Garden Design

By Tony Murrell

Being a garden designer means that you are on the job so to speak, 24/7 and I love it. The ideas sometimes come thick and fast, sometimes in the middle of the night, and yet there are still moments where my own ability and confidence gets frustratingly challenged, I think it is just par for the course and I have to say its been my way for years.

Garden design is very important for many reasons but the most important would have to be because of the way a landscape or private garden makes us feel. The emotion, the goose bumps and those breathless moments where what lays beyond or unfolds before us cannot help but stir emotion. That’s the best part of being human and of being a designer.

We have to face the fact that we now live in a society of instant gratification and reward so the mere thought of having things to look forward to seems very old fashioned indeed. The design process takes time; patience, experience and more importantly open communication. The three key questions to ask yourself when designing elements of your landscape or private garden is 1) what do you ultimately what to achieve? A picture perfect setting with manicured hedges and prolific flowering borders? 2) What do you want to feel when you look at your garden, exhausted from hard work keeping it pristine, relaxed from wandering about smelling the roses, or self satisfied from the bumper crop of vegetables you just harvested? And 3) how do you want to experience you garden? From the safety of a kitchen window? Reclining on your favourite outdoor chair? Or up to your elbows in potting mix and sheep manure?

Gardening and beautiful gardens are not all about the stress of getting aphids off your tomatoes and cutting the lawn within an inch of its life in the hope that you wont have to mow it again for another month; its about enjoying nature and the wonderment of it and the way it makes you feel. If there is some hard grafting required then get on with it, at the end of the day when you look back at your toil you will have truly earned your vino and cheese.

My top tips for achieving design success this summer are:
1) Mix it up; integrate native plants with exotics for and interesting effect
2) Work out from the get go how much you want to spend on the project - this will help keep your focus
3) Start an area for landscaping and finish it, start small that way you won’t lose puff
4) Use hedges with wire fencing in between, timber fences can be so boring
5) Look for plants with different leaf shapes for a more textural look for your scheme

At the end of the day my advice for enjoying your garden is this - make your garden your very own, sure look at current trends and loads of ideas in publications, websites and books but ultimately it has to be all about you.