Garden Centre

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Garden Designs; the good the bad and the ugly

As I travel, I often come across imaginative gardens, or, alternatively, throwbacks to a previous age. It’s quite astonishing how easily one can date a garden by the plants in it and the layout. Decking, for example, will mark the first decade of the new millennium, while the big 1950s trademark was the conservatory. The swinging sixties didn’t just bring free love and mini-skirts, they were also the zenith of the raised rock garden (if you walk into a garden when the flowerbeds rise to about waist height and are studded with granite, you can bet that garden was built in the 1960s. So, in the interest of good garden design, I’ve been clicking away at the gardens I pass to bring you some of the nicest, nastiest and most thought provoking.

Here’s my first find – a garden just down the road from me. It’s an interesting take on the classic formal garden, remodelled for the tiny suburban frontage. The standard box hedges have been laid out in a formal design and there are two classic trees, cut to spheres – a feature that normally flanks a doorway – here nearly adjusted to flank a bay window. There’s an ivy mound in the centre of the formal knot garden; ivy mounds are common in grottoes and wildernesses but not usually seen in formal spaces, and the urn, which in a stately home would have the coat of arms (known as the armorial bearings) of the aristocratic family, and would normally contain a cascading plant, is here housing a nice spiky succulent which offers a good contrasting shape and texture to the dense rather fidgety leaves that make up the rest of the display.

It’s a really imaginative and well planned space – the maintenance will be quite time consuming, but perhaps not much more so than in a front garden with grass and a flower border – I would imagine that the people who live here are used to people stopping and admiring their frontage, because formal gardens always attract attention, so this is not a style to adopt if you don’t want folk hovering outside your house. On the other hand, this is certainly an all year round winner, because formal gardens in winter are spectacularly lovely, especially when coated in snow.

Labels: formal garden, garden design, garden makeovers, garden tips

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:45 AM

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