ABOVE (click on gallery pattern to perspective incomparable picture): This city garden was designed as a year spin space for relaxing and entertaining. The planting consists of Ligustrum, Buxus hedging, Magnolia grandiflora and Ateli chathamica. A bespoke grate is total with a vast outside dining list and Dedon all-weather seat dedon.de.
Matt James
Garden designer
A new build garden provides a vacant board that offers many sparkling possibilities, though it can be daunting too as a plea is slimming down all a facilities you’d like into something that will work in a accessible space.
You need calm with a new garden. It takes time to evolve, so pull adult a clear devise to assistance a devise pierce along.
Start by identifying your family’s needs. Make certain we get a opinion of everybody who will use a space, including children. Once everyone’s had their turn, organize your jottings into what’s many critical and afterwards play around with ideas. You need to be aware of income during this stage, though don’t let a parsimonious bill suppress your creativity.
Click on one of a options subsequent or corkscrew down to find out more…
- Choosing a right design
- Marking out a layout
- Drawing adult a plan
- Cultivating your lawn
- Dealing with yellow lawns
- Creating planting schemes
Choosing a right design
A cottage-style garden customarily looks out of place with a new build house, while an ultra-modern pattern seems somewhat self-conscious. Instead select a demeanour that is contemporary with pointed normal elements. For example, use paving materials in a complicated way, such as uniform sawn sandstone pavers rather than pointless rectilinear slabs with strange edges. Concrete and petrify describe materials competence seem too many in a new build space, though they can work, quite if they have a delicate, textured finish. Contemporary healthy cedar decking is suitable too. Essentially it’s all about hints and nuances rather than adhering to any component of one sold style.
Get impulse for planting and pattern sum by trawling by books and magazines. Try to find box studies with houses that are identical to yours – it’s all good and good collecting photos of classical lodge gardens, though cruise how it will demeanour opposite code new red brick.
Back to top
Marking out a layout
Create a scale outline of your garden on paper and see how opposite distance shapes work, allocating a purpose to any one as we go – for example, one for a lawn, another for a seating area. Square or rectilinear shapes work best and make good use of space in smaller, boxy gardens. Oval shapes are good too. Avoid fiddly curves as they emanate obsolete corners and are formidable to reap if they’re in a weed – and slicing materials to fit them is tricky.
If you’re not penetrating on a demeanour of a initial blueprint we design, or we don’t consider it will be unsentimental – for example, if your space is too tiny for some shapes to work in a area accessible – try again with another layout, maybe rambling a shapes by 45 degrees, creation one bigger or slicing one out entirely. Keep contrast opposite options, recording what you’ve finished any time until you’re happy. Once you’ve found a solution, symbol out a tangible distance in your garden, regulating pen paint or a bottle of dry silt to see if it works in situ.
Back to top

ABOVE: (Before) The gardens to a behind of this quarrel of new build homes had been designed to form tiny block spaces, that were reached around high stairs adult from a behind yard behind any of a houses; (After) The owners of this residence private 20 tonnes of dirt to emanate a peaceful slope on 3 levels, that are any paved with Chinese slab slabs – for identical paving, try visionnaturalstone.co.uk. Landscaping by greenstonelandscapes.com.
Drawing adult a plan
If we have a vast new garden, don’t tackle it all during once, generally if your bill is parsimonious – do one area during a time. The enticement is to have something – anything – to uncover for a garden, hence a common mistake people make of adding out-of-proportion island beds in a center of lawns and slight borders hugging range fences. Hold behind and hang to your master plan.
Invest in a tough landscaping first: walls and fencing (especially if they’re maintaining walls), a patio, afterwards primary paths – in that order. Features such as pools and pergolas come subsequent (or during a same time if they’re integrated). Leave accessories like sculptures and shade sails until a end, unless we have remoteness problems.
The tough landscaping creates a blueprint of a garden and helps to form a structure. Don’t scrimp here, as creation changes after is irritating (and expensive) – when a garden’s full of plants we competence concede a usability and, in a misfortune case, safety.
Back to top
Cultivating your lawn
Lawns are budget-friendly and offer a need for play space as good as being adult territory. Bear in mind that your garden has been a stomping belligerent for builders during work with machine – a outcome is unprotected subsoil churned with bricks and rubble underneath a lawn, all compressed like concrete. In sequence to pill this, skill developers mostly import new topsoil and widespread it thinly over a surface, laying a territory on top, though we can also solve this problem.
Digging over a whole garden is unreal and customarily unnecessary, so combine your efforts where a lawn, beds and borders are planned. Cultivate these areas, stealing any rubble and forking in copiousness of compost to urge a soil’s structure. It is back-breaking work, so take your time – it doesn’t need to be all finished in a weekend.
You can re-lay a territory – though if some spots demeanour quite bad or all that digging sounds like too many tough work, emanate a ‘container corner’ with pots instead where we can select a ideal compost for your plants, no matter what’s underneath. Raised beds done from ash sleepers or rendered blocks are value deliberation for incomparable spaces – they make an engaging pattern component and yield a good event to grow your possess vegetables.
Back to top

ABOVE: (Before) This new build isolated property’s behind garden was an uninspiring space with a weed that was sketchy and full of weeds; (After) The homeowners chose to lay synthetic turf, opting for LAZYLAWN by Evergreens UK from lazylawn.co.uk. It looks like a genuine thing though is low-maintenance and stays sensuous all year.
Dealing with yellow lawns
If you’ve usually changed in and are struggling with a patchy, yellow and skinny lawn, your problems are roughly positively down to a rubble buried beneath. If we don’t wish to reinstate a weed with gravel, there are 3 options open to you.
You can soothe a compaction by spiking deeply any feet or so with a flare (or a wheeled spiker from garden sinecure specialists), afterwards hillside tough with a steel spring-tine hillside to mislay passed weed and moss before tip sauce with a skinny covering of compost. Next, boar a super-tough weed seed mix over a tip of a compost, raking in a seed easily with a hillside – all good garden centres have lots of opposite seed to select from. Scatter seed over a tip of any remaining good grass.
Alternatively, puncture out all a rubble and soiled soil, afterwards incorporate copiousness of good compost, or import peculiarity topsoil and re-seed (a back-breaking pursuit if we wish a vast lawn).
Your third choice is to lay all-weather synthetic turf. Artificial territory can be simply cosmetic matting, though many examples on a marketplace now demeanour unequivocally healthy with ‘blades’ of weed in opposite colours and sizes to impersonate a demeanour of a genuine thing. Artificial territory isn’t usually low upkeep – it’s useful for children’s play areas and ideal in murky gardens where genuine weed struggles to grow. Unlike normal grass, we can use it all year spin too, whatever a weather.
Expect to compensate between £20-£30 per m² for an authentic-looking synthetic turf, depending on a colour, pile, tallness and texture. Installation costs vary, depending on a ‘foundations’ – we can’t lay synthetic territory on unclothed dirt or over an existent lawn. Visit artificiallawn.co.uk, evergreensuk.com and asgoodasgrass.co.uk for their ranges.
Back to top
Creating planting schemes
New build gardens tend to miss character. There are no plants to emanate that mature been-there-for-ever demeanour – so should we buy vast specimens to start with? And when and what should we buy?
Most new build gardens don’t offer any surprises – all is manifest during once. Introducing semi-mature shrubs will emanate seductiveness immediately. Shrubs, quite evergreen varieties, are constructional plants, packaged with copiousness of form. we consider of them as big, solid, arguable anchors in a garden, defining one space from another and assisting to weave a whole pattern together.
Make taller varieties your initial choice for year-round remoteness and screening. The Strawberry tree, Eucryphia ‘Nymansay’ and noble Magnolia grandiflora are evergreen heavyweights that work well.
Not all plants are value shopping as large specimens, however. I’d usually select evergreen trees, shrubs, conifers, palms, hedging and high bamboos for present screening. Don’t rubbish your income on outrageous roses, annuals, ferns and herbaceous perennials like geraniums, heucheras and sedums since tiny ones bulk adult rapidly. The same relates to many climbers that tend to bark divided in a deteriorate or two.
Prices count on many factors, including origin, majority and how formidable they are to grow. As a guide, a 3m (10ft) bamboo will cost £60-£80, while a 1.5m (5ft) customary screening plant like Photinia, Aucuba or Olearia should cost no some-more than £60. They need some-more TLC to settle well, so select a good nursery, preferably one that specialises in large plants.
Back to top
WORDS MATT JAMES; MAIN IMAGE A HYDE PARK GARDEN BY KATE GOULD; COPYRIGHT PETER BAISTOW; PHOTOGRAPHS REPORTAGE, EVERGREENS UK (evergreensuk.com)
All prices and stockists scold during time of publishing
Featured in a Jan 2012 emanate of Real Homes
Related posts
- The Two Bedding Methods Used In Crazy Paving
- Landscaping Tips For Water Gardens
- Water Garden Landscaping Tips
- Small Yard Landscaping Ideas
- Build A Garden Fence - Low Cost Ideas
- Design an Entrance Garden
- Restoring a Georgian kitchen
- Contemporary Fireplaces Offer Sleek Yet Functional Designs
- Home and Garden Furniture Ideas
- Outdoor Deck Fireplaces
- Gardening Ideas
- Suitable Garden Furniture
- Online Garden Furniture
- Free Landscaping Ideas - Priceless Schemes For The Perfect Garden
- Problem Free Patios, Paving and Paths
- Examining Outdoor Fireplaces - 3 Different Types and Which One
- Designing a Contemporary Family Garden
- Outdoor Wood Furniture
- Wooden Garden Furniture - More Elegant and Stylish
- Herb Garden Design - Designing a Small Herb Garden
- Garden Design Software
- Putting Down Your Block Paving Driveways
- Paving - What You Need to Know Before Starting a
- Creative Garden Path Ideas
- Different Pool Landscaping Ideas
- Different Types of Paving
- Uses of Natural Stone Landscaping
- Paving 101 (betterhomesgardens)
- Outdoor Wood Burning Fireplace
- How to Prepare Ground For and Lay Paving