Waterfall - Private Client, Surrey

For a moment, forget that you’ve heard anything about garden design. Forget television, coffee table books, & your own preconceptions.

Design is about changing spaces, making space behave as you wish, altering perspective & atmosphere. Gardens are, by my definition, the space between you & the outside world, a private haven & public display. They should reflect both but provide you with the environment you desire. The garden is not an “outside room” but a space of itself with its’ own qualities & advantages – never forget that a landscape needs no building, but a building cannot exist without its’ surrounding landscape & is welded to it in the most essential way.

Most garden designs are derivative & born of necessary additions that arrive with no concept or relation to space in which they exist. This need not happen. Every garden is different, & all gardens have advantages & drawbacks. The basis of any well conceived design is to minimise or negate the minuses, & enhance the bonuses. The greatest mistakes made are, almost inevitably, caused by attempting to force a feature in to a space that will not accept it.

The main factors that I would place uppermost for the designers’ consideration are, the clients’ wishes, the dictates of the site, the skeleton of the design & the detail of the finish. If all these are considered then almost all the other factors will fall into place. For example, if a client wishes a stream water feature then it must meet the following criteria: the topography must lend itself to a stream or can be altered to accommodate a stream, the route of the stream must be integral to the overall design & the feature must enter, exit & flow through the site in a way that it would naturally. My aim would be for a person viewing the stream to assume that it had always been there, even as a precursor to the house.
The summation of good landscape design is to avoid the formulaic, to view every site as unique & to understand the design from the first spade turned to the final touches of decoration.
I feel that garden design was, in some ways, getting predictable in this country. Many garden designers favoured a particular style or type of garden, & their work easily identifiable, but I think that the greatest compliment you can receive is not for someone to say 'There's a Brian Hawtin garden', but for someone to think that it is the perfect garden for that place.  The fact that most gardens have the potential to outlast both their owners & their designers should not be lost on you. A garden is something that will be judged on how it looks now & in many years time. Buildings remain the same, but gardens grow & evolve. All gardens should be designed for now & the future.