I've got five really good garden design tips here
for you, plus two mistakes to avoid. I've been up to London to talk to the Charlotte Rowe Garden
Design consultancy to talk to Charlotte and her design director, Tomoko Kawauchi about what you need
to know when you're having your garden redesigned or trying to do it yourself. Charlotte Rowe Garden
Design is one of the UK's leading garden design companies and they've won many awards including
a gold at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show - it's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel
and blog, and I'll put links to Charlotte Rowe Garden Design and any other resources we mention
in the description below, along with time stamps so you can jump to whichever part of the video
you'd like to see most. If you're new here the Middle-sized Garden uploads weekly with tips, ideas
and inspiration for your garden and if you'd like to see the videos when you open up YouTube tap the
'subscribe' button - they're free - and if you'd like YouTube to tell you when a new video is uploaded
then tap the 'notifications' bell. Charlotte and Tomoko say that there are three things that
are very important when people come to them to have their gardens designed and number
one is the taste and style of the owner. Number two is the architecture or the interior of
the house, but number three is the function and the structure of the garden - that's very much the hard
landscaping it's things like paths and terraces and where you put somewhere to sit, it can be ponds,
it can be paving and of course this is the really expensive stuff - it's the stuff that's difficult to
change, so it's really worth getting it right first time. So garden design tip one is 'put function and
structure first' .Make a list of what you need to do in your garden, what you can see, where the sun
falls and anything else that you think is relevant. Well, the first thing we do is just discover what
the clients do, their lifestyle, what they need in a garden, their family makeup etc and we work out the
functionality of it. One of the key things is to look at the light as well, and the way you use
the garden, so if if the area close to the house doesn't get any sun, there's no point creating a
terrace there - we much prefer to create a terrace somewhere else, probably further down the garden
as a destination - a journey. What's there on site is very important - existing trees,
it could be the where the light travels, it could be 'is there the nice view to look at?' That's also
important - you want to place the terrace wherever the best view is, but also having a
shade is important for dining terrace, for example, while if you're designing a seating terrace, you
want to place it where you get the west setting sun. I used to write about interiors and I interviewed
a lot of interior designers and with interior designers and garden designers, this issue comes
up quite a lot, because we, as amateurs - that's me and perhaps you- tend to get very fixed on a
certain thing like a piece of furniture that we definitely want to use or a planting design - we
want a particular color scheme in our planting, and the rest of the garden we kind of lose
track of - and it becomes about 'what shall I have here?' or 'Where do I put this?' whereas the
professional designer will take a step back, look at it all as a whole and also see some of
the problems like 'have you got sloping ground?', what about drainage problems, could there be
flooding and, of course, what about services - things like electricity or water? We can
see the space in a bigger scale - well, if you are the client, you probably focus
too much on what plants you want to have or what furniture you want to have - I don't know -
but as a designer, we see the space as a whole, one large space. You obviously need training to
do a proper scale drawing of a garden design but if you just take a piece of paper and draw
out what garden designers would call a bubble plan, just looking at where you might have the terrace,
where you might have a seating area for a drink in the evening, storage, play areas, practical
areas and don't forget to include what you see because a view isn't always rolling countryside
it could be a church spire, it could be a neighbor's tree or it could be something you
don't want to see like an ugly street lamp. Tip two - think laterally, think across the garden,
not down the sides. Now particularly if it's in town gardens and medium-sized gardens,
quite often those either too narrow or too wide or whatever - something we do
do a lot is to break the space up laterally , so that the garden is not all seen at once, it's
broken by either low hedging or planting beds or planted rills or gravel paths or whatever, so
the eye then goes down the garden to the end - not too fast - the eye travels down. In a way you're
fooling with perspective, so it might mean, for example, like we've done here putting planting beds
close to the house which then break the garden up but then create a large space beyond for the
garden to be used. So particularly if it's long and narrow, which often town gardens are - and
decent-sized town gardens are often long and narrow - this really helps the space. Otherwise it just
looks really long - if you put one huge bit of grass in lawn, it'll look like nothing - the eye can't read
how big the space is or it thinks it's very small, so it's very important to break it up structurally
and and visually. And if you look at this computer generated design of a garden that they're going
to do, you can see how the paving is actually wider than it is deep and it's separated by
some planting and that planting can be trodden on. There's lots of little plants that will
grow happily in cracks like thyme or soapwort or some of the mints or even sedum. Tip three -
make your fencing, your walls or your trellis dark! Paint them dark, really dark not white. We do
a lot of black paints - it's actually not black, it's very, very dark gray - black's often a bit harsh -
we do a lot of dark trellis, fencing, walls and bits and pieces. Dark colours recede and make surfaces seem further away, so it feels bigger and wider - it's another come closer to you, so you might think in a small
garden, you can make it feel lighter if you paint a wall or a fence in a light color or white, but actually
what you'll do is you'll define the boundaries and you'll make it feel just a little more closed
in. Garden design tip four - bring the planting close to the house. Often with low trees because what
that does is it brings the garden into the house, but it also punctuates the view and it also
creates 'oh, what's beyond there?' kind of feel to it - it creates a sort of... a welcome, if
you like, so we often do that. In this garden here where we're sitting now, we did do that- we create
maybe promontories of planting or promontories of something else and then it interrupts the
view and then your eye goes down the garden. Now this brings the garden inside and it means you
can enjoy the lovely greenery, you know immediately you can see it from the window, you're immersed
in the garden and also because you can't see the garden quite so well, the eye sort of wants
to look a bit beyond, so it's a bit more about fooling the perspective. And this takes me on to
tip five, which is if you've got a small garden, make sure that it's predominantly evergreen.We
like to use evergreen because people get the year-round interest. When the garden is small
and the planting bed is small, we can't really have a herbaceous border, because there's
nothing there to see in the winter. And of course if you love flowers, you can always bring pots and
containers in and really work that, and change them over a few times a year. In Charlotte's own garden,
she's got some evergreen close to the house and I really love these balls - they're yew balls and
beech balls, because box balls, of course, now it's not wise to plant them because box tree
caterpillar and box blight has really affected box in most of the UK and it's spreading around
the world. I've got a video on alternatives to box, which I'll put in the description below, but
I just think this yew is lovely and also the beech, which is not technically evergreen, its leaves
do die in the winter but they stay on the plant, so this will be a lovely foliage contrast in
the winter. Sometimes it can be really helpful just knowing what to avoid because it gives
you the opportunity to do lots else creatively around that - you just avoid that one thing and
the first 'garden design tip to avoid' is 'don't center the garden.' One mistake that people often
make is they think you have to centralize a garden on the house, you don't, you should pick out two
things, first of all what you want to see, so the that will be the focal point. You also need
to think about the symmetry of the house or the shape of the house and the way the windows and
doors work where you come out into the garden, and how you look into the garden - so we're not
keen on - we very, very rarely centralize gardens - we might do if it's a detached house and
it's very symmetrical - you know Georgian - and everything perfect, but it's so rare that that's the case. Particularly in town houses (English town houses) all over England and the UK tend to be
asymmetrical, they don't tend to be centered, so we would design the garden according to that,
so that you have a focal point and you have a view. So for example in my garden here you
can see the fireplace, which is there, that's set to one side, you can see it right from the
front door as you come into the house. Charlotte's own house is a terrace in london and it's got the
front door on the left hand side and, although the back door is now a glass wall, it used to be on the
left-hand side too, so she's taken the focal point from the front door on the left-hand side of the
house. You go in and look right through the house to the garden - the main focal point is the fireplace
and that's on the left-hand side, lining up with the front door and what would have been the back
door. I quite often get queries from people who say that they have trouble in marrying
up the architecture of their house and their garden, because they say 'well, my house is quite
modern, it doesn't really have any architecture' and if you feel that that's your house, then just
think about where the doors and the windows are, what view do you see from the windows, what focal
point would you like to see from the windows, and how do you line the front and back doors up,
rather than centering the garden on a sort of mythical 'what might have been' central front
and back door that actually never existed. And garden design mistake number two is 'don't make
your borders too small' particularly if you've got a small garden, it may be tempting to make the
borders equivalently small but plants need room to grow and increasing the size of your planting
space is so helpful. Here's the before and after of a house in Chiswick designed by Charlotte Rowe
Garden Design and you can see thatin the 'before' everything's neat and tidy, they've tried to make
the most space for the path and keep the border narrow and used a very clipped hedge and then
afterwards there's a lush planting and a sense of richness and abundance and in fact it almost
looks bigger in the second photograph because this lush planting gives you the feeling that it
could just go on forever, and of course the borders are not very defined - and that's the advantage of
having really big borders and lots of planting, it sort of blurs the boundaries of your
garden and it doesn't make it quite so obvious where it all starts and finishes. Garden designers
do much more than just make things look pretty, they first have the grand overview and
work out where everything should be, they draw up plans to scale, they get involved
with how the services run, where you're going to run the electricity in the water, for example ,
if you've got a sloping site or any difficulties like that, they'll work with a surveyor and
of course ,they can manage the whole project . It's probably worth saying there's a difference
between garden designers and landscapers because landscapers actually do the heavy lifting, they
build the paths and the walls and the pergolas and some landscapers do have a garden designer
in the staff, but many don't, so you can't necessarily go to a landscaping company
and expect to get garden design out of it. If you're looking for a good garden designer then,
I'll put a link to the Society of Garden Designers in Britain - and there are equivalents all over
the world - and you can usually find a member and then that will certify that they have a certain
standard of practice and ability. Check out other garden design videos in my 'best garden design
videos' playlist at the end of this video and if there's anything you'd like a video on about
garden design - any aspect of garden design you'd like to hear more about, then do let me know in the
comments below and thank you for watching, goodbye!
