Established Gardens - Bring Them Back To Life?

Prospective clients with a large established garden often think that bringing in a professional garden designer will involve stripping back what they have and starting afresh. This is not always the case though - as very often a more nuanced approach must be taken with a mature garden.

A new (or long standing) garden owner has two choices when deciding that it is time to make a change. You can sensitively restore your garden to look precisely as it did at some point in the past (possibly when it was built if you have original plans or perhaps to a certain year if you have a photo record to work from). In some cases such a restoration will work well, for example because it is associated with a building of historic significance and a decision has been made to attempt to freeze house and garden at a point in time. Our background in historical research can create a Masterplan to ensure that we would then work to restore different areas in a series of phases.

However it is our belief that simply restoring a garden to how it looked at a point in the past is rarely appropriate. Gardens evolve over time by their very nature - both as plants grow, shade out others, and slowly senesce in their old age - and also within the historical timescale of garden fashions (the great gardens of Britain have always responded to the zeitgeist of the time - for example when renaissance symmetry gave way to the sweeping lawns of the landscape movement of the eighteenth century; or when Victorian formality moved towards either naturalism or cottage gardens; or even the modernist approaches of more recent times). A garden that focusses on creative design, encouraging biodiversity, and a sensitive unity and coherence with its associated house is therefore our preferred approach in most cases.

When starting to look at a well structured but venerable garden it is entirely appropriate to conserve the best of what is already there (in remembrance of its past owners) but also to add a new layer of detail within a specific area, or across the space, to instil a new personality. Such an approach requires a slightly different skill-set from a designer only used to paring back to a blank canvas. It requires sensitivity and an eye for small details (such as local distinctiveness or past creative successes) that can be blended with new features to give a garden a new lease of life. It requires plant knowledge and horticultural skill to assess what should be kept, and what should not (removing or pruning over-grown shrubs, or removing trees that now block the vistas they once framed, or retaining ground covering, and weed suppressing, perennials in the short-term). In addition it lends itself to incremental change across much of the space, but with direct intervention in areas that are being re-designed anew, meaning that gardens may evolve in phases over time rather than all in a single three week window.

The process to reinvigorate an old garden is very similar to that for a complete re-design, but requires more time to be spent analysing what is already there and assessing what should be retained, re-used, or removed. The designer is also taking on the mantle of a head gardener, guiding and advising to allow a garden to achieve its full potential - for this reason fees will often be on an hourly rather than at a set rate. It can be a less expensive route to take overall, although no changes to a much loved garden are simply a cheap option as the quality of finish for the interventions required need to match or exceed those that are already there.

So if you have a garden that feels stuck in the past, whether heavily influenced by outdated garden fashions or simply somewhere that has been left untended and has outgrown itself, please contact us to discuss how we can work with you to change your garden for the better.