Country Garden - The Birches - Home of gardenadvice.co.uk

Our first garden project has been to establish a garden in Lightwater, Surrey to broadcast our television station. (Launched in October 2002). The garden had already been landscaped some years previously by the former owners; they had terraced the whole garden by cutting into the steep bank at the rear of the house.

 

 

The Focus Of The New Design

We needed to create a garden that had many different areas and would provide all year round interest. The garden had a general feel of being a very baron place, mainly because of the lack of plants and the extensive paved areas.

 

 

We set about creating a master plan for the planting which would take place in a number of new beds and containers. Container plants in this situation are ideal because as we film our weekly programmes they can be moved around. However we also found that the other great advantage is that it is easy to experiment with combinations of plants.

 

 

Planting in a new area which is mainly hard landscaping is often the key to the final style. For example, with the use of combinations of soft plants such as achhilea and artemisia the whole area will become more toned down to give a more informal feel. At the other end of the scale using structural plants such as yuccas and mahonia will further enforce the formal style created by the use of extensive hard landscaping.

 

 

Practical considerations centred mainly on the soil type which is a very sandy loam with an acid pH. Ideal for growing azaleas, rhododendrons and other acid loving plants but not so good for softer plants such as many of the herbaceous perennials we required. Planting in containers proved to be the ideal solution because it will allow us to tailor the soil conditions to the individual plants needs. _.