Small Garden – Big Ideas

If your garden is more bijoux box than rolling acres there’s plenty that can be done to make the most of it. Benedict Vanheems proves that small gardens can indeed be perfectly formed

How many of us have large, sprawling gardens? Not many I bet. And yet leaf through any  book on garden design and you’ll be faced with glorious examples of meticulously laid out expanses. It’s like the property sections of the Sunday supplements – it’s all very aspirational and mouth-watering, but for the vast majority of us we have to manage with something significantly less grandiose. The size of the average garden continues to shrink. Those in modern housing developments especially will find the space they have to garden severely limited thanks to the pressure for developers to squeeze in as many houses as they can.

Never mind – there’s a lot you can do with a small garden. Even a courtyard garden can be cleverly tweaked to make it feel larger than it is. Any outdoor space can be transformed into a miniature oasis in which to unwind.

Having a small garden doesn’t make it any less special. Indeed, with the time pressures of our busy lives a large garden could quickly prove overwhelming. Working with a more modest space simply requires careful thought and the use of both horizontal and vertical planes to create a living work of art.

Space challenges

Before deciding how to best design a small garden it’s important to appreciate the challenges that working with such a space will bring. Your garden is likely to be viewed in its entirety. If you have the space, especially if your garden is long but thin, you might like to consider breaking it up into separate ‘rooms’ to create a sense of anticipation and to encourage the feeling of more space to explore beyond what is visible. Even a path leading to behind a shrub can give the illusion that there is more than meets the eye.

The biggest challenge, especially for keen gardeners, is to resist the temptation to cram too  much in. This will create a cluttered, mismatched and potentially untidy look. Exercising restraint within a limited space means deciding on a theme and limited palette of plants – and sticking to it! For example, there’s little point planting a mishmash of colours that will clash. Instead, opt for one or two colours that blend or complement each other and use leaf textures and shapes to add a further layer of interest.

Colours tend to change throughout the seasons, with yellows and blues dominating spring before moving onto hotter colours at the peak of summer, so it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy all the colours of rainbow – just not at the same time.

Everything in the garden must work hard to be there. Plants therefore need to have a longer season of interest, perhaps offering flowers in spring, luscious leaves during the summer and glorious autumn colour or winter stem colour. If plants also offer something edible, all the better – blueberries tick all these boxes.

Outdoor room

Smaller plots aren’t just about compromises – there are benefits to be had that are lost on larger gardens. Aside from the obvious advantages in maintenance and cost savings, small gardens lend themselves naturally to treatment as an outside room; don’t see the space as a small garden but rather a large outdoor room. Take on board this mind set and it takes on a whole new perspective!

Like any room there are three surfaces that can potentially be designed: the floor, walls and ceiling. By making each of these as interesting as possible (without  cluttering of course!) you will create a space in which it’s a pleasure to linger. With less area to cover, attention to detail is paramount while your budget will be able to ensure a thorough job is made of the space you have available. If you have any strong design elements in the house consider extending them out into the garden to create a seamless link between indoors and out. For example, if you have kitchen tiles inside try to mirror them outside by using paving of a similar size and layout to give a sense of coordination. Exposed floorboards can be carried on outside with decking, running in the same direction to give the illusion of the indoor room running outside. With patio doors thrown open in summer you’ll have an extra-large entertaining space that looks just fantastic.