Garden Designers & Landscape Gardeners
Garden Buildings in South & East England
The Curch Gardens.
Left - the back of the church before we started. An apartment was built inside, between each pair of buttresses where the wooden doors are open. The plot of land at the back of the church was wedge shaped; being narrow at the end farthest away in the photo.
Right - taken near completion. You can see here that we designed all the fence lines to have a 'dog leg' - in effect shifting all the gardens over so that the gardens at the narrow end of the wedge shaped plot could be made wider. If we had built straight sided gardens they would have been tiny at one end of the property and huge at the other.
When an apartment has 3m tall patio doors with a 5m high gothic window above it, the patio immeadiately outside needs to have a strong design. We designed and laid this 56 part sandstone star from two different colours of stone in a circular shape. We curved the fence line around it based on its centre point and surrounded it with architectural evergreen plants and scented climbers.
Left - this double octagon deck was painted black and made on two levels to give some height variation in the garden and to make the back section of the deck feel a little separated. The back cut away section was designed to be tucked into the planting, making a secluded place to sit. The large leaved Paulownia tomentosa behind the deck is cut down every year to keep it as a large shrub with leaves up too 60cm across.
Right - the necessity of using angled fence lines was turned into a positive effect, making interesting layouts to each of the gardens with different areas in which to relax, play, and entertain.
Some of the different paving patterns used to compliment the architectural quality of the church. The patio spaces close to the chuch have the benefit of all the original architectural features and are in warm protected micro-climates, thanks to the shelter of the massive building, so we took care to try and put as much aesthetic interest into the ground level hard landscaping.
These photos show how the 'dog leg' layout worked in addressing the inequality of space for some of the gardens. There was much debate before the descision was taken to adopt this design, with the integrity of 8 apartments outdoor space at stake. Our property developer client was happy with the outcome and we feel that it gave all the gardens an originality and interest that could not have been achieved using a conventional straight sided layout.
Some views that illustrate the interesting spaces made by this layout. All of the gardens had 2 different place to sit; either patios or decks, a lawn, architectural evergreen, scented and colourful planting, weed suppressant gravel mulch, irrigation systems and reclaimed timber pitch pine bespoke fencing. They are low maintenance, family friendly, with year round interest gardens.
This garden's feature was a pergola arched walk. The four arches had trellis panels between two pairs of posts to give the walk a slightly seperate, enclosed feel to the walk and for climbing evergreen jasmines to grow on. The bench at the halfway point of the walk made this also a place to come and sit, with a small patio opposite, surrounded by a crescent shaped lawn.
The black octagonal deck in this garden looked out over a circular lawn and was complimented by the 'Black Bamboo' Phyllostachys nigra. Evergreen plants in a small garden are very important and we selected the species here to create an interesting composition of form that would last all year, as well as provide scent and colour. The Magnolia grandiflora next to the patio doors is a good example of this, with glossy evergreen leaves and huge white lemon scented flowers all summer, placed where you cannot fail to appreciate it's perfume.
