Archive for January, 2008
Garden Design news
January 31st, 2008An award-winning garden designer has accused Huntingdonshire District Council workers of vandalising part of her garden. Marney Hall has won gold awards at the Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower Shows. A few days ago, she came home to find plants had been torn from her garden wall. ‘I went out shopping this morning, and came […]
‘Lost’ Garden rediscovered
January 29th, 2008£50,000 of Heritage Lottery Funding has recently been secured to develop proposals to restore the parks hall, grounds and gardens of Falinge Park. The estate was designed by Thomas Mawson, one of the great landscape architects of his period, but who previously had not been associated with the park. Perhaps his most famous commission was […]
When you hate your new garden
January 25th, 2008It’s not uncommon for a homeowner to put months into planning and designing a new garden, thousands of pounds into its creation and then to decide that they hate it!If this is you, whether you’ve added a new do-it-yourself garden feature and you’re not sure you’re happy with it, or whether you’ve invested in a […]
When Designers speak …
January 22nd, 2008When garden designers get together (usually at the big horticultural shows) they do tell horror stories about the people who’ve hired them to do the impossible. There’s the client who wanted a blue garden: from a blue fescue lawn through to blue eucalyptus trees, and with only silver-leaved or blue-flowered plants. After two years of […]
Don’t panic …
January 19th, 2008… although it can be frightening, when you start to redesign and re-shape a garden and it looks a bit like this! Even the dog is dejected. This is the worst stage though, when all the old features, no matter how unsatisfactory they were, have been (literally) ripped away, and all that’s left is bare earth […]
Great gardening but it’s not style …
January 16th, 2008I happen to adore cottage gardens. I could spend hours hanging over the fence of a busy, welcoming patch like this, marvelling at the dedication (and green fingers) of the creator of such superb proliferation … but it really is the opposite of style, that is, if we define style as ‘the combination of distinctive […]
How not to go about it
January 13th, 2008I was invited into this garden recently, to give my opinions. Fortunately the owners were more keen to talk about their hot tub etc than to listen to me, because my views would have been, frankly, unprintable. This is the opposite of garden design. It’s just a range of things dumped down outdoors. Sorry about the […]
Beyond the barbecue …
January 10th, 2008An Australian entry to the Chelsea flower show won a coveted gold award for the second year running in 2006. The garden by Fleming’s Nurseries of Victoria, included drought friendly plants, water features and an electric barbecue to offer a flavour of Australia’s love of living outdoors with grass trees, a teppanyaki grill, even a […]
Out of this world
January 8th, 2008The 2007 Best in Show winner at Chelsea is quite possibly the highest ‘high concept’ garden you’ll ever see. ‘600 Days With Bradstone’, a design by Sarah Eberle’s tries to imagine how the personal space of an astronaut on a tour of duty on Mars (lasting 600 days, hence the name) would help him or […]
Japanese garden resolution - Yano Tea’s ‘Niwazare’ Garden
January 4th, 2008Yano Tea won gold in 2005 with his Niwazare garden, which uses the authentic style of Japanese gardens, to express a small universe of nature in an enclosed space. As we know from the craze for Zen gardens, the Japanese approach to gardening works well with our modern lifestyles and our environmental concerns.
The Japanese see […]
