Introduction
I’ve got five excellent garden design tips and two mistakes to avoid. I’ve been up to London to talk to the Charlotte Rowe Garden Design consultancy to talk to Charlotte and her design director, Tomoko Kawauchi, about what you need to know when you’re having your garden redesigned or trying to do it yourself. Charlotte Rowe Garden Design is one of the UK’s leading garden design companies, and they’ve won many awards, including a gold at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
It’s Alexandra from the Middlesized Garden website and blog. I’ll link Charlotte Rowe Garden Design and any other resources we mention in the description below, along with time stamps, so you can jump to whichever part of the article you’d like to see most. If you’re new here, the Middle-sized Garden uploads weekly with tips, ideas and inspiration for your garden, and if you’d like to see the videos when you open up website, tap the ‘share’ button – they’re free – and if you’d like website to tell you when a new article is uploaded, then tap the ‘notifications’ bell.
5 top garden design tips – and two mistakes to avoid!
The Three Key Design Considerations
Charlotte and Tomoko say that three things are essential when people come to them to have their gardens designed. Number one is the taste and style of the owner. Number two is the house’s architecture or interior, but number three is the garden’s function and structure – that’s very much the hard landscaping. It’s things like paths, terraces, and where you put something to sit. It can be ponds, paving, and of course, this is the costly stuff – it’s the stuff that’s difficult to change, so it’s worth getting it right first time.
Garden Design Tip 1: Put Function and Structure First
Garden design tip one is ‘put function and structure first’. Make a list of what you need to do in your garden, what you can see, where the sun falls, and anything else you think is relevant.
Charlotte: “Well, the first thing we do is just discover what the clients do, their lifestyle, what they need in a garden, their family makeup, etc, and we work out its functionality. One of the key things is to look at the light as well, and the way you use the garden, so if the area close to the house doesn’t get any sun, there’s no point creating a terrace there – we much prefer to create a terrace somewhere else, probably further down the garden as a destination – a journey.”
Tomoko: “Knowing what’s on site is critical – existing trees could be where the light travels. It could be ‘Is there a nice view to look at?’ That’s also important – you want to place the terrace wherever the best possible view is, but also having shade is important for a dining terrace, for example, if you’re designing a seating terrace, you want to place it where you get the west setting sun.”
Alexandra: “I used to write about interiors and I interviewed a lot of interior designers, and with interior designers and garden designers, this issue comes up quite a lot, because we, as amateurs – that’s me and perhaps you – tend to get very fixed on a sure thing like a piece of furniture that we want to use or a planting design – we want a particular color scheme in our planting, and the rest of the garden we lose track of – and it becomes about ‘what shall I have here?
‘ or ‘Where do I put this?’ whereas the professional designer will take a step back, look at it all as a whole and also see some of the problems like ‘have you got sloping ground?’, what about drainage problems, could there be flooding and, of course, what about services – things like electricity or water?”
Tomoko: “We can see the space in a bigger scale – well, if you are the client, you probably focus too much on what plants you want to have or what furniture you want to have – I don’t know – but as a designer, we see the space as a whole, one large space.”
Alexandra: “You need training to do a proper scale drawing of a garden design, but if you just take a piece of paper and draw out what garden designers would call a bubble plan, just looking at where you might have the terrace, where you might have a seating area for a drink in the evening, storage, play areas, practical areas and don’t forget to include what you see because a view isn’t always rolling countryside – it could be a church spire, it could be a neighbor’s tree or it could be something you don’t want to see like an ugly street lamp.”
Garden Design Tip 2: Think Laterally
Tip two – think laterally, across the garden, not down the sides. Now particularly if it’s in town gardens and medium-sized gardens, quite often those are either too narrow or too wide or whatever – something we do a lot is to break the space up laterally, so that the garden is not all seen at once, it’s broken by either low hedging or planting beds or planted rills or gravel paths or whatever, so the eye then goes down the garden to the end – not too fast – the eye travels down.
In a way, you’re fooling with perspective so that it might mean, for example, like we’ve done, putting planting beds close to the house, which then breaks the garden up, but then creates an ample space beyond for the garden to be used. So, particularly if it’s long and narrow, which often town gardens are – and decent-sized town gardens are often long and narrow – this helps the space. Otherwise, it just looks long – if you put one huge bit of grass in the lawn – it’ll look like nothing – the eye can’t read how big the space is or thinks it’s tiny, so it’s essential to break it up structurally and visually.
Alexandra: “And if you look at this computer-generated design of a garden that they’re going to do, you can see how the paving is wider than it is deep, and some planting separates it so that the planting can be trodden on. Many little plants will grow happily in cracks, like thyme or soapwort or some of the mints or even sedum.”
Garden Design Tip 3: Use Dark Colors for Boundaries
Tip three: Paint your fencing, walls, or trellis dark, not white.
Charlotte: “We do a lot of black paints – it’s not black, it’s very, very dark gray – black’s often a bit harsh – we do a lot of dark trellis, fencing, walls, and bits and pieces. Dark colours recede and make surfaces seem further away, so it feels bigger and wider – it’s another way you make a garden look wider and great for showing off plants as well.”
Alexandra: “As Charlotte explained, dark colours recede, white colours come closer to you so that you might think in a small garden, you will make it feel lighter if you paint a wall or a fence in a light color or white, but actually what you’ll do is you’ll define the boundaries and you’ll make it feel just a little more closed in.”
Garden Design Tip 4: Bring Planting Close to the House
Garden design tip four – bring the planting close to the house.
Charlotte: “Often with low trees, because what that does is it brings the garden into the house, but it also punctuates the view and it also creates an ‘oh, what’s beyond there?’ feel to it – it creates a sort of… a welcome, if you like, so we often do that. In this garden where we’re sitting now, we did that – we create maybe promontories of planting or something else, and then it interrupts the view, and then your eye goes down the garden.”
Alexandra: “This brings the garden inside and it means you can enjoy the lovely greenery, immediately you can see it from the window, you’re immersed in the garden and also because you can’t see the garden quite so well, the eye wants to look a bit beyond, so it’s a bit more about fooling the perspective.”
Garden Design Tip 5: Use Predominantly Evergreen Plants in Small Gardens
This leads me to tip five: If you have a small garden, make sure that it’s predominantly evergreen.
Tomoko: “We like to use evergreen because people get the year-round interest. When the garden is small and the planting bed is small, we can’t have only an herbaceous border, because there’s nothing to see in the winter.”
Alexandra: “And if you love flowers, you can always bring pots and containers, work on that, and change them over a few times a year. In Charlotte’s garden, she’s got some evergreen close to the house and I love these balls – they’re yew balls and beech balls, because box balls, of course, now it’s not wise to plant them because box tree caterpillar and box blight has affected box in most of the UK and it’s spreading around the world.
I’ve got a video on alternatives to box, which I’ll put in the description below, but I think this yew is lovely. Also, the beech, which is not technically evergreen, has leaves that die in the winter but stay on the plant, so this will be a lovely foliage contrast in the winter.
Garden Design Mistake 1: Don’t Center the Garden
Sometimes, knowing what to avoid can be helpful because it allows you to do many other creative things around that—you avoid that one thing. The first ‘garden design tip to avoid’ is ‘don’t centre the garden.’ One mistake that people often make is that they think you have to centralise a garden around the house—you don’t.
You should choose what you want to see and the focal point. You also need to think about the symmetry of the house or the shape of the house and the way the windows and doors work – where you come out into the garden, and how you look into the garden – so we’re not keen on – we very, very rarely centralise gardens. We might do if it’s a detached house and it’s very symmetrical – you know, Georgian – and everything perfect, but it’s so rare that that’s the case, particularly in townhouses.
English town houses all over England and the UK tend to be asymmetrical; they don’t tend to be centered, so we would change the garden according to that, so that you have a focal point and your view down. So, for example, in my garden here, you can see the fireplace, which is there, to one side. You can see it right from the front door as you enter the house.
Alexandra: “Charlotte’s own house is a terrace in London and it’s got the front door on the left hand side and, although the back door is now a glass wall, it used to be on the left-hand side too, so she’s taken the focal point from the front door on the left-hand side of the house. You go in and look right through the house into the garden – the main focal point is the fireplace, on the left-hand side, lining up with the front door and what would have been the back door.
I quite often get queries from people who say that they have trouble in marrying up the architecture of their house and their garden, because they say ‘well, my house is quite modern, it doesn’t have any architecture’ and if you feel that that’s your house, then think about where the doors and the windows are, what view do you see from the windows, what focal point would you like to see from the windows, and how do you line the front and back doors up, rather than centering the garden on a sort of mythical ‘what might have been’ central front and back door that never existed.”
Garden Design Mistake 2: Don’t Make Borders Too Small
And garden design mistake number two is ‘don’t make your borders too small’, particularly if you’ve got a small garden. It may be tempting to make the borders equally small, but plants need room to grow, and increasing the size of your planting space is so helpful. Here’s the before and after of a house in Chiswick designed by Charlotte Rowe Garden Design, and you can see that in the ‘before’ everything’s neat,
they’ve tried to make the most space for the path and keep the border narrow and used a very clipped hedge and then afterwards there’s a lush planting and a sense of richness and abundance. I. It almost looks bigger in the second photograph because this lush planting gives you the feeling that it could go on forever. Of course, the border is not very ned, and that’s the advantage of borders for planting; it blurs the boundaries of your garden and doesn’t make it quite so obvious where it all starts and finishes.
The Role of Professional Garden Designers
Garden designers do much more than make things look pretty, they first have the grand overview and work out where everything should be, they draw up plans to scale, they get involved with how the services run, where you’re going to run the electricity in the water, for example, if you’ve got a sloping site or any difficulties like that, they’ll work with a surveyor and of course, they can manage the whole project.
It’s probably worth saying there’s a difference between garden designers and landscapers because landscapers do the heavy lifting, they build the paths and the walls and the pergolas and some landscapers do have a garden designer in the staff, but many don’t, so you can’t necessarily go to a landscaping company and expect to get garden design out of it. If you’re looking for a good garden designer,, the I’ll put a link to the Society of Garden Designers in Britain – and there are equivalents all over the world – and you can usually find a member,, and then that will certify that they have a certain standard of practice and ability.
Conclusion
Check out other garden design videos in my ‘best garden design videos’ playlist at the end of this video. If there’s anything you’d like a video on about garden design—any aspect of garden design you’d like to hear more about—let me know in the comments below. Thank you for watching; goodbye!