I’ve been broadcasting pretty much monthly for BBC Somerset for around 8 years and today was my final outing on these particular airways; the reason being because I’m moving to Sussex.  For existing and new clients in the West Country, don’t worry, I’m not severing my connections here and still have on-going work.  For potential new clients in Sussex, hello!

For my final broadcast, I gave my top 5 tips for improving the design of your garden, and I promised to publish them here for anyone who might have missed them.

1.  Number 1 is highly practical; make a thorough assessment of what you have, including location, views, soil (that’s pH and whether clay or chalk etc) and aspect (whether shady or sunny).  You’d be surprised (or perhaps not) at the number of plants that die simply because they were planted in the wrong soil or the wrong place but it’s easy to find out what you have; just pick up a test from a garden centre, they’re cheap and take about 10 minutes and will tell you if your soil is acid, neutral or alkaline.  Check the requirements of your favoured plants and see if the conditions match, it really is as simple as that, and you’ll save yourselves a packet in no longer unwittingly killing plants that had no chance of survival.

My assessment of this small garden (above) was that it had dreadful high fences that dominated the space, cheap vertical timbers retaining the soil that drew your eye up (see 5!) accentuating the height, and heavy alkaline clay.  By contrast, this garden (below) had fabulous views, chalky soil, but no structure – the horizontals of the landscape meant that your eye doesn’t stay in the garden but wanders about rather aimlessly between the left and the right of the view.

2.  I’d like you to visualise your garden, and now, do the same again but – in your mind’s eye - take all the plants out.  What are you left with?  Something pleasing to look at?  If not, you’re expecting your plants to do all the designing for you and that’s not going to work.  It would be like buying some lovely material and sparkly jewels and velvet ribbons to make the most superb embellished evening gown, and then just throwing it all over yourself.  You need some structure to it, and so does your garden.  Keep it simple, avoid fussy curves, choose a style, such as cottage, contemporary, formal etc and stick to it for the whole garden.  I’m lucky to have been able to design around 120 gardens now so can indulge my fantasies and try one of everything, but you’ve just got the one so try not to get carried away.

This (above) is the design for the fenced garden in tip 1 – floating Portland stone block steps sitting in a sea of planting (shown as plain green here – there is no lawn).  The paths and steps are both functional and aesthetic, creating a sculptural effect when viewed from the house, their pale colour creating a wonderful contrast with the predominantly green planting.  Note that the fencing has been painted to a pale green too – this will help it recede and make the garden feel larger – and the new retaining wall, made from new railway sleepers, has been stained black to add a touch of sophistication.

This garden (above), near Bath, prior to planting, has turned what was a dark and dingy area of the garden into a beautiful, usable terrace with interesting levels and a raised pond.  You can’t see from this picture, but behind me, the land falls away to the most amazing view so I created a large terrace from which to enjoy it. 

3.  Plan for all four seasons – winter need not be dreary, in fact I love winter in my garden.  However, don’t try to fit all four seasons in one bed as you end up with something that is trying to do too much and will lose impact as a result.  Instead, plan different areas of your garden, even in a small space, that will peak at different times.  For instance, for winter interest, try a white stemmed birch underplanted with 3 red stemmed dogwoods – simple and fabulous, a treat through the winter and pleasingly green in the summer when something else can shine.

As well as birches and dogwoods, clipped box and grasses give great winter interest, especially when hoar frost outlines their forms.

4.  Ignore your boundaries – too often gardens are ‘designed’ with borders round the edges.  All this does – especially in a small garden – is to draw attention to the boundaries (very often a rather imposing fence – see pic 1 again!).  Instead, work from the house out, with all terraces, patios, borders and paths perpendicular or parallel to the house – this way you keep the focus within the garden and away from the fences.

The original driveway for this new architect-designed house in Devon (above) was perpendicular to the lane (top right).  By ignoring this boundary and making the driveway align to the house, it now relates to the house.  Similarly, the massed planting through the decked paths to the south of the house (bottom of plan) relate to the proportions of the house.  The styling of the planting (stylised meadow) ensure that the planting also relates to the wider landscape, grounding the house in its location.

5.  Use visual tricks.  This is where design gets really fun!  The eye is very easily led - give it a line and it will follow it, give it a shape like a full-stop and it will come to a halt.  So to make a long garden appear shorter, an overlooked garden feel private, or a wide garden appear deeper, use directional lines of paving and distinctly shaped plants to direct the eye where you want it to go.  Single specimen plants will draw the eye – strongly coloured or shaped will do the trick; however something interesting happens if you have two similarly distinct plants – rather than flit between them, the eye actually settles on an invisible ‘line’ between the two (and if this is where you happen to have placed your compost bins, you’ve just made a feature of them…).  We ‘read’ a garden from left to right, so try a few box balls within a border to stop the eye rushing to the end, or use plants with spear-shaped leaves to lift the eye upwards – perhaps to a distant view that you’ve noted in your assessment.

My own garden (above) has vertical timbers creating the walls of the steps to lead the eye into the garden; these are balanced by a pair of clipped box balls and horizontally tiered bamboos (Fargesia murielae Simba) – the garden benefits from wonderful views but is long and so the eye needs slowing before it reaches the end.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my broadcasts for BBC Somerset; I’ve been lucky enough to interview some great people during my years here, including taking a rainy walk with Kevin McCloud through his wonderful Somerset garden, and I’ve broadcast from local and national shows, talking with some of the greats at the Chelsea Flower Show, so I’d just like to say thank you to the beeb for having me!

It’s always interesting seeing how a craftsman in one medium transfers ideas and concepts into another, and the Makepeace garden is no exception.  I suppose it’s no surprise that there are few straight lines, given that John is influenced by organic forms and the natural characteristics of the wood that he transforms into furniture.

However, the curves that he has introduced are bold and unfussy – essential to balance the exuberance of the grasses – and encompass both horizontal and vertical planes.  Too often gardeners look only to the plan, without capitalising on the fact that creating a garden is creating a 3-dimensional, sculptural space.

In the Makepeace garden, the horizontal line of the sweeping Purbeck stone and slate terrace intersects with the curve of the sunken pond beneath it, and this in turn is crossed by the arch of the bridge.  But even here, the horizontals are not rigid but are themselves curved – there are shallow wooden steps up onto the bridge which then sweeps down into the summerhouse – a double whammy of a curve as it is reflected in the pond.  A stroke of genius!  Added to this, and accentuating this beautiful line, the underside of the bridge is painted a bright pink – picking up the soft pink tones of the Molinia Transparent grass and providing just enough colour to complement without competing against the composition.

Against these horizontal lines, strong verticals are provided by the stone circular studio and the massed use of the very vertical grass Calamagrostis Karl Foerster, seen above with the pale Poa labillardieri in front, and the almost invisible form (until you see it move) of Stipa gigantea that lines the path in front of the wall that encloses this small garden.

The studio itself is a delight; a large round sofa that invites a long sprawl where you are cocooned with reflections in both glass and water - and just for fun, a Tony Heywood jewelled sculpture on the wall behind.  It’s here that you really appreciate the beauty of grasses; their contrasts in form and texture, their varied movement from stiff to so airy you almost can’t see them, and their ability to capture the light.  Pass me a cream tea, please John, I think I’m here to stay. 

http://www.johnmakepeacefurniture.com
 http://www.tonyheywood.com/

Christopher Tunnard, influencial designer working from the 1930s, aired his frustration that Chelsea gardens showed nothing new or original and that English garden design in general fostered the ‘traditional’ formal garden, inappropropriate, in his opinion, with the culture, architecture and lifestyles of the time (how little has changed!).  He was frustrated by the English resistance to Modernism, which, with the notable exception of John Brookes’s Mondrian inspired garden for Penguin books in the 1960s, did not begin to take a proper hold in the UK until Christopher Bradley Hole’s modernist garden at Chelsea (‘the Latin Garden’) in 1997.  What was significant about this garden was the fact that it took Best in Show, beating its neighbour – a ‘contemporary’ Arts and Crafts garden created for the centenary of Country Life – and marked the first time that Modernism really began to take a hold in the English garden psyche.

I share Christopher Tunnard’s frustration at the English resistance to contemporary garden design, which is still on-going.  While exciting and innovative private gardens are being created, it is still the Arts and Crafts variety that win the people’s choice at Chelsea.  Even this year, with Andy Sturgeon’s beautiful contemporary garden, full of vitality, drive, energy, calm, colour and space, the people’s choice went to a ‘traditional’ garden created by Roger Platts – expertly executed but showing nothing new.

 
It’s not that Arts and Crafts gardens aren’t beautiful, or worth preserving and enjoying (they are, as you can see from these pictures, all taken on the tour and shown in chronological order!), it’s that they should be seen in context; the context of an era that created them that is so far removed from our current times.  They should not be the model, nor the ’ideal’, for contemporary living (nor can they be – Gertrude Jekyll employed 16 gardeners at her own garden of Munstead Wood).

I find it doesn’t take much to inspire people to contemporary gardens; you just need to open their eyes to what current design is all about, break the way of thinking that the ‘best’ garden is on the English Arts and Crafts model and we-should-all-be-aspiring-to-it, and show them a contemporary planting (such as the Piet Oudolf borders at Wisley).  But the most important of those is being open.

So I feel I have achieved my mission for that week – to have had a highly enjoyable time in the company of interesting and interested people; to have seen some fascinating historic gardens (and put them in their context!); to have taken in some inspiring contemporary design; but most importantly, to have opened just a few eyes to the fact that what garden designers are creating now is even more exciting, even more relevant, than any ‘traditional’ English garden – however beautiful – can be at the beginning of the 21st century.

The gardens shown here are Athelhampton www.athelhampton.co.uk
Cothay Manor www.cothaymanor.co.uk
Mapperton www.mapperton.com
Wayford Manor (private Harold Peto garden open occasionally under the National Gardens Scheme)
Tintinhull www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-tintinhullgarden 
Stanbridge Mill (private Arabella Lennox Boyd garden open once a year under the NGS)
and a private garden designed by Dan Pearson, not open to the public.

The tour was designed and led by me for Martin Randall Travel www.martinrandall.com (specialist in cultural tours and Travel Company of the Year for three out of the last four years).  I hope very much that we might run it again in 2012!

I pass this farmhouse (below) every morning when taking my daughter to school, and love the sweep of the hedge line and trees above the house and the way they almost seem to draw the curves of the land.  Sometimes, like today, you can see the lines of the old field boundaries picked out by the low light; but it’s always different, and noticing this difference each day gives me a good kick start of inspiration!

I’ve come to realise over the years just how important an understanding, and perhaps even more important, an appreciation, of natural light is when designing gardens.  There’s been a lot of talk recently about using artificial light in gardens, and while I think this can add greatly to our enjoyment of a garden, I think we should first look at manipulating the natural light.  The light this morning was really soft and blue, but just look how the low level of the light picks out the tractor tyre ruts and really hightlights that gorgeous curve and draws you in – what if that were the sweep of your drive – how good would that make you feel?  (not the mud and puddle, obviously! just the lovely curves and light!)

I’ve just heard about (and ordered) a book exploring the effects of natural light in contemporary architecture, called ‘The Architecture of Natural Light’ by Henry Plummer, which Amazon describes as being “for all those seeking or interested in creating space that transcends the physical” – and what is that if not a garden?