Ideas for your garden – gallery 3 Modern Contemporary Gardens

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In last week’s ideas for your garden gallery we featured a selection of more traditional styles of garden with a heavy emphasis on plants.

This week’s gallery, the last in this series, is the complete opposite of last week’s style of garden and focuses primarily on modern contemporary styles. These types of garden tend to have more focus on design and use of hard landscaping materials so may not be to everyone’s tastes but I hope you still get some inspiration even if you want a more traditional style of garden.

Want to Know the Surprising Secret to Creating a Great Looking Garden?

Watch this free garden video tutorial (be warned the content may upset some people!)

A Little Bit Of Planning Goes A Long Way…

I’ve called this gallery advanced because a lot more time and skill goes into creating this style of garden. In part because the focus is on the hard landscaping materials. This means that the design shape is much more noticeable. In traditional style gardens you can hide a multitude of sins with a good planting scheme but with slightly less focus on plants, that is harder to do!

Gardening Blasphemy!

In case anyone is reading ‘less focus on plants’ to mean that plants are not important – don’t! Using fewer plants means that their selection is even more vital. Any planting scheme needs a lot of thought put into it but in my opinion, even more is required when planting areas are small. The less plants you have, the more each plant needs to ‘give’ to the space it’s in.

Next Week Could be a Shock to the System…

I’ll be going back to my normal blog where I actually write posts and don’t rely on moving images to keep you entertained! For those of you who prefer to watch rather than read, don’t worry, there will be more garden design video tutorials and garden galleries coming along in due course.

Oh and Talking of Good Blogs!

If you haven’t already discovered Jenny Peterson’s blog - DO go and check it out this week. Yours truly is in her brand new Gardener of the Month feature and before you ask – no I didn’t pay her to write this (though I half feel I should have!).

 

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Ideas for your garden – landscape garden photos 2

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More ideas for your garden

Last week featured the first of three galleries of ideas for your garden. The Beginner’s Garden Ideas Gallery featured gardens that are designed using simple geometric shapes like circles, squares and ovals.

Moving up a gear

The gardens featured in this gallery are more complex than those shown in the Beginner’s level. Some of these gardens feature more natural, free flowing curves which are trickier to do effectively. Other gardens featured have changes of level, which also take a bit more thinking about to get right.

Coming up next week!

The third of this series of garden ideas gallery. This one will feature mostly modern contemporary styles of garden. There are also some quite dramatic level changes in some of them.

Do you need some free advice on your garden?

Do you have areas of your garden you are stuck knowing what to do with? If you do, drop me an email or leave a comment in the box below,  you never know, a blog post featuring the answer to your dilemma may appear here soon!

In the meantime, you can always sign up to receive a FREE report on 5 BIG garden mistakes to avoid – simply leave your email address in the box on the top right column of this page and I’ll send you the report.

The Secret Sauce

Any form of art or design always looks harder than it actually is when you haven’t been taught the basics. Creating a Wow Factor garden is easy to do when you know what steps to take.

If you’d like to be guided step-by-step through the process, take a look at The Great Garden Formula HomeStudy Course – it covers everything you need to know in an easy to understand format with video tutorials along side the written materials. And as it’s coming up to Christmas, for a limited time, you can get it for discount!


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Garden Ideas Gallery – Landscape Garden Pictures [part 1]

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Looking for ideas for your garden?

As promised last week, here is the first of three portfolios of finished gardens. I’ve labelled this one beginner level because most of the gardens featured are comprised of relatively simple geometric shapes. These are the easiest to design with and therefore a good place to start if you are new to designing your garden.

Simple doesn’t mean boring!

Creating a simple circle, oval or rectangular shape to your lawn can totally transform your garden, as you will see from the examples shown in the garden gallery.

In next week’s blog post the intermediate level gardens will be featured. These are a little more involved with shape and levels.

If you’d like to receive the FREE report on how to avoid BIG mistakes in your garden, please enter your email address in the box below (don’t worry you won’t be spammed!). You’ll be emailed great garden design tips each month.

 

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How to build a courtyard garden [part 4]

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In this video you will see the courtyard garden (design shown in how to design a courtyard garden video) being built.

This is the first stage of the garden construction.

The paving slabs will be laid in a couple of months time, so you will have to use your imagination a little bit! The rendered wall planters are built, so you will still get a good idea of the design layout.

The earth moves!

Since this part of Spain is subject to a lot of ground movement, the concrete is reinforced with metal to help prevent cracking. A plastic mesh is also worked into the wall rendering for the same reason.

The paving slabs will bring the ground level up approx 10cm (4″) higher, which will make the wall planters a look lower. The garden should be completed at Easter time. I will do a follow up video when the garden is finished. The paving, water feature and plants will make an enormous difference to the finished garden, I can’t wait to see it done!

Time to plan your own garden?

As now is a really good time to be planning your garden,  the next 3 blog posts will be galleries of completed gardens. These will hopefully give you plenty of good ideas to put into your own garden (not to mention giving me some time off blog writing to devote to the first group of online garden design students)!

Your last chance to bag a bargain!

Talking of the very lovely people that have signed up to do the Beginner’s Garden Design Course – there are only 2 places left on the course. The price will double next year, so if you want to learn how to make your garden something special, now would be a very good time to sign up!

Once the course sells out it won’t be available for new enrollments until March 2010, so what are you waiting for?! Get your place on the course now – before the price goes up on Saturday 2nd January!

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How to Design a Courtyard Garden [part 3]

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In this video you’ll see the design process from start to finish – lots of trade secrets given away in this one…

Not got time to watch whole video & just want to see the finished design? See completed Courtyard garden design!

Keep to the Brief

The clients came up with lots of good ideas: raised planting borders, seating and illusion trellis focal point at the end of the garden. It was a nice change to have some of the thinking done already!

When designing anything it is important to consider the function of the area. This courtyard will mostly be used for a cool place to sit and have afternoon tea. It is two flights of stairs below the main living areas, so won’t be used much for dining.

Set Your Sights

As shown in the video, it is really beneficial to work out how the garden will be viewed before you start to design it. When you know which views are the most important, you can set your design up to maximise these views.

Find Your Centre

The line running down the middle of the garden is the centre line – it is only really necessary to know if you are planning on creating a fairly formal scheme that needs symmetry. Because of the shape of the courtyard and in order to keep the centre line parallel to the house, there were two centre lines. A centre line from the back of the garden and the other centre line from the middle of the front of the garden.

Simplicity is Key

When you start to rough out your design, it helps if you keep the shapes as simple as possible. Simple shapes to begin with, help make it easier to see how well you are using the available space and that everything is in proportion.

Precision Finishing

Before the design is finished, it is vital to check that everything lines up as it should and paths are of equal width. Double check by measuring everything you have drawn. A couple of millimetres out on the paper can be ten centimetres on the ground. You may not notice it’s not correct on paper but it will show when the garden is built!

So How Does a Garden Go From a Drawing Into Reality?

If you ever wanted to see how a garden is constructed, then the next video in the series will show all. But will it all go to plan? Find out next week!

If you would like further insights into how to make your garden look great, sign up to receive the Designer Tips Newsletter. Each week you will be emailed with an additional tip that doesn’t appear on the blog as well as receive a FREE report on 5 BIG garden mistakes to avoid.

Part 4 How to Build A Courtyard Garden

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How to draw your garden site survey plan to scale [part 2]

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In this video we take a look at how to turn all those measurements you took from the last video and translate them into a usable drawing.

Why bother, though?

I mean, really, who wants to spend any of their free time trying to get a garden survey onto a bit of paper?

Answer: anyone who really wants to do a good job creating their dream garden.

The rest of the population will be too lazy and won’t care enough. That’s not you though, is it? If it were, you probably wouldn’t be spending time to learn how to create a great garden if you didn’t really want to achieve one, would you? Unless of course the garden design fairies have hidden a hypnotic message into the YouTube efforts (seek help if you think that’s the case).

To get yourself though this slightly dull but VITAL part of creating a beautiful garden – just envisage your dream garden a few months from now. Imagine sitting in it on a lovely summer’s evening sipping your favourite beverage – surely that was worth an hour spent measuring your garden and drawing up your survey? If it wasn’t, you didn’t imagine a beautiful enough garden – try again!

As you’ll have seen in the video, the shape of the freehand, rough survey sketch and the finished drawing is significantly different. THIS ALWAYS happens – that is why you mustn’t guess what shape and size your garden is! If you haven’t already, read the tapemeasureaphobia post, you will see why this is SO important to do.

Next week we get onto the fun part – the design. You’ll see exactly how the process is done, from beginning to end – plenty of top designer trade secrets coming your way!



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Garden design – Be careful of the ‘gap trap’!

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Lend-me-your-ear!There are two types of people in the world (ok there are probably more but humour me) there are those that like to give things a go and there are those that don’t. Which one are you?

I definitely fall into the first category – I will always give things a go. That could be viewed as a good quality but sometimes it isn’t.

In my enthusiasm to get things done, I have been known to rush in and try something, then stand back and see that it hasn’t worked out quite as I planned and then need to call a professional in to fix what it was that I’d attempted (this website springs immediately to mind…thanks Nick for the website makeover!).

I’m not the only person who gets carried away with their enthusiasm. On a day-to-day basis I see what clients, with similar dispositions, do with their gardens.

When I do garden design consults there is one sentence I hear over and over again:

“Oh we just put that there because we had a gap, it doesn’t have to stay there”…

What the ‘that’ is, can be anything from a summerhouse to a birdbath or anything else you care to imagine. To most people, the assumption that an awkward area, that they don’t know what to do with (or somewhere they have a gap) the obvious and most logical solution is to put ‘something’ there.

But if you REALLY think about it – is that really a GOOD reason to put something somewhere? If you were starting the whole garden from scratch – would you still put that ‘something’ there? If the answer is ‘no, it would be much better in the other corner where ‘it’ gets the sun’. You have your answer.

If your answer is I don’t know, then that is the same answer as above, you are just hedging your bet with uncertainty!

Imagine if Mother Nature was looking at us and saying to Father Nature – “You know what honey? I think that forehead is a bit empty looking, how about if we put an extra nose or two each side of it?”

Then Father Nature adds his bit and says “Great idea but what about the gap in the middle? How about an extra ear?! How cool would that be? Think how much more they’d be able to hear…”

Now if the above conversation sounds totally stupid – just change the word forehead to lawn, nose to tree and ear to pond and hopefully you’ll start to see where I’m going with this…

Anything that is well designed is thought about, in detail, from conception to creation. Just adding bits as you go along (if there is no master plan to follow) doesn’t usually work.

The reason additions don’t usually work is because if you had planned for something, you work everything else around it and it works with everything else a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

When you design a really successful garden, features line up with viewpoints from the house or other parts of the garden. So if you are adding something at a later date, unless it lines up and is in the right place, it will never look totally right.

Now before I totally put you off ever adding anything ever again to your garden – there are exceptions to this, well not really exceptions, just good luck. Sometimes there really is a gap at the end of the garden that is perfect for a seat or something. It just happens to line up perfectly with the patio doors so will make a great focal point from the lounge and the addition makes the whole area come to life.

So look carefully at your gap before you put something in it (I probably could have phrased that a little better). Make sure you would still put the same thing in the same place if you had a blank canvas.

Do NOT under any circumstance put something somewhere just to fill a gap unless it really works with everything else in your garden! RESIST the temptation to add that extra ear!

If you’ve got to this point and still don’t know why there are ears mentioned in a garden design blog, you skim read too fast!

COMING NEXT WEEK – the long awaited set in Spain series on how to survey your garden!

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How to visualise your garden design (especially if you can’t visualise!)

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visualise

I was chatting with Alison Kerr from Loving Nature’s Garden the other day about how tough it can be to visualise how the design changes you want to make in the garden will look.

The sentence “I just can’t visualise” has been muttered into my little ears more times than I care to remember from my design clients. But Alison’s remark got me thinking….

How do you visualise a finished garden design?

It’s coming close to the launch of the Beginner’s Garden Design Course for homeowners and I have had to think back a lot in the past months about what problems I encountered when I first started to design and how I got past those problems. One thing I hadn’t really thought about, though, was visualisation…

Now that I have taken the time to stop and think about it, something quite shocking occurred to me. I couldn’t visualise at ALL when I first started. More shocking than that, I’ve only really started to be able to ‘see’ how something will look in the last 5 or 6 years!

So how on earth did I manage to be a successful, professional, garden designer if I couldn’t visualise for the life of me?

That is an excellent question – one I was very surprised to be asking myself! When I think back, it all comes down to the way I was taught at college. We started and finished the whole design process on paper.

Looking at your design on a plan, will help you see what works and what doesn’t without the need to visualise.

To explain that further – garden design is about shape, proportion and movement through the garden. It’s much easier to see that from above (the plan view) than it is whilst you are standing in the garden.

One of the most important things I learnt is – if it works on paper it will work in the garden. Because I was working mostly with shapes to get the key design principles working and because I understood how the design principles worked, I didn’t need to visualise.

I do remember when my first few garden designs were built, how anxious I felt during the process. They were right though – it really does work in real life if it does on paper.

My cheat

However, I’m not totally comfortable to just rely on the plan, I like to know that something will definitely work. So the trick I use when I have finished the rough design is to do a little 3D sketch of the layout.

Before you tell me you can’t draw to save your life – neither can I actually. My perspective sketches look like I’ve drawn them standing on a roof, so they are not much better than the plan view!

Here comes the cunning cheating part…. Take a photograph of your garden (several if it is large – join them together to form a panoramic view). And trace over it and incorporate the shape of your design as best you can. It will help you to visualise how your design will look. And most importantly, you will have the correct perspective and scale thanks to the photograph!

Sketching1

Kaye-sketches_0001If you are feeling more adventurous than that, you could make a clay model or even a cardboard one – here’s one I made for a client overseas (scroll to end of photos to see it). It took ages and I’ve vowed never, ever to do it again but it was effective – amazing what you can do with a shoe box, some cardboard, plastic plants & a few fairy lights!

The sketches and models are for reassurance but they aren’t totally necessary if you draw your garden to scale and work on a proper plan. I’ll be doing a series of how to measure and draw up a plan to scale, coming soon on the blog (yes the infamous set in Spain videos will be coming soon!).

In the meantime if you want to learn more and want a FREE report on avoiding 5 BIG garden design mistakes? Then just sign up to the newsletter to receive your FREE report!

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Plant passion v precision (or when it all goes wrong for a garden designer…)

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Pansies (Viola)Picture this – you’ve designed a lovely garden. Everyone is happy with it. Even the builders have followed the plan to the letter, no one has changed or accidentally botched the design! It’s almost finished. You know on completion it will look great…

All that remains is to put in the perfect planting scheme and viola! It’s done! (Yes I know I’ve spelt “voilà” incorrectly but as you will see, my version is more relevant!).

Backstory…

I’m commissioned to design a garden in Spain. It is situated in a stunning location. Beautiful house, beautiful scenery. Awkward shape garden (the type I love to design) and the potential to create a lovely courtyard garden. And it’s in SPAIN, did I mention that!! They have sun there!

I get the call to go out and do my thing at the exact point I’m beginning to set up the Successful Garden Design website to help show homeowners how to design their garden. In order to help people understand about garden design, it helps to show examples. So with permission from the owners, I video the whole process from garden survey to the build.

Super – my first set of video tutorials will be set in a beautiful location (with sunshine). Much nicer for viewers, much nicer for me. The garden is built, bar the paving (that’s being shipped over next Spring). It’s November and a good time to get the plants in.

Falling flat on face at last hurdle time…

Here’s where it’s turning into a bit of a drama/unmitigated disaster (depending on how melodramatic you are feeling).  Now it’s come down to plant choices I’m tearing my hair out. Mr Client wants to bring half of England out with him!

Going back to where we are, in Spain, with its Mediterranean climate, the sentence “I want to bring out a load of winter flowering pansies” wasn’t something I was expecting to hear! EVER! At first I thought it was a joke and laughed! Big error on my part – it is no joke! Seriously pansies!! I asked “Why?” and the answer was “Because it’s not something they have out here!”… No kidding!

And the list of unsuitable plants doesn’t end with pansies! Normally I’m very good when it comes to client wishes. I am very aware that it’s their garden.  I don’t let client changes upset me, I work with them. So what’s happened this time? This time I’m emotionally involved. I’m passionate about this garden because I’m making the FATAL mistake of viewing this as ‘my’ garden.

The full picture…

Palm-treesThere is one more piece of information you need to have the full picture. The clients I’m working for are my parents. They say never work for friends or relatives and now I see why! I’m incapable of being impartial. I thought I could be but I can’t.

I think the main issue is coming at the garden from two different perspectives. I want the garden to look good and work from a design & location perspective –  I see exotic, Med planting with palms and Bourganvillias. A wonderful opportunity to grow all the plants we can’t grow well in the UK.

My father, on the other hand, is a plantsman. He loves plants as much as I love design. He is passionate about individual plant characteristics. He loves each and every plant and views them as living, breathing beauty. He’s not a plant snob. If he likes something, he likes it – including winter flowering pansies!

He also wants the palms but he wants to put them with everything else on his list. And I’ve not yet mentioned his love of  colour – bright daffodil yellow and shocking pink together have been past favourites…

I am beginning to feel like the cruel daughter as I write this but the designer in me knows that you can’t just put all your favourite plants together and have it look good. It’s not as simple as that. Good planting design is about shape, form, colour and control.

Can you imagine what a disaster it would be if you were cooking and put ALL your favourite ingredients into one dish! And I mean everything – every single thing you love to eat in one dish! Imagine the conflict on your palette!

Designing a planting scheme is no different to cooking a good meal – you need to be disciplined with the ingredients or it will be disastrous. Too many random ingredients and your visual palette will get indigestion!

Even if you cut down on the ingredients, you still need to have harmony with the flavours you are creating. Mustard and marshmallows for instance, are going to be an awful combination. I feel the same is true about palm trees with pansies!

Not entirely sure how I’m going to resolve this situation – I may have to face facts that I can’t and let my father get on with it – it is his garden after all…

Out of all the gardens I could have chosen to spend months filming from start to finish,  the one that’s meant to promote the Successful Garden Design Course and show hundreds/thousands of people how best to do a garden, could turn out to be my worst design nightmare!

Do feel free to laugh/commiserate or offer pearls of wisdom – leave your comment in the box below. In the meantime I have hair to pull out!

Rachel

P.S. I will be answering your garden design queries in the next post –  if you have trouble visualising your finished garden design, we will look at how you can use that to your advantage…

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Garden design – so what do YOU want?

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Lav-question1So far we’ve discussed how people often confuse the planting of the garden with garden design (the one with the lovely cake pic!) why planning the garden is SO important (the brick one) and how vital measuring is to successful garden design (the jigsaw one)

Basically I’ve written about the things I wanted to write about… it is my blog after all! BUT now they’re done – it’s time to get down to what this site is really about – helping you, design your garden successfully. Now I can easily find topics to write about but that’s kind of like talking to myself!

So really – what do you want to know about? If you could have an hour of my time on a one to one consultation – what is it you’d ask? What do you want to know about garden design? What problems do you have that you’re having trouble solving?

So the deal is you tell me what troubles you (preferably garden design troubles – I’m no Aunt Aggy!) and I’ll do my best to advise you and put it in a blog post for all to read. Chances are if you have a particular problem – someone else will. This is one of the very rare occasions that sharing your woes will help someone else!

Leave a comment at the end of this post or if you are blog shy, email me.

Looking forward to reading your comments!

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