CHAPTER THREE Structuring
No garden can comfortably survive without a strong skeletal structure . Having walked the site and breathed in its character it is time to set to work with pencil and paper and consider the bones. Drawing a plan by hand evokes every aspect of the developing garden in your mind’s eye. The pace and rhythm of the garden spaces, the views, the practicalities all settle into their rightful place. In shaping a plan all the real and invented intentions emerge. This is how the beauty of a place is uncovered and made real .
This old cart lodge is hundreds of years old (above). The blank flint wall and rich rusty clay roof tiles make the perfect backdrop for a garden. I made huge hedges of Rosa Iceberg (‘Korbin’) around the three different garden rooms – they, and the building, formed the structure for the intimacy of the gardens. R . ‘Honorine de Brabant’ and lavender are all the decoration that these beautiful flint walls need (below). I structured the colours very carefully so the purpled leaf tints of the Catalpa x erubescens ‘Purpurea’ match the rose and lavender and link both gardens over the wall.
The necessary corsets
One of my seminal books about how to design is the excellent Gardens are for People , written in 1955 by Thomas D. Church. It is a brief and beautifully written book by a man who pioneered domestic landscape architecture in post-war America. Just as Abraham Maslow had set up the Hierarchy of Needs so ably for psychologists, so Thomas Church set up the abiding structure of fundamental truths for budding landscape architects.
Firstly, he discussed the need for unity, integrating the flow of movement between house and garden. This is followed by functionality: never neglecting the practical uses of a space so all members of the household are treated to pleasing areas of both service and recreation. He believed the economic and aesthetic success of a design relied on simplicity. And, ultimately, scale was vital to the creation of an integrated design.
This town garden is surprisingly wild for its small size and needed strict controlling lines for it to be legible and livable. A strict management programme for the black bamboo keeps them looking smart. If you haven’t got the patience to care for it – don’t plant it.
Church also bestowed another great confidence, and that was to make drawings conversational. I hand draw everything. I can only design in this way, as the process of thought to solution to pencil is the most fluent for me. Hand drawings are warm, inviting and collaborative, and appeal to a potentially nervous client. For a long period of time drawings are the only thing that exist about a scheme, so they become quite talismanic and need to hold the imagination until things can start on site.
‘First we must destroy!’ This is often my opening remark. In making a new landscape or garden all the obsolete things must first be swept away and the space considerately cleared. Every aspect of what is inherited at the dawn of a new garden has to be thoughtfully reviewed and evaluated. I am an old hand at it now, and sometimes forget how terrifying it is to the uninitiated to see me going through the place issuing death warrants. Badly misshapen, damaged or sick trees and shrub planting must go. On one estate I felled 90 per cent of the trees (with the relevant permissions, of course), and cleared the way to a spectacular view for the new house that was being built. Old fences and irrelevant sheds or structures must also go. I get in there like Genghis Khan and sweep all before me. One client looked aghast at the smouldering piles of grubbed out trees and shrubs, roughly ten separate bonfires grumbling away on a foggy autumn morning across his newly acquired parkland. I had, he said, reduced his home to Mordor. Then just a few months later he said he now completely understood why it had to be done. As the junk is removed it is possible to really see the value in what is left, and this is where the real work can start.
The dark waters of a swimming pool are perfect for mirroring the house and anchoring the eye in the garden. We chose a graphite tile and the resulting waters are cool and calm.
I enjoy order and the process of ordering things and initial aspects of the work are an absolute delight to me. Managing the question of where everything that has been asked for goes is extremely satisfying. The wish lists are formidable, and often include swimming pools, tennis courts, formal gardens and informal gardens, drives, lakes and ponds, formal water features, running tracks, garaging, woodsheds, woodchip boilers, chicken runs, stables, cutting gardens, jungle gyms, potagers, zip wires, yoga platforms, meditation walks … you name it! Even the lists for small town gardens can run into pages. I build buildings if they are needed, which they frequently are, and have also been called upon to cross the threshold into the interior and design kitchens, fireplaces, bathrooms and bedrooms; literally everything and the kitchen sink! I love this process and it translates down even to smaller gardens, such as my own in London. Where space is at a premium it is really important to make clear unsentimental judgments about what goes where and why. Every view matters, and in a small garden there is no margin for error.
Irrespective of size, I always make sure there is a base survey of the land with all the levels on it. I can’t work without levels. The process of locating things on a plan is fluid at this stage, as it is just pen and ink. All the elements required in the garden can be easily moved about. Sometimes I’ll cut out bits of card or even drive cars around to indicate structures and shuffle them around just to see how they feel in different locations. It is really important to allow quiet time for this process to take place. I almost always design in my private studio and rarely in the office. A technology-free environment is best for creative work. It is instinctive to see what is required to decongest a space and make it breathe freely. But this intuitive work has to be tested. Intuition followed by reasoned judgment is my process.
The proportion of space each activity or incident needs is different outside from the process when planning interiors. Experience tells me that we move differently outside – our gestures are longer, our gait changes, the way we sit in a chair outside in summer to have lunch has no kinship to the same activity indoors. We are relaxed, bigger, more generous and more expansive. Therefore, really consider how your space is meant to feel and scale it to the generosity of a big family group or the intimacy of a couple or single person reading in peace. Even in small gardens these changing dynamics are feasible.
A literal ‘back of an envelope’ sketch for my London garden (above). I wanted the luxury of walls and east/west terraces for morning and evening sun – and a moat. The structure is very evident, as the planting has just gone in (below). The desired focus onto the woodland beyond is achieved by stepping the walls down and framing the view. The planting will be very jungly once it gets going, as this is a hot shadeless south-facing plot on a hilltop.
This end of a walled garden is highly structured. At low level a rampart of box tightly clipped into eggy shapes forms a screen. The box-headed limes are tough customers and swipe all the water – the area below them is hard to keep pretty and is better screened.
I enjoy big bold shapes, and this topiary lawn was designed for parties. It looks amazing in all seasons, and the moving shadows trace the path of the sun. Each topiary piece is huge and that scale is vital to make it feel balanced with the buildings.
Orientation
Understanding the elements
It seems pretty self-evident that understanding the sun and its impact during the day is important for a garden. Nevertheless, give it some time, as it is a more complex subject than it might first appear. For a start, it depends where on earth you are. We are living on a big spinning ball moving in orbit with other planets and we are orbiting the sun at some speed. That’s a big enough thought to start with. The available sunlight and its intensity are therefore very different in relatively small geographic distances. I’m much less blasé about it all since living in the Mediterranean region and working abroad. It can catch you out. The sun path on the equator took a few minutes to understand!
Three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon, the truth.
—BUDDHA
Culturally people have different reactions to the sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen like to be out in the midday sun, but generally no one else does. Even in the UK it can be a mistake to orient a terrace or summerhouse to the south. It will heat up like a furnace in no time and be unbearable just at the time of year you wish to use it. East/west is best, with windows or shrubbery on both sides to let the light percolate through.
By drawing in the sun path for a plan, you graphically see the information you need to create a comfortable environment. I strongly recommend it.
Terraces needs careful siting in order that they stay clement and warm without either baking or being plunged into perpetual slimy shade. I like formal terraces to have static large dining tables on them. To eat in full sun is very unpleasant, so choose an area that is warmed in the morning and becomes more protected as the day wears on. Sunbathing can take place on a lawn. My suggestion is to have light migratory furniture that can be easily carried from place to place so the choices between sun and shade rest with the individual.
Often there is little choice about orientation as a house already exists and has to be dealt with. I once designed two long borders as a pair heading off a west-facing terrace, both over 30m (98 feet) long, and then realized as I began the planting plans that one faced south and, inevitably, its twin faced north. Clearly the south side would be filled with rampant and volatile growth, as it got all the light, and the other side would be stable, cool and modest. I achieved harmony with a degree of ingenuity and rational planting, but I don’t recommend it.
I do like north-facing sites. I love the quiet, still, shady calm of them. Topiary looks wonderfully static and ominous with long sharp shadows. I like to work in my north-facing studio with unvarying light. North is a gift.
This house and its outbuildings blend seamlessly into the environment. All that is visible is the roof terrace and some chimneys. Soon they’ll vanish too. The secret heart of it – the courtyard – is tucked away within sturdy walls. Protection from the equatorial sun is offered in the colonnade, and within the garden the yellow fever trees are raising their canopies and will provide light shade soon enough.
The fundamentals of planning a layout
What goes where and why
Gardens must fulfil their many criteria through being well designed and beautifully executed. I look at the place scrupulously. By the time I leave at the end of the project the owners must feel that they are getting something that reflects them, not me. And, in turn, I must feel that I’m leaving something beautifully considered and exceptionally well built. Often a project contains many elements of design. In some cases it has been appropriate to design a rationale for an entire village, as was the case for one project in Norfolk and another in France, where three villages and five farming communities were brought into the scheme. The principles are the same for a tiny back garden; in fact the imperatives are almost greater, as nothing is ever out of sight. I recently made one that was only 4m (43 feet) square; it has to work hard.
I love doing these little axonometric sketches during the design process. They describe proportions so well. This is, in reality, a vast garden but on plan it looked minuscule due to the size of the parkland. Sketching really helps nail the proportions.
How space is structured plays a huge part in how we feel. Early childhood sensations of fear, alienation and oppression that I felt in the dark red sandstone fire-bombed wreck of 1960s Coventry were just as intense as the joyfulness of playing by the river in the parks of my hometown or roaming the gardens at Hidcote were liberating. I still feel my way into a space now and listen carefully to my gut. It is a little like water divining.
A view across a lily pond back to a big dining terrace captures the lovely changing light in this garden (above). Water is so useful for bringing movement and life into large areas of planting. The opposite view from the terraces (below) shows how the water creates foreground structure in this very flat landscape, breaking up the planting and echoing the cubed topiary – just a simple language of elements, none of which obscures the long view to the lake.
How to start a design? It is good to look at the subject in overview first. Don’t worry about flowers or decorative accessories, as that comes much later on. Initially, the things that matter are the building blocks of the brief, and also all the items the client won’t have thought of. I never let clients design a scheme. I incorporate all their ideas, of course, but then my role is to synthesize them and create a cohesive picture. My clients are intelligent and articulate people and usually very good at something very different. Subjects like drainage rarely crop up in a brief. Nor need they if you have a steady hand on the tiller and can bring the very many mundane subjects into the scheme competently.
Make sure you look out of all the windows on every floor and get a very good understanding from literally the inside out. Phrases that commit one to a hard act, such as ‘blocking the view’, don’t work for me. Imagine you have a soft pencil in your hand as you look at everything and begin to shade out what you’d rather not see, and sharpen up that which you would like to emphasize. This gentler process brings into scrutiny where a view might be weak and unfocused, or a neighbouring building lumpy and heavy. I tend to view all other buildings as part of the landscape. The aim is to reach a balance of building to planting that is equally weighted and visually sensitive, much like the little villages on the rocks in France – a fusion of structure and softness. So in the initial layout we view from without and from within and place structures, walls, buildings, terraces, pools and so on in a coherent pattern that is agreeable from every vantage point. There should be a logical progression through a site and, if well executed, everything falls easily to hand, be it easy access for refuse collection or a grand reveal for the house. Don’t be afraid to change ground levels or make sweeping architectural changes. If you can solidly justify it, then go for it.
Sir Edwin Lutyens was a wise man. He would listen politely to opinions on his designs and then carry on with his plans.
I like to build up the drama and intensity in a design and often think it best to keep the approach to the house quite classical and simple. Position the outbuildings appropriately. Choose really good estate colours for doors and window frames, gates and railings and create a unique identity for the place. Make everything clear and legible. Build up some garden-y excitement around the front door that makes the visitor really want to get in. Gardens are all about the changing tempo of mood and activity, and these need to flow seamlessly, one into another. Once you are through the house, the show can really start.
The extent of building on this Kenyan estate can easily be seen as we fly over – even so soon after finishing, the land is healing up again (above). This is no accident. It took 450 local people a year of work to cultivate, contour and grass up the land to our designs. The sensitivity of our builder, Ben Jackson, meant that the entire native bush was saved, and then we cultivated and planted rough grass and baby shrubs throughout (below). It’s growing in speedily, despite the lack of water.
Protection
The inner sanctum
It is vital to feel secure in a garden. There is a special kind of serenity that can be found, knowing that you are alone, safe and engrossed in whatever activity moves you.
Gardens are unique in providing this. This feeling can be achieved in the design process. I like to structure a garden so that it ends up as a genuinely private refuge, a garden that is properly fortified by surrounding walls or hedges or buildings.
I have always very much liked monastery gardens and have visited lots over the years. They are sublime machines of functional good sense. Generally they are well sited next to a flowing river or brook that allows ample fresh water for pasturing cows, keeping trout and growing orchards with beehives. These activities lie outside the monastery walls – they are more public. Passing through the building you invariably find the inner sanctum – the cloisters, or ‘claustrum’ in Latin, meaning an enclosure. Here the monks could take their contemplative walks, probably after many long hours of gardening. In a garden the same meditative and tranquil condition can be found. There is nothing more engrossing than weeding, and it would be very unnerving to have the near-transcendental levels of concentration broken by an unexpected visitor.
In smaller town gardens, the effect is pretty much already in existence due to the natural enclosure of surrounding buildings, so it is just a matter of blending out unwanted views to amplify the serenity. In the city, I find that traffic noise or passing trains become secondary to the sound of birdsong when I am in that state of peaceful security.
It is enormously seductive to be invited into a private place where few are ever admitted. I love making spaces that have the heady excitement of the harem about them.
A view through the courtyard gardens and the drawing room to the terrace – or, as I prefer to call it, the elephant ha-ha (above). The object of the whole project was to feel secure in the midst of raw nature and enjoy the proximity to it to the full. And, of course, make a significant contribution to conserving the wild animals we have left. Having made a protected garden it was no surprise when birds came and made their nests in the panicum (below). I feel foolishly successful when this sort of thing happens!
The drama of this view for me is the vast yew hedge I planted to make a protective boundary between the wild wood and the topiary lawns. I deliberately made it bulky and irregular so that it looked like it had been there since the 1700s. Apart from the self-sown ash trees on the right, every stitch of green was part of the garden project, even some of the roofs.
You’d never think this was the centre of London and only seconds away from a globally significant sports centre. Yet it is a haven of peace and birdsong, and not another building is visible. It was quite an achievement within such a confined space.
Our definition of a sanctuary has changed. We no longer hammer our fists on the door of a church in pursuit of protection. These days it’s calm, quiet solitude and an escape from the rigours of city life we seek. Gardens have become vital to our sense of self-protection.
This garden design made the best use of the old barn building and its huge doors to make the transition from an inner courtyard garden to the constructed meadows presided over by two ancient walnuts.
This site is enormous, bounded by roads on two sides, a river on a third and a green lane. The business end of the garden is squashed into the top right corner and is even then, in reality, a very large series of gardens.
Routes and views
Pleasurable repetition and far horizons
Once again it is not so much a matter of how much space you have as how it is defined. There are differing speeds of travel in a garden and it is worth making a little map of the animal tracks that will most obviously be used. It is pointless making a meandering path to a compost heap, as anyone staggering along with mountains of detritus just wants to get there fast! Sightlines from the house or special vantage points can be sketched in. Strong axial views generally radiate out from principal windows and address specific aspects of the landscape or special features. Smaller routes meander through shrubberies, woodland or herbaceous planting. I love very relaxed routes through herbaceous plants – it is seductive to feel immersed in planting with no boundaries. Mowing paths and patterns through grass is also a great way of creating soft routes and changing the tempo of a garden.
This straight line route is invaluable for traversing the garden fast and creates the boundary edge (above). Viewed from within the garden, the same route is rendered invisible and all seems rich, intimate and floral within, with poetic reaches of English parkland without (below).
A rose pergola creates a linking route through the gardens to a walnut orchard. I designed the tiny gate and railing as a device to slow the eye.
This bucolic path was created out of a scruffy old boundary hedge left unkempt for years. Strategic thinning, a gravelled surface and lovely woodland floor planting made it into something worth having.
This is the long walk to the tennis court. I used the drum rhythm of a Stevie Wonder track for the sizing and spacing of the cones, so that you can sing it and dance in time up the grassy path.
Sometimes a door is enough to create a dramatic change of tempo. I built the bastion beyond as the grand finale to the garden.
Somehow a propped open gate has always been a lure for me. This one rarely closes and forms part of the structure of the lovely house, hairy with Virginia creeper and yet strongly functional with its compacted gravel softened with planting.
It appeals to me no end to let paths shrink down to their most useful width. This one is actually much wider, but the cobbles have become colonized and we allow the climbing plants to flop over. The seductive glimpse of steps leads one on.
I like to establish a hierarchy of routes and make the most of any exciting views at the same time. Posh routes come first – they are the ones that make visitors feel special as they are guided through the great moments of a garden. They lead one on through breathtaking moments and quiet idylls and are strictly separated from the functional routes. The practical routes allow mundane tasks to be carried out easily and without disturbing the tranquillity of others. I like to put them, if space permits, behind hedges or walls that lead to and from places where work takes place – greenhouses and vegetable plots, for example.
Finding where the good views are takes a bit of practice. Flat sites are very difficult to manage, as the eye has nothing to navigate with and so everything is seen at once. It is very important in these circumstances to make sure there are foreground, middle ground and distant views. Trees are the view-maker’s friend, so do what artists do and make a frame with your hands and see what falls within your frame and set about planting out the rest.
As for how to avoid blemishes or blots on the landscape, such as your neighbour’s horrible garage, just learn to look the other way, make a virtue and strength of alternative angles and before long you’ll never notice it.
A feeling of security enhances the pleasure of a great horizon. I’ve always loved castles and the omnipotent feeling they give of viewing for miles in all directions. Harnessing this feeling is part of my garden-making lexicon.
I dreamed of this view from my first sighting of the property when awful trees obscured it and there was no bastion. Lady Getty and I were both born during total solar eclipses so I knew she would appreciate a 3.5m (12 feet) drop with no safety rail. She wrote the waiver and we enjoyed the purity of the result. We fed the wild red kites that she helped reintroduce here, as they swooped down on their great wings to take the carrion we held out.
Structures
Anchorage in a sea of green
Greenery, however beautifully designed and harmonized, can run the danger of being visually indistinct. In photographing gardens, it becomes obvious very quickly that without some kind of architecture or structure in the frame it is extremely difficult to give any sense of focus to planting. Returning again to the vision of the French hilltop village seamlessly welded into the landscape, it is easy to see why gardens need structures. Architectural elements are important to give depth to a scheme. To inherit a good cluster of roofs in an interesting composition is the ideal. If they aren’t there, then they need inventing. Sometimes it can be as simple as reusing found objects. During one restoration we unearthed bits of steeple that had fallen from the church next door. I used one in a planting scheme and it instantly transformed a huge herbaceous border into something with an intriguing focal point. I also found a bit of old mullion window and a bell, and we remade these to sit on top of a newly built wall. This had the double virtue of aging down the newness of the garden and adding a little quirk to the views. At Manor Farm the problem faced was the lack of a distinct boundary between the house and the hill on which it stood. I stared at it for ages and then felt the only thing was to create a magnificent bastion wall with an ‘infinity lawn’ (see here ). This anchored the house and garden and made the wonderful natural landscape even more focused and enchanting. Also, the spaces that existed between the existing buildings were too big. It wasn’t feeling right either on plan or in person. I realized we had lost some farm buildings over time and that I needed another small roof back to balance the proportions of the garden rooms. I invented a little outdoor room and called it the Piggery. It feels right in the space and no one ever questions that it wasn’t once a pigsty!
Oast houses, once used for drying hops for brewing, are common in this part of England. By the time I’d finished wilding up the garden, this one rose turret-like above the surrounding woodland and made a useful structural contribution (above). This is a little detail of the roof of the shed built by the oast house (below). Smothered in lichen, it sets off the Rosa ‘Rambling Rector’ to perfection.
Tremendous natural boulder outcrops anchored one good city garden I made in New York. A fine 1920s house, perched on top of the boulders, and handsome mature oaks planted on the roadsides, framed the entire ensemble. The charm of the area is the lack of boundaries between the houses – instead of fences the houses all just seem to grow from the rocky hillside, and the woodland seems to naturalize the architecture, which, in turn, focuses the gardens (see here ).
Originally, the holly tree seen at the right was in the garden but I sacrificed a chunk of garden and returned it to the field. I wanted to see sheep sleeping at the foot of the bastion and sheltering under the tree. That was part of the purpose of making such a strong statement with the bastion: sharp division.
I enjoy sharp lines. The structural benefit of these limes can be read from all over the gardens, and here in the walled garden they are quite pure and simple against the flint.
How generous and how confident to have built a suburb without walls and divisions and simply let the flow of underlying rock and the forest dictate the organization of the space.
This New York house is built on a promontory of rock. Sketching it out (see here ) made me understand how amorphous this garden needed to be and that requires a skilled and sensitive landscaper who ‘gets’ it. The garden is nested into existing woodland over rock outcrops with no boundaries. The plants do all the work. I had a great time shoehorning them into crevices and making little secret dells in which one can dine al fresco.
Walls and boundaries
Containment and division
Gardens are just so much better when cleverly divided. The hide and seek of not knowing what happens next makes the experience playful and intriguing. Partitions can be used very effectively as methods of seduction. I have a door to nowhere in my London garden. I put it in the centre of the newly built wall at the end of the modest plot. The garden has the most tremendous views out onto natural woodland that is unprecedented luxury in the centre of a huge city. It amused me that I could make use of the classical visual play of extending my views and sense of ownership with a simple wooden gate. Almost without fail I’m asked what lies beyond the door. Boundaries also camouflage, and this same wall that helps so much with the sense of space and drama also helps disguise a weedy section of railway track. The wall is made of London brick and isn’t particularly tall – just the right height to see over the top. If you can see over a wall, it isn’t oppressive.
Choosing the height of a boundary is a language, and first it is necessary to know what you want to say. In the city I often like to be saying, ‘My garden is much bigger than you think!’ Layering the boundary can have the effect of increasing the mystery and exaggerating the space. A Parisian friend worked with Alexandre Chemetoff on her small but historically significant garden. The house was built by Le Corbusier’s teacher. Chemetoff made the garden remarkable by building perforated, pale brick screen walls within the boundary and then planting behind them. The effect is magical – no longer does the space feel small but rich and mysterious. Playing with scale like this is essential in gardens if they are to have any visceral impact.
Large gardens certainly need divisions in order to give them intimacy. These walls or high hedges don’t necessarily need to fashion an entire room. Sometimes they simply form a single linear screen – something that creates a full stop, allows for decoration with climbing plants, and frames the trees behind it, perhaps. I will use hedging, masonry walls in many different styles or trained trees as partitions. Never be scared of scale. Big things work in both big and small spaces, so be adventurous and have some fun.
The little ‘Piggery’ I built prevented the mid-air collision of the two sets of box-headed limes. It would have been claustrophobic, I think, and this way there’s the cheeky glimpse of the far horizon with its forest of pines.
Here is the infamous door to nowhere in my garden in London. I gladly sacrificed 60cm (2 feet) of land for the space behind it. Boundaries should go where you need them.
I made this fence of hazel wands and clay using a traditional pattern from Lesotho. I liked the juxtaposition with the razor-sharp, water-cut stone of the flower bed border.
In a profusion of rampant wild planting the only boundary is a rickety gate made from sweet chestnut. It was inspired by rough animal fencing seen in Spain and by the locally indigenous chestnut palisade fencing.
The rear wall of the pool house was treated as an interpretation of the main façade, and creates a fractal arrangement of elements within it. It is a playful boundary and screens part of the boundary to the village that is now planted with orchard trees
The huge tree fern, Dicksonia antarctica , performs the vital role of allowing the necessary sharp corner of the garden boundary to be softened and diffused. The terrace needs to be strongly defined, and the planting prevents the overall effect being harsh.
The softly muted flowers before it mellow the hint of brick and flint wall.
Seen in the foreground is the oldest surviving wall in this very ancient garden – the house is mentioned in the Domesday Book. It gave rise to a garden of walls and partitions, many restored, and an equal number newly built in soft Cotswold stone.
Green structure
Nature in the frame
A great deal of the structure of a garden is architectural: walls, retaining walls, paths and paving. I use trees, hedges and topiary as the second layer of building. They are my green architecture. My gardens look very structural on plan yet in reality they seem surprisingly soft and gentle. Gardens must stay beyond the whims of fashion. I have absolutely no problem with using elements that have been around in gardens since the dawn of time. We humans have the care of plants deeply ingrained in us, whether we like it or not. Not that long ago, it would have been an imperative in our chances of survival. I find that, without wishing to make blanket statements, if you hand anyone on earth a pair of secateurs, it will awake the latent pruning instinct! So my approach to green architecture is that it must be intelligently placed, it must have its roots in good ground and then it needs a person with clean sharp tools to care for it.
Placing and planting trees requires thought. It also requires a bit of reverence. Trees live from sixty years upwards, and often significantly into hundreds of years. In some ways, private gardens and parks in our increasingly urbanized lives might be their best chance of an undisturbed life. In any event, it is important to give due consideration to the species, soil, ultimate size and purpose. If planting parkland, choose an avenue species that is appropriate in scale. I use a lot of walnut, Juglans regia , for avenues, as they don’t get too enormous and are very beautiful and productive trees. The native English lime, Tilia cordata , is another favourite. Consider the romance they will give in the future and choose accordingly. Tilia cordata is a very mercurial tree and every one, unless you choose a clone, is prone to grow into an unpredictable shape. I love that about it. Imagine in eighty years, when we are all long dead, the wonderfully crooked romance of a drive with pale green light filtering through the summer leaves.
The number of notes that exist for us to write our tunes with are pretty much set – the rest is in the hand of the composer
Hedges are another favourite. I plant mile upon mile of hedges. For formal structure I’ll use English yew, beech or hornbeam. They are the noblemen of hedging and suit most soils and circumstances. If the ground is complicated by poor soil, or is very wet then, of course, one looks elsewhere. The plant must suit the physical circumstances. That is a golden rule. I love hedges for their seasonal value, their sound-buffering qualities and their positive effect for birds. Poor birds. They have so few undisturbed places left to live and a good solid hedge is like a premium condominium.
A loose sketch is usefully descriptive (above). I had to cover a significant distance with a route and thought a graphic hedging treatment would be interesting. The strict lines of high hornbeam hedge are not just graphic but also work as a windbreak on this devilishly windy site (below). It is 3m (10 feet) tall and continues to wrap around the tennis court. The topiary sits in long grass that has recently been cut.
Topiary in winter earns its keep, casting strange figures in the ominous chill of the landscape. This time of year reminds me of the winter paintings of Johan Christian Dahl, the great Norwegian landscape painter.
Where would we gardeners be without topiary? I grew up near a remarkable Elizabethan garden, Compton Wynyates, in Warwickshire, now sadly stripped of its topiary. We would sometimes walk there through the woods. The excitement of coming up through the undergrowth to the crown of the hill was met with the most amazing display of topiary on the front lawns. I don’t think I’ve recovered yet, as I still love to plant topiary lawns. I use topiary wherever it seems justified. It anchors views, creates spaces and adds humanity to a garden. It feels like people, old friends. I’m planning a new topiary garden for myself and it promises to be unusual.
Taxus baccata , the English yew, is a tree of great antiquity and can live to at least 4,000 years. It deserves our respect.
This little garden is the last in a sequence of eighteen walled gardens within a whole. It is a small enclosure that would have been a pigpen or a cow byre. It needed something structural so I chose pig topiary. A rare moment of humour in the serious business of gardening.
This garden is often described as very floral. The truth is somewhat more complex, as can be seen here, with many layers of structural planting holding in quite narrow beds of voluminous prettiness.
In order to appreciate the stunning views, this garden needed to be held tightly to the foreground. I planted a fluffy native hedge on the boundary to tie in to the woodland opposite, then punctuated the rose garden with cones of yew. All green, all soft. The romance is in the lavishly unpopulated countryside.
Water
The magic ingredient
In the Loire Valley in France, my favourite chateau, Chenonceau, was built in 1547 as a place of aristocratic serenity. We went when I was about five or six. Nothing I’d ever seen in England came anywhere close to this staggeringly beautiful chateau and minutely managed landscape garden. Nowhere is a house and landscape more ingeniously created and fortified than here. The great flat gardens – the very antithesis of subtle English gardens – lay as ornamented plateaux before the glistening white chateau with its silky grey slate turrets.
Across a slender bridge the chateau sits astride the smoothly flowing river. I had never seen a building treated as a bridge, its beauty amplified by its own narcissistic reflection in the slow-moving water. Looking at the chateau these days, with everything drawn in CAD and modelled in 3D software, one is hard-pressed to conceive of something so sublimely precise being made by hand from pale blocks of limestone nearly 500 years ago. I wonder what the drawings looked like? Or even if there were any. I marvelled at the stanchions – how could such a huge building be able to stand in water? I spent a lot of time in rivers, and the bottom of ours at home was treacherously squelchy mud, many feet deep. Here it seemed that the feet of the building were secure in their aquatic depths. My first foray into structural engineering ensued, as I couldn’t sleep until I’d found an answer. How was the water held back from the river to enable building? How could people work in these conditions? I knew that one isn’t supposed to build a house on shifting sands either literally or metaphorically. Stability for the building was as important as the roots of an oak tree, and that tangible stability transmitted itself as a feeling of confidence to me standing on it and staring down into the river. Structure. Everything is made confident by structure. This beautiful castle taught me a great lesson.
As philosopher Lao Tzu is reputed to have said, nothing is softer or more flexible than water, and nothing can resist it.
Water is the very stuff of life. In the old days we would have made provision for finding, collecting and storing it close to our homes. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the great English landscape architect, undertook water management on large estates and elevated this singular skill in water engineering to the level of an art form. Almost as a by-product of the prodigious land-moving required in creating lakes and canals, he sculpted fashionable landscapes for the great and the good. I love the anecdote that he even found time, when called upon, to fix the drains in Green Park, London.
These are the lead spouts I created for myself at home in my moat. The house has a history of old lead pipes springing leaks and I like the idea of commemorating them.
There is something magical about crossing water, and in Africa where water is so scarce it is a luxury. The stepping-stones lead to a terrace cooled by the pool.
Swimming pools are so versatile and this one is in a very natural garden, so I planted hedges of raspberries for snacking on and let the grass grow long and wispy.
As any landscaper worth their salt knows, a prodigious quantity of water is needed to make a good landscape. If the opportunity presents itself, I like to start with a river or a stream. Nothing betters natural water flowing through a garden, and by gently opening up the banks and moderating the light levels, nature will create all the beauty for you. Next to this comes the building of lakes or large ponds. A house in the country must have water. Water anchors the eye. Water brings light and reflections. Water hosts life. I was once told that a newly made lake left completely unplanted would be fully colonized with plants, animals, birds, amphibians and bugs within a year. That is magnetism in action.
In Kenya we managed water from the outset of the project. We repaired a vast dam so that the biennial rains could fill it. A borehole was dug but gave very minerally water – too strong for plants, as the minerals burn their leaves. I put some small water troughs with water lilies in them through the central courtyard garden and also a more formal canal of water. Water is so precious here that it becomes extraordinarily magnetic. No sooner had the bowser filled the troughs with fresh water from the dam than we were dive-bombed by swirling house martins. They began nest-building in the courtyard colonnade the same afternoon. Swiftly on their tail feathers came the gigantic neon dragonflies, then bees, then butterflies. How do they know to come? When we dug and filled the waterhole down in the lugga, the guys had to run like crazy to higher ground, as out of nowhere came the heavy thunder of buffalo feet. Buffalo are the scariest of the wild animals that roam the high country of the Rift, and there is no stopping them in pursuit of their aims! The water is mesmeric and they all come immediately. It must carry a very strong scent that we blunt-nosed humans can hardly discern.
Before we could do anything in Kenya we needed to make sure there would be water, so we fixed the dam. A very long wait ensued, as rainy seasons produced nothing. Then, suddenly, it was full. I find this little image very moving. Water is so precious.
This old farrier’s pond was perfectly circular on old maps, so I re-created it the same way (above). This is amplified in winter and accentuated by the knobbly fists of the willow pollards. In summer the pond is brimming with life (below). It has ducks, newts and frogs as regulars. Dragonflies of huge size breed there and I’ve seen slow worms swim across. In summer it is a mirror for the sky, and in winter it is graphically returned to its original form.
I can’t make a garden without water. It brings the seasons in, and is often a magnet for wildlife.
Before I started there were no focal points and no structure in the estate. The gift of the place is the magnificent, if slightly battered, parkland trees – the cedar, limes, oaks and beech. After some remedial work to stabilize the cedar it became the encircling arm and background character to the new garden.
Even in very loose planting there needs to be some backbone strength. Tucked into the summer madness surrounding the house are sun-loving evergreens such as cistus, box and cryptomeria.
The structure of colour compatibility is used so that the foreground herbaceous planting has plenty of green to anchor it into the wider estate, with its predominantly green hues. The planting is muted with flashes of crimson and orange to spark it here and there.
The structuring continues in the big beds shown here. I admire huge perennial borders yet I’m a shrub-layering type, as I need the winter structure rising to the mid-height. The backdrop of topiary cubes gives weight and depth, and frequent stands of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ support the more fleeting floral elements.
This area of the garden was generated by the existing clump of Crinum x powellii tucked into the corner of the Georgian conservatory. I’d never seen it so big and healthy! So the garden was then structured as a semi-exotic planting through gravel. It's relaxed, easy to weed and stays warm, so the plants love it.
I like a swimming pool to feel part of a garden, so this one is embedded into huge plant beds at one end and has a pergola and outdoor kitchen at the other. The sandstone is warm and inviting underfoot.
The estate is huge. It is also flat. Flat land is challenging to design, as everything is visible in one go. It becomes hard to hide things that need hiding, and creating focal points is necessary to hold the eye. This estate was full of potential, with some ancient parkland trees and a brown trout river. It was enjoyable bringing these elements back into prominence and working out where to put everything else to make it work smoothly.
I have a golden rule that wherever possible we don’t take spoil off site but reuse it. In this instance the restructuring of the estate involved reusing mountains of spoil, especially from the digging of the swimming pool. This allowed me to introduce gentle contours over the landscape and also to hide the newly designed gardener’s compound and boiler houses behind pretty hillocks covered with trees. This protected the views from the house. The new drive passes seamlessly through parkland devoid of eyesores, and the house and new pool garden have wonderful vistas in all directions.
The most important thing in structuring an estate is remembering that the gardens that are used every day must be close to the house. I always like to put the fun things near at hand, so using them becomes intuitive and easy. This is a social house and there are lots of friends and family around, so plenty of cooking goes on outside, and the pool gets used all year round. I chose to use it as an ornamental part of the garden. I suggested that we place the pool house facing back to the main house and utilize the pool as a reflecting pool. The architects and I are old friends and our collaborations are really enjoyable. We reached easy agreements about most things, which always ends up in a better outcome.
Swimming pools can become very attractive in a garden, and in this one I wanted the swimmer to experience the garden. Two sides of the pool are set within huge beds of perennials segmented by smooth stone paths. I had visions of the children running through these paths, playing hide-and-seek, wet from their swimming. On another side of the pool is a lawn for sunbathing and picnics, and at the shallow end is the terrace with the pool house and outdoor kitchen.
The main house is completely wrapped in sumptuous planting emerging through gravel. I created a huge terrace off the kitchen that sits slightly elevated above the main gardens, with commanding views out over the gardens and parkland towards the new lake. Enveloped in soft planting, this is a lovely place to spend Sunday afternoons and to appreciate the beauty of the landscape spread out on all sides.