Great things can come in smaller packages

As our outdoor spaces get smaller, top garden designer Noel Kingsbury offers tips on ideal plants for petite places

Think your garden is too small to have the wow factor? Too cramped for carpets of colour or sizeable shrubs?

Think again, because most of us have small gardens, particularly in urban areas and designers have long been creating plant combinations for minute spaces.

Noel Kingsbury is one such designer and his latest book, New Small Garden, aims to demystify the art of making the most of your modest outdoor space.

“Many plants require a horizontal area to grow well but remember you can also use the vertical space,” he advises.

“A small garden may, in fact, have a larger vertical surface area than ground space.

“How much do you have and what is it – a wall, fence or hedge?

“Vertical space can be adorned with climbing plants, or use it to add storage, with cupboard-like structures.”

Many traditional gardens have stalwart shrubs that create both form and colour throughout the seasons, yet some gardeners with small spaces avoid them for fear they will outgrow their allotted space too quickly.

“Many shrubs grow too big for small gardens and it is easy to plant them too densely,” Kingsbury says.

“When planting new shrubs in your small garden, take care not to make the same mistake and note their eventual sizes at the outset to ensure they are suitable.”

Good choices include the slow-growing Pittosporum tenuifolium Irene Paterson, which has attractive dense evergreen foliage and makes a good year-round feature; the compact Japanese azalea Rhododendron Victorine Hefting, which flowers in late spring and can be clipped to shape and the hardy Fuchsia magellanica, valued for its profuse summer flowers, or used as a decorative hedging plant.

“An overwhelming majority of shrubs also have a shape most politely described as ‘ambiguous’ and will spread out in many directions over time,” Kingsbury adds.

“But the fact they are also extremely resilient means they can be kept smaller.”

Design tricks include dividing up your space to form physically different areas.

If your garden isn’t big enough to do that, consider including a couple more places to stop, such as a bench or seat, which allow you to see the garden from different angles and viewpoints.

Detail can make all the difference. It could be a profusion of plants grouped together in containers, mosaic tiles which act as a perfect foil for particular plantings, or even just a stand-alone architectural plant.

Narrow paths through planting encourage the visitor to stop and look at plant combinations, while small surprises such as sculptural objects offer a good way to make people stop and look.