Designing a London garden

Designing a London Garden

Going back to the garden I designed for the family in London, we'll go through how to divide up your garden and start to populate the areas, as well as some tips around hedging, terraces and making the most of a small space.

In this garden, the brief seemed tricky:

• four boys of different ages wanted spaces to hang out with friends and to cook
• mother wanted as many roses as possible
• everyone wanted an entertaining area outside the kitchen.

First, get the outline plan down onto paper and start analysing the spaces you need.

1. Draw a rough layout for your garden. For this garden, it's a rectangle.
2. Mark out known features – here, an entertaining area near the kitchen, and pizza oven area, which we put at the far end as it may be noisy.
3. In between, fill in with planted areas and a seating area surrounded by plants.

Make it as simple for yourself as possible – divide your garden into three or four areas, then give each area a function. Then start to fill in the gaps.

As you go down this garden for example, you go from an entertaining area, through plants, through a social seating area to the big event at the end, which is the pizza oven.

Staggered hedges to separate spaces

Staggered hedges work well for narrow gardens:

• create hedges across the garden with a gap to pass through, but offset the gaps so that you can see through the closer one from the house but not through the further one
• you can also do this with fences or walls, but hedges give a lovely green feel.

A terrace rule of thumb

When looking out from the ground floor, you may want to see plants, so create planting beds close to the terrace outside the door.

There's a great trick for deciding on the length of your terrace:

• look at the height of your doors or windows downstairs – whichever is highest
• imagine those laid flat and see how far they would come out
• that's the shortest your terrace can be, but it can be longer
• e.g. for doors 2m high, the terrace needs to be at least 2m long.

The terrace in the rose garden isn't huge, but it has enough space for chairs, tables and some pots - everything you need.

The second area

Beyond the initial terrace is a planting area. I always want a space to sit among the planting, so I place a bench on one or both sides.

• Provide something to look at when you're sitting on a bench – e.g. a tree, plant, sculpture or garden mirror.

Stand back and look at the area as a whole:

• do you have space to sit?
• is there enough space for the amount of plants you want?
• is the journey easy to get from one area to another?

Then start creating paths through – the main route through the garden, and any detours to go off through the planting or to a seat.

The social area

This is the third area. I used two curved seats on either side surrounded by planting.

• Curved seating is great for enveloping people and making them feel comfortable in a space.
• It makes a visitor stop and gives a glimpse through the staggered hedges to the final area.

In the final area there's the pizza oven, a table and chairs, and bar-height worktops against the walls to put cooking tools, a glass etc. to make it as comfortable and practical as possible.

The dining area

This is the fourth area, where we installed the pizza oven and have enough seating for 8 to 10 people. We also used slightly smaller paving stones to give a different feel.

Make use of vertical space

Always look up and use vertical space – walls, overhead structures.

• A prerequisite for this garden was to include lots of roses, so we included as many structures as possible to host climbing and rambling roses.
• The side walls are covered in roses and clematis, and there's also a series of overhead pergolas for more rambling roses.
• These pergolas also help to screen off the garden from taller buildings around.

The design process

Below is a summary of the step-by-step process to get a design to a place that serves the people who will use it.

1. Get a site survey or draw a scale drawing yourself.
2. Create a list of all the functions the garden will need to serve, and then prioritise as best you can.
3. Divide the space into three or four areas, each one serving one or two of those functions.
4. Remember not to get bogged down in fine detail at this stage. That can come later.
5. Consider carefully how you will use each area and whether there are any you want to screen off from the others, e.g. a dining area, and put in hedges accordingly.
6. Remember to consider what the garden will look like from the house. I didn't want to see the cooking area at the end of this garden – just the plants – so I used staggered hedges.

Plant Directory

Clematis species and cultivars

Clematis

Mostly hardy or half-hardy, deciduous or evergreen climbers; some are shrubs or herbaceous perennials

Ranunculaceae

Rosa species, hybrids and cultivars

Roses

Hardy deciduous or semi-evergreen shrubs or scrambling climbers

Rosaceae