Archive for August, 2008
The soft porn of garden design
August 31st, 2008
That’s how interior design maven and long-cuffed New Romantic television presenter Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen describes the exteriors of a number of British houses, as he seeks out Britain’s best garden.
His new TV series will visit two spectacular and contrasting gardens and houses each week - and a panel of experts including garden designer Anne […]
Dream garden becomes road?
August 28th, 2008
It’s the kind of nightmare we all dread. The Hills retired early from their city jobs and moved to Cornwall to invest in a country estate on which they could live the good life. But now their plans have come up against the local council which has rerouted a multi-million pound bypass […]
August 25th, 2008
Well, I thought this was funny until it happened to somebody I know and now I realise it’s not. A neighbour of ours has a lovely city garden: long and narrow, somewhat shadowy, bordered by quite high flint walls, and inhabited by, amongst other things, a nightingale and some hens. But no […]
Garden style – bulbs
August 23rd, 2008If you’re anything like me, you’re finding that virtually every day now, a bulb catalogue drops through your letterbox. I don’t know why I keep subscribing to them, to be honest, as my garden has two of the complete no-nos for successful bulb growing: heavy clay soil and squirrels!
But assuming that your bulbs (unlike […]
Front garden style – window boxes
August 18th, 2008Okay, you don’t have a front garden? That’s no excuse for not expressing your personal style, as this French townhouse shows – not only do they not have a garden, they don’t even have a pavement, but the enterprising house owner has still managed to create a stunning display. And of course it doesn’t […]
Recycling bottle garden
August 15th, 2008If you have a passion for outdoor living and for good wine and food, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re missing the link - integrating wine-inspired features into your garden might provide the perfect environment for savouring your favourite vintage. While you might think a bottle house is a bit excessive, you can certainly […]
Garden style – front door fashion
August 12th, 2008
Or, as the Americans have begun to call it – curb appeal! Only in the
USA, right? But there’s a serious point here if you’re hoping to sell your home, and it’s that just as in relationships, people make up their minds about your house within a couple of seconds of seeing it. Love – […]
The ideal garden – in the South
August 9th, 2008George Wimpey has carried out a survey of householders in the South East and while the results aren’t exactly surprising, they are at least worth considering in relation to garden style. 67% of those surveyed felt their garden was as important as their indoor living space and 83% of homebuyers (in South East at least) […]
Recession-proof garden style
August 7th, 2008The cottage garden might have fallen out of favour in the sixties, seventies and eighties but it’s becoming more popular in recent years because it’s just so adaptable. It’s based on a subsistence style of gardening, basically the householders simply planted whatever decorative plants they could get, interplanting them with the edible crops that […]
Secret Garden Style
August 3rd, 2008Gertrude Jekyll, the famous female British garden designer, once asked, ‘Why should a garden not be childish …’ , and in Britain we certainly love to celebrate the whimsical, dreamlike and fantastical: mazes and grottos, gnomes, model railways and shell houses have all been part of our traditional British garden design. And it’s all do […]
