3 Gardens in 1 - And a Taste of The Med!

i'm at a client's garden in southern england when i first visited this site over 12 years ago now it was a blank canvas the gardens that we're going to look at just weren't here and although the scale of the place is quite large and grand a lot of the stretches that i've employed could be used on a much smaller scale too in my first video of this garden we looked at the design of the magnificent courtyard at the entrance to the house now we're focusing on two other areas both of which were designed with entertaining in mind this was one of the first spaces i started working on in this garden and i find it quite difficult because the scale of the house is really quite large and it's quite high and so any little terrace area outside it would just look mean and pitiful and you need to come right out into the sun so the way i solve that is i put this big checkerboard of gravel and stone squares in front of the house on the diagonal and in the center point of some of the squares of the checkerboard i put these criticis punifolia they're multi-stemmed and they are a magnificent tree they're not too big in scale we don't want anything massive here we want to bring the scale down they have a huge seasonal interest they have the wonderful flowers in spring in may although with climatic warming it's sometimes april they then have the lovely green foliage comes out and then you get the wonderful berries and then you get the fabulous autumn color and i think the winter structure when they're devoid of leaves is also pretty magnificent and i think it's a tree that the fairies like so there is something quite magical about them i think and what's more they're tough they can tolerate any amount of exposure and wind and sun and shade and drought although of course being in baseless pots here they will grow through into the soil and they don't need any irrigation immediately you have a tree breaking up the landscape like that it brings the scale right down and it makes it much more friendly and more usable just to punctuate the building i put big pillars of hollies around the base of the building again in baseless pots but this time we've done timber ones with metal straps around them and then the planting i've kept very simple so i've just done blocks of squares within some of the checkerboards and that's important planting because it's on view all year round because of the lots of the glazing from the house so that space floods into the house all months of the year and so it's got to look good in the winter so we've got quite a lot of herbaceous there but a monks are herbaceous i put different balls i put balls of you balls of holly balls or box so there's a strong winter framework there was also a problem with levels here because we had the beautiful horse chestnut tree that has no sign of disease unusually and it's mature and it's a main focus of the garden but it was at quite a different level to this lower level so i solved it by doing this woven willow retaining wall all around it which we built in situ and then we did the wide timber coping so you can actually sit on it and it's quite nice to sit on it and look back at the terrace and it's a lovely perching point because they do a lot of entertaining and the more seats you have in formal or formal the better now it does have to be redone every so often but it does form a very organic retaining wall which is contrary to many retaining walls which are quite hard and then around the bowl of the horse chestnut tree i've done another huge timber seat supported in inverted commas by big box ball but actually we've got bits of timber behind that support and it just looks like it's supported by the box as you can see it's a high used terrace the sitting areas there's sunbathing areas there's eating areas and it's actually guarded by this wonderful piece of sculpture in the middle that huge oversized man with his beautiful girdle or belt that's picked out in gold leaf is really quite stunning the planting is a quite simple quite informal quite low so you can look out onto this lovely big lawn and then we've done the big marlboroughs running down the lawn and then at the end is the most used space of all which is the children's play area this is very much a family garden but with a partially surrounding moat so we sectioned off the children's garden with a narrow but glamorous strip to the side this is the rose garden it's an unusual rose garden in that it's linear and as such people use it as a main pathway throughout the year so i've actually added a lot of other elements to provide 12 months interest outside of the main mohs blooming period i've used the italian cypress on either side just flank the sides keeping them upright so they don't bend over because they do move around in the wind and tend to grow to one side is quite difficult but so far we've done quite well and they're beautifully pencil straight and i think they're a good evergreen fall on one side you look over to the moat which is beautiful and on the other side to the main lawn then i've put the wisteria the standard wisteria in the baseless pots and they're beautiful when they flower in may and then i've added the pergola now this pergola i've designed out of cedar so it's very light in columns and we've lit the inside of the columns so twilight or at night it's lovely with the huge fluted columns lit up and then it's covered by more wisteria i could have just made archways all the way down and had a covered way all throughout but i just think it's nice to have some shade some open some shade some open then you get more interesting shadows and then you can see into the planting either side slightly better and it just creates its own rhythm i think sometimes when you do one all the way down a pergola solid pearl it can just look a bit relentless so i prefer to open it up a bit and break them up and more often than not i break up my burglars into several sections rather than having a continuous run but i never have a rule i always think any design rules are just made to be broken and there's always times when you want to make an exception for some pretty good reason usually and then i've broken up the pathway so i've got the long runner in the sets and then i've edged it with the with the big slabs either side i do quite like using a smaller unit paving in a smaller area as i think it makes it look bigger sometimes when you use very large units in big spaces it looks amazing but here i've gone the opposite way lining the pathway i've used intermittently the box i didn't want to just straightforward edging box but i've gone round the columns and i've taken it out in a pattern working places so it's not so predictable as we often see just the straight lines of box hedge then at the very end i've got my favorite plant which you see in men of my gardens the canner iridaflora it's the hardiest canner and it has amazing flowers it doesn't really look like a traditional cannon much nicer i think and that wonderful magenta color and it will flower for a good three months i've also used a lot of box because box obviously gives us all-round evergreen color and then now you can see there's just a mass of anemones which add the flower interest still some rose is going but it's mainly from the anonymous the over large seed at the end of the mode is just a very simple green oak curved shape an ellipse it is in fact and it's sitting on some stone balls and at the back i've put big box balls just to form the back of the seat and round to the edge and those are actually still in containers i took they're in the plastic containers they came in i just took out the bottom of the containers sat them on soil so the box actually roots through so by leaving the box balls in the containers and just cutting out the base so they could root through i've gained a good 450 height already which was the height of the container so i've actually saved on the size box ball i need to put there and it works very well no one would know on the other side of this garden is a very different entertaining area bringing a touch of the med to sunny england to the olive garden as you can see i've chosen plants with a very distinctive mediterranean feel for this space so it all hangs together we've got the sunken space and then we've got the raised space either side when i designed this garden about 12 years ago i was a little bit hesitant about using olive trees because i wasn't 100 convinced of their hardness but they do tolerate -15 degrees c these have done really well they've settled in they've grown they are a magnificent tree for getting the mediterranean feel there's no better and what's more the highly versatile you can toporize them you can grow them on short legs or bigger trunks or you can just let them go naturally like this and in some places in cambridge i've known them to juice olives and they probably do hear every now and then they're tough tree and they seem to really come into their own the older they get with their character and their wonderful blue grey foliage keeping to one tree and quite a simple range of mediterranean plants is really important to get that all-important mediterranean feel so we've got the salvia cambridge blue which is coming into its own now we'll go on flowering for a good another month we've got the simple grasses the stypa lots of rosemary lots of lavender a few hydrangeas around in the shadier corners and then lots and lots of agapantha sitting on the pots on top of the walls the little urns that we chose to go throughout the garden on the piers aren't planted and i quite like that you could take the lids off and plant them but we decided to go and just to leave them as little urns to make them like almost like finials within the garden this garden is sunken and i do think there's a huge advantage to sinking or raising a garden people rarely do this but it has many many plus points first of all whenever you think a garden it always makes it seem bigger i remember at chelsea we did the boat race garden way back in something like 2001 and i was amazed when we dug up the whole garden which was something like 10 meters by 23 meters i think and instantly my plot looked way bigger than the plots either side i don't know what it is but it is a great way to make a space look bigger it also makes it much more sheltered if you're sitting down at the lower level you're just out of the strong winds and here we are really very exposed although you wouldn't believe it looking at it like this on this brilliantly sunny day but it just tucks you out of the wind and it also can make privacy much much better obviously we don't need privacy here but it has that feeling of containment you feel more private and you often can just shelter from neighbors if you've got high neighbours on either side so by changing levels you can manipulate the space hugely to your advantage sometimes you raise them and sometimes you sink them i think people are wary of it because they think it's actually quite expensive but it isn't really it's it's sort of not that much cost for a digger with a driver providing you don't have to take the earth away and if you can use it on the site then it really does make it a very economical way to really change the whole garden's feel in any garden it's nice to have a contrast of different scales this is a fairly large garden but we've got quite an intimate sized space here it leads up on one side to the greenhouse and on the other side to the main games lawn the greenhouse is situated between this space and the wall garden and i think it's lovely to be able to meander through a greenhouse so if you suddenly get a shower of rain you can all pop in there and chat and admire the wonderful plants and it gives it a lovely backdrop to the whole garden it really does frame it beautifully on that side and so on these two sides we've got big wide generous steps taking you to the two main venues either side and then little smaller steps creeping up the slope to get to the path that leads to other less popular parts of the garden the fire bowl in the center is a wonderful focal point and then you can sit on the steps using it rather like an amphitheatre so if you're entertaining a lot of people here in the evening it's sheltered it's comfortable to sit on and it's a lovely place just to chew the fat [Music] i well remember finishing off this garden and there was a big wedding coming up and so there was a huge impetus on us to get it done it's always exciting when you finish any garden but normally you don't have to finish it for a certain deadline and when you do it makes it a much more fun thing although it is a little bit nail-biting because you know it's got to look good you can't afford to make any mistakes it's rather like doing a chelsea but for obviously a more select audience but it came together very quickly and i think when you have a strong character in any garden the mediterranean garden it's much easier to pull it together so it has that strong feel it comes out in the paving the planting the design and it's much easier to make a statement if you have a character such as that we had wonderful weather and it all just came together perfectly in time for the wedding both this garden and the olive garden are just two spaces in this much larger garden so do watch my other two videos if you'd like to see more

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 47,588

Rating: 4.9382381 out of 5

Keywords: bunny guinness, garden design, trees for small gardens, grand garden designs, paving, chequerboard paving, baseless pots, garden statues, seat round tree, woven garden seats, oak garden seats, sunken garden, garden levels, Mediterranean garden, Mediterranean plants, rose garden, pergolas, rose pergola, topiary, box balls, Persian garden, Iranian garden, garden steps, courtyard garden, planning a garden, top garden design tips, Chelsea garden design

Id: DE3F7E2UAqc

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021