Garden Design Ideas - Small Shallow Garden - Update 5

This small, shallow garden in Warfield (Berkshire) is so nearly finished, just not quite!



Everything is constructed. The walled alcoves have had their Slate cladding applied. The walls have been painted a fetching purple - love it! The fences, trellises and pergola have been painted black. The paving is laid. The lawn is laid.



Now the garden is infested with electricians. Their stuff is everywhere, so I can't get good photos, grrrrrrrr!! Just kidding. The fabulous Dilwyn Jones and his lovely assistant Noel, are doing a sterling job. The decorative and task lighting are being fitted. The water feature will go in and be connected last.



The garden is a positive hive of activity still with Gareth taking care that the paint job looks perfect and Matt still painting trellis (sorry, I know it's a fiddly, boring job).

The barbeque alcove has worked really well and will function as a small outdoor kitchen.



Next comes the planting - watch this space .......

If you need help designing your garden please feel free to email me linsey@linseysgardens.com. You can visit my Web site and see some of my other completed projects and get a bit more information.

Garden Design Ideas - Small Shallow Garden - Update 3

The build for this small, shallow garden in Warfield (Bracknell), Berkshire is nearly at an end. The main structure of the garden is in place. All the retaining walls are built, the pergola is finished and the paving is going down.



The garden has been divided into distinct areas without using solid physical barriers. One of the ways this has been achieved is by creating two spaces that are enclosed by curved sections of low wall which have been finished with slate cladding which looks stunning. This gives them their own character, a sense of enclosure and the feeling that they are for different purposes. In short, open plan rooms.



One of these curved rooms is a seating area with a chunky pergola. I'm sure I've said it before and I will almost certainly say it again, but when you're designing a small garden which is overlooked you need to focus attention inside the garden. One sure way of achieving this is by building bold, architectural structures. In this garden the pergola serves this purpose and I'm delighted with how it's turned out. Greg from Tranckle Landscapes is a master of pergola construction and has done a brilliant job considering he's had to work with straight sections of wood round a curved wall...



The other curved wall encloses a piece of lawn into which will be set a stainless steel water feature. It is the sort of area where you can sit on a rug with a picnic and a book without the feeling that all the neighbours are peeking at you. The curved walls also help focus the eye inside the garden.



Even though space is fairly limited, there are two other sitting/dining areas. One of them I've designated the breakfast terrace, it catches the morning sun and is a short walk from the back door - an ideal place to take your morning coffee. The other is just outside the conservatory doors. It will house a couple of loungers from which the person lounging can watch the cook prepare food on the barbeque. Speaking of the barbeque, it has it's own designated enclosure with two peripheral cupboards and slate worktops. A mini outdoor kitchen.





I'm almost through choosing the paint colour. I want a bold colour to contrast with the charcoal slate cladding and bring some vibrancy into the garden. It's all too easy to fall back on white, but I love colour and a carefully chosen bright colour helps define the character of the garden without costing a fortune. I always say that if the clients hate the colour I'll go back and repaint it myself - one day someone will take me up on this!

The planting and lighting have been designed and we're just waiting for Greg to finish so we can get on with these important finishing touches. I'm always disappointed when we get to the end of a project and don't have any budget left for the lighting. After all we spend so much of our time in this country inside looking out at our gardens it's a shame not to be able to see them.

The decorative lighting has been designed to brush over plants, skim up trees, graze down pergola posts and wash up over the surface of the walls and fences. Although these lights will also provide an amount of ambient light, there are some strategically placed lights that can be switched on to give higher light levels when needed.

I've ordered some fab planters from Livingreen Design and these will be stuffed with seasonal colour - bulbs for the spring, Agapanthus and Hemerocallis for the summer, as well as housing some climbers for the walls of the house and fences. I'll say more about the planting scheme once we get cracking with the planting.

If you need help with designing your garden please get in touch via my Web site, or email me at linsey@linseysgardens.com.

Front Garden Design

A front garden is the public face of a house; it creates the first impression of you and your property to visitors or passers by. Here are some tips on how to design a front garden and give your property that all important kerb appeal.

The main purpose of the front garden is to provide easy access to the house without getting drenched or scratched by prickly plants. However, these days the front garden is often needed for other more practical purposes as well such as wheely bin storage, bike access, car parking, and wheelchair access. To accommodate all these often conflicting requirements and create a great looking garden the key is to keep the design simple. A simple layout with robust planting will look great and not need constant maintenance. Keep the layout simple, avoid using too many different hard landscaping materials – you can create interest with the planting.

Use a straight, wide path that get’s you to the front door without having to navigate shaggy, overgrown plants. The entrance to the house should be obvious, and welcoming. Frame the doorway with some elegant Box topiary – it always looks smart and is easy to keep looking tidy. If you’re going to have a climber over the front door keep it tied back and well pruned to stop it becoming a damp, smelly, prickly obstruction. Don’t include a lawn in a North facing front garden it will not thrive, and if you have a lawn keep it mown – a scruffy lawn ruins an otherwise good garden.


When designing the layout use simple geometric shapes and avoid fussy details – freehand curves work well in large, country garden schemes, but do not translate well into a much smaller front garden. A formal scheme with strong, crisp lines always looks good and is easy to keep tidy. If the scheme looks a bit bland and flat, create interest by including some raised borders. You can also use the planting to create interest, texture, colour and soften the hard edges.

If the front garden is your only outside space and you want to use it for sitting in, consider creating a sunken area which will give you some privacy. A water feature can also add interest in a front garden, but you need to make sure it is in scale and in keeping with the style of the garden. I don’t like the kind of pre-fabricated water features you find in garden centres, and feel that a simple drilled sandstone sphere or a raised brick pool with a steel spout works in most situations.

Having provided a straight path from the gateway to the front door, you may still have a problem with if there is another shorter route into the garden, for example, over a low front wall. Human nature dictates that we will always try and take the shortest route and regular callers like postmen and delivery drivers will soon create an ugly, informal route through your lovely new scheme. Some strategically placed spiky plants, like some ornamental Hollies will help stop this.

Avoid making would-be burglars’ lives easier. High hedges offer ideal cover for anyone wanting to break into your house unobserved. Use movement sensors for lights so that they are activated when someone approaches the house. Secure pots or sculptures by either cementing them in place, attaching them to the house or a ground spike with chains.

When designing front garden lighting, don’t get too carried away and be tempted to over illuminate. Wall-washers either side of the front door create a nice warm welcome, and are much better than security lighting which is unnecessarily bright, can shine directly into people’s eyes and is rather harsh. Add some pathway lighting to for safe nocturnal navigation. You can include some decorative spotlights, but be careful, there’s a fine line between highlighting the garden and creating that airport landing strip effect!

Garden & Landscape Lighting Design

Let’s face it we have a lot of dark, miserable days in this country, and for a good percentage of its life your beautiful garden in which you’ve invested considerable time and money is invisible. Not only can you not use it, you can’t even see it. The solution is to make a feature of the garden by night using dramatic lighting effects that are actually quite simple to achieve.

Garden and landscape lighting is often overlooked or ends up being just the bland wash of a security floodlight and maybe some ugly, low-level spreadlights illuminating paths. That’s because garden lighting, like anything else in the garden needs to be planned if it is to succeed on anything other than a purely functional level.

You can change the entire feeling of the garden by night simply by uplighting some key architectural plants, a sculpture, or a water feature. You can even create different effects depending on your mood or the occasion – an intimate dinner, or a lively party. Instead of looking at the rain on the window, you can look out on a dramatic scene with depth and emphasis created by lighting.

Walk around your garden, look out of upstairs and downstairs windows and take account of the focal points and viewpoints. Viewpoints are places from which the garden is viewed. Focal points are those things that are important within the view. Then decide which of the focal points is most important (primary focal point) and those that are less so (secondary focal point). Light the primary focal point more brightly than the secondary focal points, which ensures attention is directed to the most important features in the view. Washing surrounding planting and hedges with a lower level of lighting than that the more brightly lit features create a backdrop for the focal points.

Security lighting does not have to be bland, doorways can be lit by downlights that graze brickwork and create a warm, inviting entrance. Instead of using spreadlights to illuminate paths, washing the adjacent planting or hedge with light will provide a more subtle effect which is quite sufficient for safe navigation. Where security lights are essential, for example, to access the garage, these can be put onto a timer with a movement sensor so that they are only on when absolutely necessary. Modern movement sensors can be adjusted so that they are not triggered by nocturnal animals.

Consider what you will want to do where in the garden and put in extra lights to accommodate these tasks, for example, getting to the shed, cooking or eating. Then have more than one circuit so that you can switch on the extra lights when needed.

You can use concealed, spike mounted spotlights to create some really interesting effects in your garden, transforming it into a dramatic night time space. Try downlighting, uplighting, shadowing, grazing for emphasising texture, washing to draw attention to colour, crosslighting to change how a sculpture is viewed, and moonlighting down through trees to create dappled effects. I like to downlight pergola posts as it throws light onto the flowers of climbing plants and creates pools of lights at the base of the posts which provides a lovely gentle light for a summer al fresco meal.

Lighting for Gardens has a wide range of different lighting products with variation in strength of light and beam angles. LED lighting is improving rapidly, it is much cheaper to run than mains voltage lighting and does not require transformers (which can be ugly and expensive) like low-voltage. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any low cost LED fittings that I like the look of, so I only use them when they can be concealed.

If you’d like any help planning your garden or landscape lighting scheme please get in touch.