Affordable Design at Hampton Court

It’s the perennial problem for garden designers – the ‘phone rings and a charming potential client makes an enquiry about having their garden designed.  After a short discussion of their needs and what the designer can do, the question of the available budget crops up. 

‘Oh, I thought something between £1500 and £2000.’

This is the point at which the designer has to gently bring the enquirer to an understanding of the realities involved.  The bald fact is that having a garden designed is a purely elective expense, and one that is pretty much a luxury.  It is easy to see why people think they can get gardens for these sums – plants are not hugely expensive, and you can buy a lot of them for £2000, but this takes no account of the labour involved in creating hard-landscaping, materials, VAT or, at the bottom of the heap of priorities, the designer’s fee.  The sum the client has in mind is, undoubtedly, a lot of money, but it is simply insufficient for what they have in mind.  It is possible to transform a small garden by spending this amount wisely on plant material, but to create the longed-for ‘room outside’ takes far more in the way of cash. 

‘But Alan Titchmarsh used to do it for £500 over a weekend!’  Well, anyone with an understanding of the true cost of things knows that he didn’t.

The new show garden category, ‘Low Cost, High Impact Gardens’  at Hampton Court Flower Show this year is thus to be welcomed – four gardens built to three different budgets give an inkling of what is achievable on the relatively modest, in design terms, budgets of £7000, £10000 and £13000.  I know, these are still big sums, but in terms of what it allows you to achieve, they are minimal outlay.  A couple of years ago I designed a courtyard garden for a house that cost at least a million pounds but that had a tiny, neglected garden.  By careful design it was possible to give the client a beautiful outdoor space for about £14000, of a size that would have cost them a further quarter of a million had it been inside the house.  When looked at in this way, the outlay begins to look like not only good value, but essential expenditure if you have the resources to spare.  Forget the immense improvements in the way you will live and experience your home – even in terms of the returns on reselling it’s a no-brainer.

But if you are having a garden designed and built, where does all the money go?  The expenditure is largely in the creation of the hard landscaping – the paving, decking, pergolas and walls all soak up contractor days and materials, and while it’s not possible to pare down the day-rate of a landscaper, it is possible to make the design faster to implement.  This is where it actually pays to engage a designer: savings are there to be made, and a good designer knows how to achieve this.  Take time though, to research a designer you have confidence in – I’m a firm believer that good design doesn’t have to be any more expensive than bad.

Rule number 1 – stick to straight lines and right angles.  Anything involving curves or odd angles immediately hikes the price, as such features are trickier to set out on the ground and more time-consuming to build.

Rule number 2 – limit the changes in level where possible.  Digging out and carting away waste, or making ground up by importing extra material is a luxury where it isn’t strictly necessary.

Rule number 3 – if you have to compromise to achieve a budget, consider changes in materials or creative use of cheap and readily available materials first.  The overall layout of the design should be the last thing to be modified, because if the designer has done a good job, this layout will be the optimal solution for the site.

So, back to Hampton Court and the Low Cost gardens.  Well, on a day of pouring rain you don’t linger too long on the details, but the first thing that struck me about all of these was that they looked amazing.  Show gardens occupy a strange cultural niche, because they always look their best, but these could, at a glance, have stood up to many more expensive gardens.  The budgets assume that a garden has boundaries and that the plants bought will probably be smaller versions of those on display, allowed to grow up for a couple of years, but even so, the results are impressive.

'Our First Home, Our First Garden'

In at the lowest price was the garden created by Landform Consultants.  ‘Our First Home, Our First Garden’ designed by Nilufer Danis had a sunken seating well (in flagrant contravention of Rule 2, tsk) surrounded by a lovely summer planting in blues and yellows.  I can’t imagine any first-time buyers not wanting to create something like this to show off their new pad.  The cost of digging out had been cleverly offset by the very creative use of cheap reclaimed scaffolding planks as retaining walls for the seating pit, steps and decking.  Gravel, always a good cost-effective choice for a semi-durable surface, formed the floor of the pit, and the budget had even stretched to a shelf/woodstore supporting an outdoor heater.  I’d say this definitely provided the template for good, affordable design for a couple setting up home – the planting implied an interest in gardening as a hobby rather than as a mere backdrop to life out-of-doors, and provided a good range of wildlife friendly plants.  A couple of semi-mature trees brought height and presence to the planting, and if you are establishing a garden from scratch it’s always worth splashing out on just one big plant like this to give a sense of permanence to the whole.

'Our First Home, Our First Garden'

In the £10000 category Richard Wanless of Twigs Gardens had created ‘A Compromising Situation’.  I’m not sure what the title refers to exactly, but the conceit here is that the garden is one in a Victorian terrace, the residents of which can pass through each other’s plots.  Though this is a far-from-normal arrangement in my experience, it gave an opportunity to create a seating area secluded from the gravel path, screened by hedges of different heights and a timber arbour.  The paths and terrace area were paved in stone, and the inevitable expense of this offset with areas of (cheap) grass.  The lie of the path added interest to the design, and  a bit of extra width to a seating area.  If space and/or budget are limited, finding ways in which necessary pathways can contribute to other areas is a good trick.  There was scope in the budget here for a few little ornamental touches – a screen of curling steel reinforcing rods evoked the croziers of new fern leaves, and the risers of the steps were made of rough stone - while this wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice for an urban Victorian terrace, it’s an indication of the level of detail it is possible to achieve with this degree of funding.  The planting, less expansive than in the first garden, nonetheless achieved a good balance with the other elements of lawn and paving.

 

'A Compromising Situation'

The first of two gardens in the £13000 category,  ‘live outdoors’ by Roger Smith for Garden House Design used very simple shapes – a square deck big enough to put a dining table on, covered with a clever arbour and crisp paving in the path were all surrounded by the type of planting that looks great in an urban setting – a limited palette of plants linked by form and colour, with plenty of softening foliage, bamboo for screening  and one or two knock-your-socks-off specimens.  In this case the specimens were tree ferns which do look amazing although you need to check your supplier’s credentials if you are investing in these plants – I always worry that they have been uprooted from virgin Tasmanian forests when I see them decorating a courtyard in the UK.  This garden had some nice design touches that illustrate my point that good design doesn’t have to be expensive:  the step risers were made of three paving slab sections put together – this didn’t mean much until you noticed the uprights of the arbour, made of three laths of timber to each face, or the overhead beams constructed in the same way.  It’s this sort of detail that can really pull a design together, giving the garden a coherent feel.  The beams were a real designer’s touch – open at the top they acted as channels for planting which spilled over in a curtain – a neat way to soften the structure without using climbers.  The budget even ran to a wood-fired oven and a couple of planters.

'live outdoors'

The final garden was ‘Summer In The Garden’ by Mike Harvey for Arun Landscapes.  Another design centred on a seating space, this garden also had a budget of £13000.  A Yorkstone crazy-paved terrace with an outdoor chimney stack surrounded by a good mix of shrub and perennial planting created a seating area submerged in vegetation.  Again, the overhead plane was defined by timber, treated much more simply in this case, with the presumed-to-exist boundaries rough-cast rendered then painted a vibrant yellow.  This is a great way to introduce some drama to a garden for very little outlay, and through your choice of colour can produce just about any mood you wish.  The feel here was very much of the Mediterranean – an olive tree and pencil cypresses underplanted with santolina and lavender don’t look at their most natural under leaden skies, but with the sunny yellow walls the whole certainly brightened up a gloomy summer day.

'Summer In The Garden'

So, do these gardens offer a realistic goal for those trying to establish new gardens on a budget?  Very definitely – for me the most important aspect in each case was the way in which the design process had been used to minimise unnecessary costs, and I do think this is where it is worth getting design advice.  The principle of using cheaper materials to deliver the design is a good one and if you are hands-on with construction  you can save thousands of pounds in landscaper fees, but unless you are really confident and experienced, with plenty of free time to devote to your project,  it is probably worth stumping up for a professional.   A bit of patience allows you to buy smaller plants that will establish quickly and fill the space in a couple of years, but what these gardens really show is that getting the long-term design details correct at the start is the key to a successful garden – practical, good-looking and, most of all, a place you want to be.

Paul Ridley Design

Planting with Style

 

In a garden designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole in south Oxfordshire, sweeps of naturalistic planting merge together to form a plausible community of wild plants - plausible, but not genuine, and certainly not wild.

The planting is beautiful, however. Here, Bradley-Hole has employed his grid system, with square beds of perhaps four metre dimension separated by gravel paths. The planting is so dense that the pathways become visible only when you are looking directly along them, and each square of the grid echoes its neighbours in the choice of plants. Dynamism and variety are introduced almost mathematically - the proportions of each type of plant change with each bed, and select additions subtly bring new colours or forms to the overall pattern.

Elsewhere in the garden, a fringe of massed grasses and huge Persicarias along the boundary picks up the theme of these plants which runs through the planting as a whole, and a mown circle of grass allows for rough-grass planting of spring bulbs around its perimeter. The terrace, raised above the level of the garden, is fringed by a tall bank bearing swathes of different Persicarias and more grasses - looking at this head on gives the impression of a huge pointillist screen, ranged in colours of rust, plum and tawny yellow.

Some find this pattern of planting somewhat 'spotty' - too many small groupings of plants (often in fact single plants) creating, for them, a hectic mess of plant material.  This is highly skilled design, however - although the plantings cannot be read easily at distance, closer inspection reveals the rhythm built through repeated forms, closely-related varieties of the same plant and the same colours, appearing in the foliage and flowers of completely different species.  I find the style deeply satisfying - a creative response to the environment that suggests wild places and natural communities of plants through highly knowledgeable design.

Paul Ridley Design

Autumn colour

After a relatively overcast August in the UK, when the vibrancy of late summer flowers has been toned down by the grey skies, the sunny opening to September is a reminder of the value of bright light in maximising the impact of late summer and autumn plantings.

Many plants flowering at the moment have a daisy form - either simple as in the Rudbeckia deamii shown above or doubled up as in the Shasta daisies and asters that also make valuable contributions at this time of year.  Other groups with daisy forms at their peak include the annual Cosmos and  Helianthus varieties, Bidens and Coreopsis.  Colours tend to yellow and blue/purple with plenty of whites to soften the clashes.  Some of the sunflowers show wonderful rusty dried-blood reds - 'Velvet Queen' is a favourite, whereas the asters (often quite scruffy plants overall) have a colour range extending from the classic blues and mauves through salmon and white to eye-popping pink (seek out A. 'Andeken an der Alma Potschke').  In short, if you are looking for a daisy to enliven your September garden, you'll find something, although of course the scale of a sunflower will have a very different effect to a cloud of small asters...

I have to confess that I love the simplicity of the single rayed daisies, and the Rudbeckia, with its black cone offsetting the bright yellow petals or the blue of Aster 'King George' contrasting with its orangey-yellow centre are pleasingly unaffected - robust and dependable at a time of the year when to be fussing too much in the garden seems just wrong - we are in wind-down mode and should rightly be enjoying a lull in the ornamental garden after all the hard work of the spring and early summer. 

 It's a happy fact that, with often similar environmental origins, these simple flowers associate superbly with the late-flowering grasses - Miscanthus varieties often have purply-brown feather plumes that would look magnificent behind a stand of the 'Velvet Queen' sunflowers, with perhaps a few of the branching, smaller-flowered 'Italian White' to leaven the mix.  A combination of the Rudbeckia with creamier, less strident Bidens can be partnered effectively with the drooping awns of Stipa gigantea, perhaps loosened further with the extraordinary weaving flower spikes of Stipa barbata.  There is still plenty to enjoy, and while the sun continues to shine in September and October, the daisies are there to bring colour and structure to perennial plantings.

Paul Ridley Design

Summer Planting

As summer progresses into August in the Northern hemisphere, light quality changes - by the end of the month the sun is lower in the sky, and afternoon light is tipped towards the red end of the spectrum.  This is the most evocative time of year for me - grasses, seedheads of earlier-flowering perennials and the drumsticks of spent alliums are all ripening, and the tone of the colours softens.  The plants that are still doing their thing may have gloriously coloured and vibrant flowers, but with a gently fading background and less strident lighting these accents are not the eye-popping additions that they might have been a month or two earlier.  We are at the cusp of autumn, and as large numbers of plants fade away, the performers that are really hitting their stride become increasingly valuable.

Many umbellifers (now grouped in the Apiaceae) shine at this time of year - fennels, dill, angelica  and the rest invariably stand well through autumn, and even into winter, their skeletons gradually leached of colour and the seeds eventually released and dispersed.  The heleniums, or sneezeweeds, contribute their mixed warm palette for months - the buttery yellows through to velvety mahogany shades in the petals, via burnt orange mean that there is something in the family for almost any situation.  To extend their season I am experimenting next year with the 'Chelsea chop' - by taking a third off the tops of these plants in May I hope to push the flowering back to August, and reckon that if I do this for a third of the plants I will also get some valuable shorter, sturdier specimens to support those plants that escape the shears.

Eryngiums and thistly plants are all in full swing at present (see my earlier post) and Dahlias are beginning to have an impact in mixed borders.  Plant dahlias with dark foliage and you won't go far wrong .  Crocosmias, with a similar colour range to the heleniums, offer a valuable option for partially-shaded sites, or an interesting contrast of foliage and habit if mixed in with the sneezeweeds.  My all-time favourite is Crocosmia 'Emily McKenzie' - petals in two shades of rich orange, with a purply-tobacco shaded throat.

Many herbs continue well into August - ornamental marjorams (Origanum) are good value, especially O. laevigatum 'Herrenhausen' with its glaucous foliage and clusters of purply-pink flowers.

The best thing about all these plants?  They are crowded with masses of insects at this time of year, so the garden is alive with sound, movement and interest.

Paul Ridley Design

Spiky Plants

I love the drama of big spiky plants.  As the summer moves to its later stages, the many garden plants that have a thistly habit reach their peak, and their jagged outlines and often grey-silvery colouring are a good antidote to the mounds and cushions of more vibrantly coloured perennials.

Some varieties are perennial - the globe thistles (Echinops), artichokes (Cynara) and bear's breeches (Acanthus) are among these, but some of the most eye-catching are biennials which, having spent a year looking decidedly underwhelming suddenly sprout into amazing Gothic candelabra.  The Scotch Thistle (Onopordum acanthium) is one such - eight feet tall, with felted white leaves in huge sheaves around its winged stem, it branches wildly to bear tomato-sized thistle heads of blue-purple.  It is invaluable as an accent in larger schemes, but give it room - the leaves make uncomfortable close-quarters partners in small spaces.  Once you plant it you have it forever - it self-seeds like crazy.

One family of garden-worthy plants has a wide range of forms that run from something the size of the Onopordum down to much less threatening two-footers.  The eryngiums, or sea hollies do have some perennials among their number, such as the stately E.pandanifolium (widely branched flower stalks to about seven feet, with, in the dark Chelsea Physic Garden form, rusty claret buttons at the ends) - the most elaborately formed flowers belong, however, to the biennial Eryngium giganteum, commonly known as Miss Wilmott's Ghost. 

Green in bud, the whole plant reaches its peak in a blaze of silver, the extravagantly jagged ruff to each flower veined with pale buff as it dries.  The blue flowers are loved by insects, including wasps, and once they are over the plant decays beautifully, holding its structure throughout the winter, the deeply cut and thorny flower heads never better than when frosted on a sunny morning.  The story goes that the Edwardian plantswoman and gardener Ellen Wilmott surreptitiously introduced this, her favourite plant, to other gardens by sprinkling the seed as she visited.  Like the Onopordum it is a vigorous self-seeder, favouring hot situations and gravelly soil.  Besides the species, there is a selected form with even more flamboyant costume, E.g. 'Silver Ghost', but either plant will reward you with a glamorous late-summer display to set against daylilies and grasses, with which they associate particularly well.

Paul Ridley Design