a set of rules to apply to it.  You can even ‘room’ a garden within a theme, giving it a different feel in different areas but the theme itself helps maintain harmony and unity throughout supported by repetition of form or texture or colour.  Repetition and colour too can play the leading role in achieving cohesion when style or theme may not be so prominent. 
  2. Balance – other names might be order, scale, proportion, symmetry, mass & voids – but this is all about where you ‘put’ different elements within the garden and how they work with all the other elements that are there so that everything feels balanced.  Perhaps the easiest way of achieving this is through symmetry, where one side of a garden ‘mirrors’ the other side – everything on one side is balanced out by exactly the same things on the other side – but plants also play a part in balance and the same species and variety of plant can grow at different rates in different parts of the garden. If that is the case for this example, then the balance of the symmetrical design could be ruined by over or under-performing plants.  Not every garden works symmetrically, of course, so finding balance and proportionality between elements can be challenging; balancing an existing shed for instance wouldn’t be about siting another shed somewhere else but using something that carries similar visual ‘weight’ or impact in order to achieve balance.  This might be a large shrub or a mature tree for instance.
  3. Movement – other names might be transition, rhythm, flow, line, focal points, destination, perspective, depth, journey – and this is mainly about how you move through the garden, whether physically or by eye, (i.e., when viewing the garden) but also about how the garden itself can be a source of movement.  Pathways, arches, benches, water features, sculptures, specimen plants and more all give the eye or the body something to follow or move to, while rustling leaves, grasses swaying in the breeze, trickling water, bird and other wildlife all bring extra layers of movement too adding dynamism to a space.

The challenge for any garden designer is to utilise and combine these ‘rules’ in order to create something that is fit for purpose and looks fantastic too but if you’re getting bogged down with too many garden design principles and don’t know which or how to apply them, the principal principles approach might just help. 

Creating an Indoor Outdoor Cohesive Space

Creating an Indoor Outdoor Cohesive Space

One of the jobs of a garden designer is to try to make the garden feel part of a cohesive whole with a client’s house so that they feel they belong together. It’s rarely an explicit request but when we’re designing a garden, a good starting point when trying to decide where things should go is to do it with the sight lines from the house very firmly in mind.  Regardless of the size of garden if you can create something beautiful and interesting to look out at then it brings the garden ‘closer’ to the viewer because they feel more engaged with it.  We’ve talked before about creating views of the garden so that from inside the house, the frames of windows and doorways when looking out are ‘framing’ the view beyond.  In putting that ‘view’ together it’s a good tip to try to think as a painter or photographer would, in terms of thinking about fore-, middle and backgrounds; about balance, subjects and ways of leading the eye through the view.

The décor, along with the use and choice of materials indoors, can give huge cues for outdoor decisions in terms of linking a garden and home – and more on that in a future article – but one obvious way to link indoor and outdoor spaces is through the use of greenery, i.e. plant choices and planting design.  Indoor gardening is more popular than ever and as we’re becoming more and more aware, just as looking out at a view of nature is good for us, surrounding ourselves with house plants is too.

Studies show that there are both psychological and physical health benefits of indoor plants; psychologically they improve our mood, reduce our stress levels and help make us more productive.  Physically they reduce our blood pressure, headaches and fatigue.  Indoor plants – just as outdoor plants do – also bring with them a massive and versatile potential for aesthetic styling, and just as we work with such things like form, habit, colour and texture externally, so too can we do so indoors. 

There’s a huge potential then for creating cohesion of indoor and outdoor spaces through planting.  For instance, if you can bring your outdoor planting right up to your house – perhaps through window boxes or raised beds leading up to your patio doors/bifolds, etc - and your indoor planting right up to the outdoor threshold so only the glass of a window or doors separates them; it can be a very effective way of blending the boundary between indoor and outdoor. 

Similarly repeating the forms, textures or leaf shapes of indoor plants with outdoor planting reinforces the links between the separate areas.  Picking repeating/similar flower or leaf colours across thresholds has the same effect as does choosing similar styles of pots that continue across the divide. 

For many of us space can be an issue both inside and out, so as usual, when floor space is limited, we’d recommend thinking vertically.  While hedges aren’t quite an option indoors, indoor wall space can be just as effective as garden fences and walls outside when it comes to accommodating plants.  You don’t need a full-size living wall either (as beautiful as they are!).  Climbers can be used indoors or as in our image/s small ‘living pictures’ can be used to harmonise the indoor/outdoor areas just as effectively as floor or shelf standing planters.  (We were so delighted with these living pictures in terms of looks, versatility and practicality - they have their own reservoir so watering is pretty much taken care of – we are now accredited suppliers of them so do get in touch if you are as equally delighted with them!)

Of course, choosing plants for indoors needs the same consideration as choosing for outdoors so light levels, room temperature and fluctuations, plant care needs and toxicity are some of the things to be considered along with their looks, size, form, colour, texture, etc.  If you have the right plant, in the right place doing the right job for you both indoors and out then the chances are good that you’ll also have a cohesive indoor/outdoor space.

Don’t be fooled by gardens in winter

Winter isn’t ‘dead’

It may be the ‘dead’ of winter, but don’t be fooled… contrary to popular belief winter gardens have an awful lot going for them. Not only can a well designed garden look gorgeous in winter, in terms of both gardening and design there is also lots to do in, and about, the garden at this time of year.

...winter can be one of our busiest seasons because for those clients who want to enjoy their garden in the spring and early summertime, it is in winter where all the work is required

As garden designers we’re often asked if we get the winter ‘off’ but honestly, winter can be one of our busiest seasons because for those clients who want to enjoy their garden in the spring and early summertime, it is in winter where all the work is required. The garden design, build and planting process can take anything from 5 to 24 weeks from date of sign up, and even longer in some circumstances – the weather, resource availability and other factors can often get in the way – so counting backwards, if you want to be enjoying those early rays of April sunshine in your newly designed garden you need to be confirmed in our work schedule in December, January or mid-February at the very latest.

But even if a professional garden designer and landscaper isn’t for you; it is in winter that the best laid plans for your garden need to be hatched. It is winter time that allows you to see the underlying structure of your garden and judge whether or not it’s working; it is winter time that is best for physically addressing those structural problems while plants are dormant and space is clear for movement; it is winter time that is the best time for moving plants that you want to keep because of that dormancy and it is the wintertime that precedes the time you most want to enjoy your garden, enabling you to be ready and prepared for the spring ‘rush’ to be outdoors.

If you’re not redesigning but looking after your garden the winter offers the best opportunity to prune trees and shrubs such as wisteria, fruit trees (though not stone fruit trees like plum or cherry), climbing roses, acers and vines. It is a great time for propagating many perennials from root cuttings and shrubs and trees from hard wood cuttings. It is also the best time for the maintenance of structures and tools and there are still many garden maintenance tasks that, if done regularly, will benefit your garden greatly when it does begin to come out of hibernation.

In terms of designing for a beautiful winter garden for next year, structure is the key here.

In terms of designing for a beautiful winter garden for next year, structure is the key here. Structure can be provided by a number of means: well placed evergreen plants, for instance, with different forms, texture and heights really come into their own in a winter garden. Hedge lines and simple topiary shapes like balls and pyramids can look fantastic as do ‘gone over’ seed heads and the stark imposing shapes of deciduous trees. Sheds, obelisks, pergolas, art, water features and trellis all offer structural opportunities for the winter garden along with hard landscaping features like pathways, steps and walls. And don’t forget colour too, just because it’s winter your garden doesn’t have to be dull – think of the neon winter bark of cornus and willow, the bright red berries of holly and the acid yellow/orange flowers of hamamelis, to name a few; not to mention the extensive array of paint hues and shades available to us for a man-made intervention.

Tempted to get out of your cosy armchair yet?? Go on! You know you want to and spring will be here before you know it!

Up Front Garden Design

Up Front Garden Design

I thought I’d make a change from normal proceedings this time around, and rather than focus on a garden design principle or tip I thought I’d consider a specific area of our home: often overlooked, but always on view, our front gardens frequently get short shrift when it comes to imaginative home improvement.

Recent trends in front gardens have seen significant increases in full paving practices and substantial reductions in plants both of which have detrimental knock on effects to humans, wildlife and the planet as a whole. It may sound dramatic and it’s easy to think that ‘my little bit’ won’t make a difference but cumulatively lots of ‘little bits’ following these trends are increasing the possibilities of flooding, contributing to climbing urban temperatures and pollution levels, impacting negatively on wildlife and making our environment more fractious, depressing places to live.

It may sound trite to say that a little bit of garden design inspiration can help mitigate these very real threats to ours and our natural world’s existence but if we all start to really think about the space outside our homes as a ‘garden’ first and a car park or a bin store or a mere transition point from a pavement to our front door second, then we just might stand a chance of reversing these damaging trends. Don’t get me wrong, I still stand by the design mantra of ‘form ever follows function’ but there’s no ‘form’ in fully paving a front garden; it is functionality without form and it is that idea – that you have to sacrifice form entirely in order to get a car (as an example) onto your front garden – that I want us all to reconsider. With a little bit of imagination and an application of design principles there is no reason why we can’t have our cake and eat it too i.e. have a functional but still lovely front garden.

So, some top tips for achieving it? Read on…

Hopefully this will give you some ideas of where to start and we can all begin to make our neighbourhoods lovelier places to be! Check out the RHS website too for more ideas about how to green your little bit of grey Britain.

Now you see it – magical garden design

Garden Designer as Magician?

Before we start I do want to make clear that garden designers are not magicians! We can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat or find a fortune for you behind your ear but that said garden designers do have a few tricks up their sleeves that, like magicians, depend on the powers and skills of misdirection, and dare I say it, manipulation.

The garden designer’s motivation for using such skills is fairly benign: how can we hide this ugly corner, for instance, or make the garden feel bigger, smaller, longer, wider, shorter, more intimate or more expansive; I’m sure you get the picture! We often want things we haven’t got or struggle to deal effectively with things we have and gardens are no different – thank goodness then for some of the tried and tested illusionary tools in the arsenal of a garden designer…

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this subject, it’s as expansive as the results appear magical, but hopefully it will give you an insight into some of the ways garden designers achieve some of the effects they do.

Colour in the Garden – Outstanding Yellow

What’s not to love about yellow you might think – it’s bright, cheery, striking; there are some gorgeous yellow- flowered and leafed plants; it’s sunshiny disposition is a tonic, managing to uplift us all, especially in spring. But yellow is not without its detractors it seems. The modernists of the 50’s for instance disliked yellow for its intensity, considering it way too jarring to be comfortable; and yellow has been banned from many a ‘snob’s’ garden for simply being considered the colour of ‘the people’.

Controversy and prejudice aside though yellow has a lot going for it in terms of garden design and if you can harness its power effectively the results can be spectacular.

Like red, yellow is both a primary colour and a ‘hot’ one and many of the attributes of red also apply to yellow. For instance both colours draw attention and as such seem to ‘advance’ – useful if you want to make a large space appear smaller. Play around with hues though and yellow becomes much more versatile than red. Paler yellow can act as a soothing balm to other colours for instance – odd for a hot colour; and an all yellow – but different shades – scheme works so much better than an all red planting scheme. The secret to its success is probably in its positioning on the colour wheel. Sitting right next to green – THE predominant neutral colour of any garden – yellow blends with green like no other colour.

But it’s not only green that yellow works well with. Pair it with blues and purples (violet) and it acts as a spectacular foil to its complementary colours; and still further, no hot border will ever be complete without the analogous colours of red, orange and yellow.

Yellow is also one of the best natural reflectors of light in a garden – edge a pathway with yellow foliage or flowered plants and you instantly create a ‘light marker’ along the path. Position yellow in areas that get early or late sunshine and you create golden ‘glows’ around your garden. Pale yellows, like white, seem to glow in a night time garden.

Whilst yellow can seem super fresh and radiant on hot sunny days, summer time is perhaps its least effective season because of its reflective qualities. Depending on the tone of yellow, very bright sunshine can make a bright yellow seem far too dazzling and overpowering whereas the softer light of spring, autumn and winter tends to only bring out the best of yellow.

One of the tricks of using yellow to its best advantage is to mass plant with it rather than dot it around a border. Think how striking fields of sunflowers or rapeseed are when seen en masse and whilst we don’t all have a field available to us we can proportionally mass plant within the space we do have. And one more thing about yellow (flowers) that’s worth mentioning: bees love it (even though they think its blue)… and we love bees… so what’s not to love?

Garden Design Quick Tip: Using Plants for Texture

We love creating texture in the garden because it appeals to many senses at once. You can often tell what something is going to feel like just by looking at it - think of Stachys byzantina also known as ‘lambs ears’ where the leaves have that soft woolly texture and Stipa tenuissima (feather grass) with its fine feathery tendrils that make you want to run your fingers through the leaves. But not all plants feel how they look and it is only by interacting with them – i.e. touching them – that anticipation can be confirmed or surprised. When there is great textural contrast within a border its effects are heightened not only because of the visual and physical impact of how those textures work together but also because the invitation to touch it is so much stronger too.

Examples of plants with coarse texture are Gunnera manicata, Bergenia and even Fatsia japonica – where often the leaves themselves become strong and dominant focal points.  If you have a small garden having too many coarse textured plants can make it feel claustrophobic, and generally to create greater depth coarse textured plants would be placed in the foreground with finer textures around the boundary.  In a small garden this could be achieved using Fatsia japonica in the foreground and Osmanthus x burkwoodii or Sarcococca confusa (or varieties) for instance around the boundary.

Often medium textured plants are used to link the coarse and finer textured plants to create harmony whilst softening the contrasting textures.  The shrub Elaeagnus x ebbingei and perennials such as Geraniums or Heucheras both have medium texture foliage that help link the others together.

Finer texture plants have the smallest leaves such as Hebe, Yew or Stipa tenuissima.  These plants do not seem to demand the attention that the coarse plants require and therefore are more calming and much easier to look at.  They also have a great quality of receding; therefore planting a small garden with many fine textured plants can make it look larger.  Fine textured plants can often play an important part in more formal planting schemes because it is often the overall shape of the plant rather than the leaves that becomes the dominate feature.  So, for example, Buxus sempervirens (Box) has very small leaves but can be clipped into many shapes as does Taxus baccata which provides a good backdrop for different types of planting schemes.

Remember that if your garden is lacking in texture the ratio 1/3 fine-textured plants and 2/3 course textured plants is a good guide to work towards.  Obviously every garden and setting is different but as a general rule it’s not a bad one to remember!