Alexandra Campbell’s tips on making your garden suit you

Alexandra Campbell unearths the best ways to design your garden in order to fit your lifestyle.

I’VE just visited the award-winning Charlotte Rowe Garden Design studios (www. charlotterowe.com) to talk to Charlotte and her design director, Tomoko Kawauchi, about how garden designers divide up the space in the garden.

Charlotte believes there are three major influences on how you design a gardens.

Firstly, there’s the owner’s taste and lifestyle. Secondly, she thinks the garden should echo or mirror the interior of the house or its architecture.

The third factor – and the most expensive – is the way the garden functions.

For many people, “garden design” is about what sort of plants you choose or which colour themes you have.

“A garden designer sees the garden as a whole,”

Tomoko explains.

For a garden designer, the layout and the hard landscaping is far more important.

After all, it’s the most difficult aspect of the garden to change. Many of us live with the terraces, paths and structures left to us by previous inhabitants.

The first step is to list how you use the garden and what you want to do. Charlotte and Tomoko would then consider where the light falls and where you might enjoy the sun most.

“Don’t always have your terrace outside the back door of the house,” Charlotte says.

If it’s a dining terrace, then you’ll want it to be where there’s some midday shade. If it’s a terrace where you plan to enjoy a drink at the end of the day, think about where the evening sun falls.

“Consider the view,” she adds.

She and Tomoko often design terraces at the end of the garden, “which creates a destination”, Charlotte explains.

This way, you can look back at the house.

Charlotte says that when people are designing their

own gardens, the most common mistake they make is to centre them.

In many British houses the front door is to one side, and the back door into the garden will be similarly off-centre, so a centred garden doesn’t link properly to the house.

Charlotte lives in a terraced house with a front door at the left-hand side. Her garden’s focal point – the outdoor fireplace – is lined up with it, on the left of the garden, not in its centre.

Also check the views from windows. You want them to make sense – with a feature or focal point, such as a border or a pergola, that looks good from the window, not from a “centre” that isn’t relevant.

I often get queries about both narrow gardens and wide gardens. Charlotte and Tomoko’s advice for both is quite similar.

“Break up the space laterally,” Charlotte suggests.

If you go across the garden with planting, low hedging, rills, ponds or a terrace, the eye stops at each thing it has to cross.

It takes longer to see the whole garden, so you create an illusion that it is bigger than it is.

When you can’t quite see the whole of something, there’s a desire to step in further and to look, which makes a garden inviting.

Charlotte likes to put a border, often with a tree in it, quite close to the house, “which brings the garden into the house”, and has done this in her own small town garden.

There are glass doors across the back of the house and borders planted laterally just outside.

When you’re in the house, you see lots of greenery, then through to the courtyard and focalpoint fireplace beyond. ■