|
It has been a busy year in the garden building business. We have created a lot of gardens in all corners of the South East, some have been easy & some have been a challenge, but the most pleasing moment of any job is always the reaction of a satisfied client. Changing an unfocussed space with no visible redeeming features into a garden that fits into both the space around it & the lifestyle of the client is hugely rewarding. It is the lot of any good designer that some of your best work is done in the name of a style or in a manner that you would not personally choose to have in your garden. Sometimes, however, you get to build something that you love, & these gardens are the nicest to build & the hardest to hand over at the end.
My favourite garden this year is situated near to a busy road on the Surrey / Sussex border close to East Grinstead. The brief to provide a garden were traffic noise was eliminated as much as possible was demanding & the site looked unpromising. The main problem from a garden point of view was that half the plot was separated from the house by a small stream that was prone to drying completely & by a belt of mixed, nondescript trees growing around an old iron fence. Now, to my mind, the first principle of design is to remove those things that are causing a problem, & to start with the desirable elements that are left. This is easy to do in the design drawing, but takes a lot of manpower (& confidence from the client) in the first few days of the build to put into practice. The first elements of the design to fall into place were the lake & the ‘spine’ of the overall scheme, running from the patio, over the bridge, to the gazebo by the lake. With a garden of this size you need destinations & circulation round the site to the lake & a wildflower meadow meant that the whole site was being utilised. The lake was dug out of a natural dip in the garden, enabling the water to appear like a natural dewpond. The danger with a large expanse of water is that if it sits in an inappropriate position in the landscape, it will forever look manufactured so placement & profiling of the edges of the land are vital. Attention to detail extends to the planting where marginal & boggy planting blends the lake into the landscape & attracts wildlife. Advice from the Environment Agency enabled us to take a feed from the stream to fill the lake & to keep it topped up, & soil testing showed that the sub soil was heavy clay, which meant that no liner was needed to retain the precious water. If the soil had not been suitable we would have lined the pond with either ‘puddle’ or ‘vole’ clay, so even if your soil is not suitable a lake like this is not out of the question. To fully exploit the reflective & calming qualities of the lake a jetty was built in front of the summerhouse & damp loving trees with bright autumn foliage planted lakeside. Views across & down to the lake were framed carefully, though it will take time for some of the plants to reach their full size. Part of the effect of opening up the garden was the use of ‘borrowed landscape’. This is the use of trees & features outside the boundaries to enlarge & enhance features within. The removal of trees in the mid part of the plot allowed the illusion of the meadow blending into woodland to blur the perception of boundary, & hence makes the garden appear bigger. It should always be remembered that you have no control over borrowed landscape & therefore can never count on any of the elements that you are using to remain untouched ad infinitum. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating, & the removal of this oasis from the proximity of the road means that although you can still hear the traffic, its’ capacity to disturb is diminished both by distance &, more importantly, by the distraction of the environment in which you find yourself. When I have the space to do this, I will be revisiting this design for myself. This was a hard one to give back…. |
