Archive for February, 2008
Garden Style – making the most of your makeover budget
February 27th, 2008So, you’ve decided you need expert help – and you’re worrying about the cost already? There are several ways you can reduce costs without having to scale down your ambitions:Â
Hire yourself as a navvy – the more work you do yourself, the cheaper a garden makeover will be. You might find a good-sized garden shrub […]
Garden Style in February – build yourself a gazebo!
February 24th, 2008Â
 Â
Seriously, as Alan Titchmarsh says, you can knock one of these up in an afternoon, assuming there are two of you to work on it, and one of you is halfway practical – I’m not, but my other half is, and we actually did build one of these in a friend’s garden for a surprise […]
The biggest new garden in the world
February 22nd, 2008Beijing’s new city park, the Olympic Forest Park, will spread over 680 hectares in northern Beijing, and essentially serve as the ‘back garden’ to the 2008 Olympics and then provide environmental as well as leisure benefits for the city. The large design team that has created the ‘vision’ for the project aims to produce a landscape […]
Front garden style – and how to improve it
February 18th, 2008Most of the year, this front garden has a lot going for it, but in winter it seems to lack pizzazz. As you can see, the overgrown path has a cottage garden feel and you can bet that in summer it is a fragrant tunnel of scented climbers and is studded with bright flowers – […]
How to give your garden good proportions
February 15th, 2008Trees and houses: if you are going to plant trees, rather than inheriting them, they need to be proportional to the house – a house is big which means a tree should be bigger, or much much smaller. What does that mean? If a house is sixty feet tall, plant a tree that will be […]
Garden style – a sense of proportion
February 12th, 2008Many people struggle to understand how proportion works in relation to the landscape. A major failing is to use things that are too small, whether because you’re nervous about making a ‘big’ mistake, or out of a sense that smaller things are cheaper – and this mistake gets made with anything from purchases like trees, […]
Garden Style - Front Garden techniques
February 9th, 2008The front garden is very often a wasted opportunity in garden design terms – which is a small tragedy, as it is often the first and best chance you have to indicate the style themes and priorities that are key to your overall garden plan.
There are difficulties, of course – the size of a front […]
Garden Design - planning with photos
February 6th, 2008Another great idea from The Principles of Gardening is to take a bunch of photos of your garden and then draw on them. When the book was written, back in the seventies, these photos had to be developed in a high street store (how times have changed!) but now, with digital cameras and printers, it’s […]
Principles of Garden Design
February 4th, 2008I’ve been reading, or rather, re-reading, Hugh Johnson’s excellent book, The Principles of Gardening. Although it was published in 1979, it has really stood the test of time, which cannot be said for all books of its vintage! One of the most important sections of the book is a small six page section, with three […]
