The key moves

The Key Moves

By breaking a project down into a series of key moves, the project becomes a logical and manageable process in which one step naturally feeds into the next.

Initially, Little Dartmouth looked like a big project, with lots of connections to landscape and strategic moves needed to re-orientate the buildings and free up space. But once you start to look systematically at how those changes come together, it helps you break a project down into a series of key moves.

• These key moves allow you to create specific places that each have their own atmosphere and approach, forming distinct individual moments within the property.

An Outline of the Key Moves

Initially, the buildings were very dominated by the farm buildings. The clients had already decided that they needed to adjust that and give the working farm a separate space, allowing us the whole space around the buildings to make a landscape that would connect to the wonderful views beyond it.

Seeing potential

Our clients had identified several buildings as being key to opening up the situation. It's always great for you to have clear ideas about where you can already see areas of potential.

• Removing the big barn over the farmyard would immediately create a potential walled garden.
• Removing two buildings on the banks to the side of the house would create another space.

The house looks south, down towards the sea. Framing the view, there's an important old shelterbelt to the southwest, and another smaller shelterbelt to the southeast.

The site had been designed to move people through in a very straightforward way. For instance, the drive simply cut through the trees from the lane to the front door, following the line of desire with no sense of journey or even any realisation that the sea was right there.

Developing Areas of Potential

1. The drive

One of my first key moves was to open up that drive to create an experience in which you engage with the sea upon arrival at the property.

• The new drive takes you out over the landscape to give you a look at the sea, then swings round through 90 degrees to look straight at the front door, dipping into a little hollow and then crossing a cattle bridge to reach the house.
• This creates a completely different feeling and a sense of where you are.

2. Meadow and roundels of trees

We turned the field containing the drive into a meadow, and planted three roundels of trees in strategic positions that allow you to look between them.

• When you come through the front gate, the initial view of the sea is framed by two of these roundels. This is a great technique to distil and magnify something.
• As you come around the corner, the third roundel reframes your view of the front door.

These sweeping moves were inspired by the topography of the site: the lines follow the natural rises and falls that we identified from looking at contour maps.

• Following the contours makes things easier in a practical sense, but it also helps to make everything work in terms of feeling right for the place.

3. Ha-ha

There was already a ha-ha between the meadows and the lawns. We created a second ha-ha just below the house so that the lawns could sweep up to the terrace.

• This created an area around the house that was distinct but without any barrier to the view.

The terrace looks out at the sea, and the small garden spaces around it are planted with things that are adapted to the conditions, but still allow you to look through to the most important element – the view.

4. Garden spaces around the house

Finally, we looked at the more sheltered spaces created by removing the big barn from the yard. This centre space is inward-looking – defined by walls. We created paths that trace the desire lines this time, linking the entrances and exits to take you where you want to go in just a slightly sinuous journey.

The banks to the side of the house, originally dominated by the other barns, were now a space to create a sheltered productive garden, with a herb garden close to the buildings to bask in sunshine and shelter.

• We built two smaller barns to serve the garden, ideal for storing equipment and the harvested produce.
• We planted a new orchard on the outside to provide another layer of shelter, and to extend the productive space to wrap around that whole side of the property.

The domestic and garden spaces in this property are really quite small, tightly clustered around the buildings and giving way to easy views out. The landscape sweeps up to these more domesticated spaces using meadows with paths mown through them.

Ensuring Continued Shelter from the Wind

We took about 5 acres from the farmland to create meadows that wrap around the central core of the cultivated garden. It's great to have this buffer of surrounding land that we have control over: We can have meadows that are cut when we want, and we can plant new shelterbelts to protect the garden.

Eventually, the original shelterbelts planted long ago will fail. Therefore, it was really important to plant new trees to future-proof the site, so that the gardens we created don't suddenly become exposed to the winds.

• The meadows around the new drive were planted with three new roundels of native oaks and Sorbus intermedia (Swedish whitebeam) – a brilliant tree for coastal conditions.
• The Sorbus protects the oak, and the oak will then provide the long-term shelter we need.

Setting and Context

When you're thinking naturalistically, it's always good first and foremost to think about the context, and how things should feel right in their place. It makes absolute sense to only be gardening with things that are adapted to the places they're going to go. This is particularly important with this very exposed site.

Even though this is a large project, we're only actually gardening a very small space. What allows those cultivated spaces around the buildings to feel right is that we've brought the softness of the landscape up to the gardens through meadows, which form a smooth segue to the wild space beyond.

• This is a simple move that allows your eye to travel over something that isn't maintained to such a high degree yet feels like it's part of your managed landscape.

Discovering the Views and the 'Places to Be'

One of the first things we looked at with this site was what all the best views are, where you want to be and what you want to look at. We had to make a few tree edits to open up these views.

Sometimes it was about creating a place that took advantage of somewhere else, even though the two places weren't actually connected.

• For example, we hung a swing in a tree at a point where you can see distant rocks in the sea, to make that tree into a place where you want to be, and also as something that focuses your gaze towards the rocks.

'Places to be' are often very simple little devices to incorporate in a design, but it's really worth spending time at the beginning of a project to consider these by walking around and working out:

• Where you feel most comfortable.
• Where the sun falls.
• Where the shelter is.
• Where your eye wants to fall and rest.
• Where you can encourage your eye to travel to, through finding the right places and the right ways of channelling those views.

Break the Project Down into Its Component Parts

Although this site could have looked daunting, by establishing a number of key moves to be made in sequence over time, we were able to divide the project into bite-size chunks with a logic to every step. Each move then became less daunting, because it was connected to something that already made sense.

• When we removed the large barn from the farmyard to make space for a walled garden, we were immediately given that space back for an intimate area that would become the main core of the garden.
• When creating the wildflower meadow, we stripped the topsoil out to reduce the fertility, and this soil went back into the walled garden once all the concrete had been taken out.
• The concrete from the old farmyard was chipped down and crushed to use as the base material for the new drive.

Garden areas

Each key move created a distinct area that would have its own plant palette to suit the space we wanted to create:

1. A wildflower meadow that's adapted to the dry, exposed site,
2. The front terrace, where we want nice plants around us but also want to see past them to the view,
3. The sheltered space of the walled garden – an ornamental garden enclosed by buildings,
4. A productive growing space sheltered by buildings and trees.

Breaking the project down into these bite-size chunks that form a sequence of logical steps, which each made sense with the one that came before and the one that comes after, allowed us to manage our time and resources, and to keep everything on site.