Do you have an oddly-shaped garden? A triangular-ish space? An awkward front garden? No back garden? A small garden? Tiny budget?
This week's Garden Design Challenge: a case study
I’m hoping that August is bringing you that long-awaited summer cheer - the weather today did that clever thing of raining all night and then moving into warm sunshine all day - more of that, please!
Just look at the difference in the light - I know which I prefer sitting out in, although the ornamental grass behind this rose does a very good job both in the sun and the rain - we’ll take another look at this fabulous grass later.
Today, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and show you my own garden as a case study, complete with the grim reality of the ‘Before‘ images for total transparency. It isn’t a garden which had a budget of tens of thousand of pounds - I needed to do this garden makeover as cheaply and efficiently as possible.
Do you have an oddly-shaped garden? A triangular-ish space? An awkward front garden? No back garden? A small garden? Tiny budget?
I had all of the above: I want to give you hope, and to inspire you. I promise you, you can do it.
Some quick reminders:
I’ll be running the Small Garden Design Course again this autumn for paid subscribers, so whether you’re new here or whether you’d like to have another go, or whether you’re simply interested in dipping in and out, look out for updates from September.
Diary date for our paid subscribers’ Zoom get-together, which is really a fun general catch-up as well as the chance to ask questions about how to use The Gardening Mind - it’s on Tuesday 27th August at 6pm UK time.
Come and join in the weekly ‘Show Us Your Plots’ where we all share photos of green spaces wherever we may be - on Sunday morning you’ll see a post on the Chat which starts ‘It’s Sunday 18th August and it’s time to Show Us Your Plots!’
Before even having visited it, I’d decided there was no way that I would buy this cottage
I’d seen the satellite image of the garden, and what there was of garden was all at the front of the house, and it all faced north. No way was I going to go anywhere near that space. I’m a garden designer, and I wanted a garden with potential.
Yet house hunting was taking forever, frequent gazumping was annoying, and I was persuaded by the fact that there’s a very good village pub, to at least go and take a look at the property. And so, like a sulky teenager, I turned up, and told the agent that I could see why nobody would buy this house, however pretty it was: it only had a front garden, which was triangular, exposed and bare. Not for me, thank you.
I loved the house. I hated the garden. It didn’t feel like there was any garden.
And then it dawned on me that this is what so many of my clients tell me when I first meet them. They say they can’t understand what can be done with their garden: “It’s hopeless. Why did they even buy the house…?” And I persuade them that anything’s possible.
So I had a word with myself, reminded myself that anything’s possible, bought that house, and set about doing my job. My brief to myself was to create, out of the little that was there, a garden for all the family, spending as little as possible.
Take a look at this photo, which is what greeted me when I first moved in - do you see what I mean?
The above was the view from my kitchen, with a diagonal wall slicing across - you can see the diagonal more clearly here:
It isn’t a tiny garden at all, but the sheer bleakness and lack of privacy made it feel so small and unloved. Look at that photo: you can see everything from everywhere, and there’s nowhere to sit apart from an odd inaccessible north-facing gravel terrace with a tiny shed tucked in a corner.
I can’t stress just how little privacy there was, and that was my starting point for the design. And when I say ‘design’, I mean that in the loosest sense - there was no way I could afford to start this garden from scratch and so, as well as privacy, I had to think very carefully about re-using what I could.
The first step was to draw the outline of the plot. I think you’ll see the issues:
Having this layout helps me think about what needs dealing with. What design issues are there that are making this space impractical and unwelcoming?
Design challenges:
Triangular in shape - a really hard garden shape to deal with
The path slices diagonally across the grass and zooms you straight to where you might put a terrace, so there’s no privacy
The garden is all at the front of the house - again, no privacy
The possible terrace area sits lower than the house and so the retaining wall is ‘right in your face’ when you look at it from the house
There’s no room for a table because of that funny diagonal line of the retaining wall
The central steps from the path also make furniture placing difficult
Pointless flower border along the edges of walls and path
Ugly fence
Really weird free-standing trellis panels along one side
I could lose all the grass, but children and dogs like lawns. They really do
As I was thinking about all these issues, another problem arose three weeks after moving in:
According to the neighbours, the path and drive flooded as badly as this every time there was heavy rain. Historically, there’d been a pond here, and nothing could be done about it. You can see here on a very small scale how building can create flooding: hard landscaping in an area where water sits is only going to have one end result.
Marvellous.
Losing the diagonal
The issue of the diagonal comes up again and again here in this garden shape - it’s as if the triangle shape has been embraced in this garden. If you have a triangular garden, don’t embrace the triangle. Ignore it. Create different shapes within the triangle and blur the edges in between.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have diagonals in a garden design, but I do find that sharp angles can jar, particularly with older properties. In this little cottage garden, the diagonal lines felt like a contemporary imposition, which is indeed what they were.
It’s clear then that the feeling of the triangle somehow needs to be obscured, and so does that path which creates so many privacy issues and space-usability problems: it cuts across what could be a lawn, and we can see everyone coming into the garden.
The path still needs to lead to the drive, but I could move the gate along to the right and direct the path along the ugly fence, and then use plants to hide the path from the grass. The path really did need to move because of the flooding, so this would address that issue too.
Even better: I could create a pergola to run all the way along the path, covering it with roses and clematis and creating height, colour and interest at the same time. The pergola could turn to the right at the end, and enter the garden via a new set of steps down where that useless terrace had been.
And that annoying diagonal wall? Well, I could square it off.