Designing the walled garden

Designing the Walled Garden

Removing the large barn from the central farmyard created an empty space enclosed by the older farm buildings. In this lesson, we look at how I approached the walled garden, both in terms of organising the space to work out where we wanted hard areas and soft areas of planting and how I approached the planting design.

Basic Components

We first created paths to connect the places that need access but also to allow interaction with the planting as you move through the garden. Then I started to design the planting, step by step.

1. First, I made an evergreen buffer along one side of the planting to screen off the parking area and through-traffic on the path to the kitchen garden.

• This also provides shade in the south-facing side, creating a microclimate to shelter the plants next to it, and forming a year-round backdrop to the planting.

1. We then looked at other trees and shrubs that could provide structure, shade, sheltered areas and seating areas. A big space like this needs to be animated with some height.

1. Then, we gradually worked down into the smaller shrubs and perennial layers.

Dan's Order of Design

When I walk around a site, these are the initial notes I make:

• Where I want the views to be retained (e.g. a view between two trees allowing the eye to travel through and beyond),
• Where I want the views to be limited or something to be screened off,
• Where the key places to be and sit are,
• Where the paths need to be.

These guidelines allow you to start establishing where things will go in the planting plan.

The planting plan works on several levels, through which you gradually work down in scale.

1. Structure – where the evergreens should go to provide screening or weight in the planting, and where trees should go to provide shadow or a place to be underneath them.

1. Shrubs – again these provide anchor points for other more intimate areas of planting.

1. Emergents that will rise above the other perennials to provide seasonal height and flux.

1. The main perennial layer, flooding through to glue the planting together.

1. Bulbs, which mainly appear in winter and spring, with some summer and autumn bulbs, to punch through at times when the perennial layer might lack interest.

Trees and Shrubs

The trees and shrubs are your first key moves.

• These animate the space, step up to buildings in scale, and stop you seeing everything at once, helping break a large space down into a series of smaller spaces.
• They help certain views to work – for example, you can frame something between two trees.

Within the trees and shrubs, there are several layers working together, with some taller things and others sitting underneath that can create a series of reveals as you move through the garden.

Identifying Things that Will Work in Your Environment for the Key Underlying Structure

The first thing I put into the walled garden was the evergreen layer screening off the parking and path to the kitchen garden. I wanted this to be indestructible, so I used plants I knew were already adapted to the environment, because I'd noted they were present and thriving when I first looked at the site.

• We planted several bay laurels (Laurus nobilis), clipped into domes that provide year-round interest, a sculptural divide between the buildings and garden, and a gateway into the garden.

Breaking Up a Space Using Trees

Several key trees and shrubs provide height, weight and break up the width of the site. It's a large garden dominated by buildings and walls, including a solid backdrop of a long barn on one side, and some of these walls needed softening and clothing.

• We put a group of walnuts at one corner of the long building to break up the expanse of wall.
• We planted magnolias close to the adjoining building, which sit just underneath the walnuts to one side to create layering. Also, some climbers scale the wall to give some more softness.

We then looked at other trees and shrubs that are well adapted to this windy, salty environment, and found many useful New Zealand species. Not all of them felt right, but Olearia did. It's a really good tree that we've used here and repeated throughout the garden. It's a late-summer-blooming evergreen that has nice shimmery foliage, and it never gets too big, but sits very well in this environment.

We linked these evergreen trees with low evergreen shrubs, which take that weight down towards ground level and create privacy around the pool. We've used the fantastic giant Euphorbia x pasteurii here.

• The euphorbias were planted around the pool, forming low domes.

Finally, we looked at deciduous trees and shrubs. We've used groups of Rosa x odorata 'Mutabilis', one of my favourite roses, which blooms from April right through to November, with delicate single flowers that transition from pale yellow through orange to hot cerise pink.

• These provide something lighter and seasonal throughout the middle of the garden, and their colour means they act as a counterpoint to the evergreens.

Map Your Trees and Shrubs to Aid Your Process

As well as providing year-round structure, trees and shrubs create vistas through framing, help buildings sit comfortably, and providing shelter and shade for planting. When you're putting together a list of suitable trees and shrubs, it's important to understand what each does in terms of its character.

• Is it evergreen or deciduous?
• How big does it get; what's its volume?
• Does it look better as a multi-stem or single stem?

Identifying these characteristics helps to drive how you put the planting plan together.

When you put these volumes together by drawing them onto a map, you can immediately see how they relate to the buildings, how you can create spaces alongside the buildings, and how you can make a rhythm that provides both open spaces, where you create the perennial planting, and opaque spaces, which you can't see through.

Mapping out your trees and shrubs allows you to see where:

• You have planted spaces.
• You have spaces left unplanted to appreciate the architecture or a view.
• You can harness the light by not overplanting.
• You've retained light coming in right down to the ground for some good perennial planting.

Simple Drawings Are Very Useful

I'd encourage you to try to put things down on paper wherever possible. As soon as you start sketching, that loosens up your thoughts. It's a simple exercise that shows you where your key moves are, where you want to put things that can animate the space and make it special, and where you want quiet places.

Climbers

When I'm drawing up my plant lists, I divide them into the following categories:

1. Trees, shrubs and climbers – all the woody elements with a perpetual stem that provides structure throughout the year.

1. Perennials – the layer that comes and goes, divided into evergreen perennials (ground cover) and herbaceous perennials.

1. Bulbs – these sit underneath the perennial layer to punctuate it at certain times of the year.

1. Annuals – an ephemeral layer that immediately makes a space feel lived in and gives it an immediacy in that first year.

The key layer is the woody material, as that's what provides the structure. It's easy to overlook walls or fences as planting opportunities, and indeed, sometimes good-looking walls can be nice left unplanted. But walls are actually very valuable planting opportunities, because a climber will take up very little space at ground level, and may only take up less than a metre in depth, but it can provide a big impact.

A climber can scale some distance, so you need to consider climbers that are suitable for the space available, in exactly the same way as you would trees and shrubs. It's always a mistake to plant something too big that you will then have to keep pruning hard.

Considerations

• Climbers may be self-attaching, like Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus), or they may need a framework of wires or trellis to scale, like roses.
• Climbers can be mixed to cater for different seasons, but it's always worth thinking about how those climbers will be maintained. For example, it would be a mistake to put wisteria, which requires twice-yearly pruning, with something that needs pruning at a different time of the year.
• So sometimes clarity in the climbers, and keeping them separate, can be a good thing. When you do combine climbers, you will need to make sure they are compatible in terms of seasonal care

Some Climbers Can Be Combined to Great Effect

The maintenance of climbers is really worth getting right. On the big wall, for example, we've put a Rosa 'Cooperi', a big evergreen rose that needs to be very carefully trained to give it a structure in its early years. Once you've got that structure, it can become a host to something else.

We've planted jasmine 'Clotted Cream' at its base, to climb through the rose. These work well together and can cater for two seasons: the rose enjoys a short flowering season, which is then picked up by the later-flowering jasmine to keep the interest going.

• These two climbers work because they are sequenced so that the pre-established structure of the rose forms the framework for the jasmine to climb.

Plant Directory

Olearia

Euphorbia x pasteurii

Rosa x odorata 'Mutabilis'

Parthenocissus quinquefolia

Rosa 'Cooperi'

Jasminum officinale 'Clotted Cream'