Saturday February 9th
Weather: Very windy, dull start but sunny after lunch and doing physical work so wind chill not so bad!
“Designing for a client is one thing, but for myself is something else”
I use the garden frequently to give prospective clients ideas, not only with design but with plants and shrubs, its always a pleasure to have morning coffee and scones whilst discussing design ideas for their garden. I would however always suggest looking in books and magazines for ideas, but sometimes better to see things in reality. The photographs that I use on my mood boards come as much as possible from my garden or that of others I have visited ensuring that a design will work (well as much as nature will allow, it is one of the things I love about gardening, you can never quite work out how something will grow, different areas and light levels, will mean different rates and style of growth). For some years now my garden has remained unchanged. I suppose the question being, ‘Why change something if it works?’ but two areas in particular had become a problem. The grass was becoming bald and patchy, my husband had tried to re-seed but it had not really worked. Both areas are connected and both were failing for different reasons. The first area was due to the roots of two beautiful trees, the second to just shade from large shrubs, but with the shrubs I have privacy and no way were the shrubs going to be reduced in size not just for a lawn, so the question was what do I do? do I re-turf? It would be a hard job over these roots, well impossible, so shall I make a feature of them? The second area, shade. I ask myself how long would the grass last? So the answer to my question was gravel. I am lucky that the second area connects with the kitchen garden, the area consists of a series of 4 large vegetable beds with a chess board in the centre. The medium that was used on the paths surrounding the beds is gravel. Gravel works well, I find the kitchen garden easy to access in wet weather and above all to pick the vegetables during the winter months. Armed with ideas in my head versus on paper as I would with a client, SDL the landscapers that work on projects with me duly were called in. The outcome is excellent. The area now looks larger, the connection of gravel within the two areas has improved the look beyond belief, and I have realised that too many changes in surface coverings can reduce the size of an garden.