Beautiful Garden Design
Small Gardens
A small garden doesn’t have to look cramped and claustrophobic. Here are some tips from the world of professional garden designers:
Cover up fences and walls with climbing plants to avoid a cramped “garden-in-a-box” look. The boundaries are camouflaged and become less obvious.
Create vistas if you can. While using trees to block overlooking neighbours, you can also encourage a sense of distance by framing any attractive views you do have and leading the eye towards them using paths running in that direction or with an eye catching feature giving a focal point.
Make sure everything is in scale. Keep flowers, pools, paths, patios, pergolas, statues and benches small and dainty and they will make your whole garden look bigger. Most pots and some ornaments come in different sizes to suit different settings. If your features are too large and out of scale the whole garden will look smaller.
Use flower / leaf colours carefully. Bright colours, particularly reds, oranges and yellows should be used very sparingly near the house or not at all. Pastel shades have a lighter airy feel to them. You can add to the impression of distance by planting flower colours towards the blue end of the rainbow furthest away and those at the red end of the rainbow nearer the house, or the position from where the garden is normally viewed.
Eliminate straight lines. Straight lines create a sense of construction.
Curves create a sense of space. This applies to paths, lawn edges, walls, terraces or ponds. If it can’t be built in a sweeping curve, at least cover it up with plants. The most spacious shape for a small lawn is one which imitates a pool of water.
Don’t subdivide a small garden unnecessarily with terraces, raised beds or walls or it will look even more bitty. If you have to build retaining walls, make them curved and disguise them with covering plants. The exception would be a very long narrow garden where partially blocking the view can make it look wider.
Use tricks of false perspective to create impressions of depth or width. For example the ellipse shape persuades the eye that it is really looking at a circle, side on which therefore looks deeper than it really is.
Swiss Garden - Old Warden - Biggleswade
Nine acre garden said to have been created in the early 19th century for the Swiss mistress of the third Lord Ongley. Leased by Bedfordshire County Council in 1979 after long years of neglect, it has since been restored.
Dotted with footbridges, interlinking ponds, ironwork bridges and tiny Swiss cottages.
Romantic design with daffodils, rambling ponds, rhododendrons, azaleas and spring flowering shrubs.
Cedar of Lebanon, largest Arolla pines in England, 150 year old pieris, variegated sweet chestnut.
Grotto and fernery.
Further 10 acre native woodland with picnic area by the lake.
Gardening Year - January
It may seem as if the world consists purely of ice, frost, cold, dark and perhaps even a good helping of damp, but don’t let the gloomier aspects of January get you down. Surely there is nothing much more beautiful than a really bright, sunny albeit icy cold day? True, the weather may mean that there are quite a number of tasks you can’t easily get on with in the garden or, indeed that there are a good few things you would be better off delaying, but there is still a plentiful supply of things you can do if you have the time.
For me January is often a month when I plan and try to think ahead to gardening aspirations for the rest of the year and also try to crack on with some of the less plant orientated jobs - some tidying up or maybe even a bit of construction, who knows, but there is nothing better than a bit of gardening on a bright January day to clear away the cobwebs and cheer you up.
Green Thumbs Green Fingers
In America it is said that a successful gardener has “green thumbs” while in Britain they are said to have “green fingers”.
Those poor souls who lack for gardening skills are said to have digits that are either purple, black or brown. The worker who possessed the greatest “green thumbs” was also elected to make the first planting and sowing in a field before the rest of the labor joined in.
Gardeners, even to this day believe in having a close affinity with their plants, which may well be the source of all “green thumbness”. In fact the renowned plant breeder Luther Burbank once said that love was the prime nourishment a plant needs. It is fitting to note that during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake when much of the city was destroyed, not one plant or one pane of glass from Burbank’s greenhouses was harmed.
