Garden Design Ideas - Long, Narrow Garden, Woking, Surrey

Here's the first update on the build of this long, narrow garden in Woking, Surrey. Despite the foul weather the guys at Tranckle Landscapes are making progress, albeit slower than we had hoped. Week one was mostly clearing and setting out.

The narrow side access meant using a mini digger which was used to remove some scrubby Hazels, a large overgrown Laurel, and a Holly which was not particularly attractive and definitely in the way. The left-hand boundary fence was also cleared of some Ivy infested old stumps to make way for our lovely new native hedge.



The curved shapes that comprise the borders, lawns and steps in the new garden have their springing points outside the garden boundaries. So, in order to mark the garden out accurately, Greg set up a string line from the house up the centre of the garden and used offsets to plot the curves.



The curved shapes of the borders were marked out onto the garden using Sprayline - a nifty aerosol of usually yellow paint that sprays upside down.



Even though the relentless rain has made the site horribly muddy, we're still making progress. Well, when I say 'we', I think you all know that I mean Greg, Matt and Jamie - I'm safely tucked away in the warm and dry most of the time.



The footings for the utility/compost area screening were dug. I think of this screen as an oversized, vertical Venetian blind. It's going to be made of railway sleepers on their ends and placed at an angle around the curve with a slight gap in between each one.



The sub-base for the patio was excavated.



I've used railway sleepers to create retaining walls throughout the garden. The main reason for this was to keep the costs down, but it also meets the client's requirement to keep the scheme as natural as possible without too much hard landscaping. This explains the huge pile of new Pine railway sleepers that arrived on site earlier this week.



Jamie & Matt are in the process of sawing up the railway sleepers into the various lengths needed to create step risers and retaining walls.



Here's a link to the first post about this long, narrow garden.

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