Planning a courtyard garden - part 1

Planning a Courtyard Garden - Part 1

For this brief, I'm going to walk you through a charming courtyard garden that I designed in Primrose Hill. The space was already laid out beautifully thanks to the architects, so I started with a site survey and discovered that the courtyard had an East/West aspect.

This courtyard was quite a unique space and it had two pairs of double doors that gave access to and from the house. I knew that the route from these doors had to be hard standing, but this left me with a skinny stretch of land in the middle.

For this project, the brief from the client was that I could do what I like with the space, which is always wonderful to hear from a designer's perspective. The only requirements I was given was that I had to include a BBQ, a shed, a water feature, garden lighting and an irrigation system.

Planning the Garden

The garden was overlooked by a high triangular building, so I wanted to break up the view of this as otherwise, it looked rather oppressive from the garden below. I also wanted to introduce some other shapes into the garden too so that it wasn't just straight lines laid out in tracks.

When planning the layout of a garden, whatever the size, it's very important to pay attention to your garden route. You need to be able to walk around your garden and also use the space efficiently, so make sure to plan the route you will take as you move around your space and ensure that this flow works for your needs.

If you can create a circular route, this will be better than reaching a dead end and having to turn back.

Using Railings

I decided to use railings to break up the garden laterally, with the railings running from the front of the garden to the back. This was quite an unusual design choice but I wanted to try something different in this unique space. We had bespoke estate railings made by a firm we work with often and we tied some espalier pear trees to them to create a screen effect.

Make Use of What You Have

When we took on this garden there was an existing acer tree close to one of the boundary walls. This tree cast shade on the garden below, but after much debate we decided to keep it in place. We really don't like to get rid of trees, so as often as possible we try to work with them.

The acer tree was a beautiful specimen and with regular pruning it creates lovely dappled shade in the garden below and also has a delicate leaf shape that is pleasing to the eye.

Depending on what you inherit, it is always worth trying to work with the features in your garden and bring them into the design scheme if you can.