Turn your PATIO into a PARADISE

It’s the heart of any garden, a space for entertaining and unwinding. This week and next, Monty Don shows you how to create an idyllic outdoor room which will be THE place to go when the summer finally arrives

WE gardeners often refer to ‘outdoor rooms’ when we speak of the division of our gardens. It is a useful, if hackneyed, term because if a garden is to be a comfortable and easy aspect of our lives, then it has to feel proportionate and human in scale. This applies to patios more than any other part of the garden. Above all, a patio must feel like a well-balanced, comfortable room that is inviting and personal – rather than just a paved space outside where you occasionally light up the barbecue or sit and have a drink on a balmy evening.

On the other hand, it has to function as and when you want it to. It is lovely to sprawl on sweet-smelling grass on a fine summer’s day but the truth is that there are perhaps only a dozen such opportunities in an average year. In contrast, a well-organised and designed patio will have a paved, dry surface that will quickly drain, provide shelter from cold winds and prying eyes, and be rich with fragrance, colour and the ambience of green foliage.

All of this can be managed to suit your requirements, regardless of what kind of garden you have or where it is. There is no one-size-fits-all ideal, but there are certain tips I can give that will be of use to help you make your own ideal patio.

A SOCIABLE SPACE

WHEN planning a patio it is helpful to think of its original meaning, an inner courtyard open to the sky. That implies high walls or fences and goes back to the idea of the garden room.

The best patios are found in Spain and the very best Spanish patios are in Cordoba, where they have a festival celebrating them every summer. These range from tiny courtyards in private houses, like the one I visited a few years ago that had a hundred small terracotta pots, each painted a brilliant blue, fixed to its walls and filled with pelargoniums, to the patios of large apartment buildings occupied by up to a dozen families that have trees, huge pots, vast tables for communal meals and wonderful terracotta ovens. The common element is that each patio is as much part of the domestic living space as any indoor room.

Your patio must also be a place to eat and entertain. That can be very modest. I recall one of the nicest patio experiences I had was when I helped someone design a garden in a brand new house that she moved into after her husband died. It had room only for a small patio, outside the living room door, which was almost completely taken up with a little table, two chairs and a couple of pots. Nevertheless we sat and had tea and cake and raised our cuppas to toast her new garden, and it felt like a party.

Basically, you will need a hard surface, a table, at least two chairs, maybe a comfy seat or two, and an outdoor tap, even if only for watering the pots. In addition, a lot of people like a fixed barbecue setup, and these can either be homemade or one of the hundreds of types of barbecues, firepits or outdoor clay ovens available to buy.

It is good to surround any eating space with good scents, some shade and possibly herbs or even vegetables that can be used for cooking outside as well as being handy for use in the kitchen.

SET UP A SUNTRAP

POSITIONING a patio might seem obvious, and most are set up so you walk directly from the house onto them. But this can have a disadvantage – that the patio becomes just a passageway to the garden.

Above all, your patio should be where the sun catches it when you want to use it. It’s pointless to have a sitting area that’s bathed in morning sun if you have to leave early for work and yet is in deep shade when you get home and have the leisure to sit in your garden.

It makes sense to follow the sun. In a large garden that can mean having more than one patio or terraced area, but for most people that is a luxury beyond the means of the available space. Thirty-five years ago we had a small town house and the best sunlight in the evenings was right at the end of the long, thin garden. But having to carry a drink or a meal on a tray down a path flanked by lovely plants was all part of the garden experience, whereas sitting in chilly shade is no fun.

Some like the experience of chatting to neighbours as they sit on their patio but I feel inhibited by this. So either your patio should not be unduly overlooked or else you must contrive to create privacy through judicious planting and use of fences, trellises or walls. I’ll be looking at ways of doing that while still enhancing the appearance of your garden next week.

But for many people a patio is their garden and the important thing is to make the most of it, however big or small, because sitting outside on a lovely evening after a long day, perhaps with a glass of whatever you fancy, is one of life’s great pleasures.