Five Things that will Transform your Garden
See article by Lila das Gupta in the Telegraph, 3rd November:
or read the original below
Do you feel as if your garden isn’t quite what you’d hoped but you can’t quite put your finger on what’s not right? You’ve been there too long and can’t see clearly what’s needed anymore?
Or maybe you’ve just come to a new garden and don’t feel quite brave enough to make drastic changes – and you can’t see the wood for the trees?
I will come and look over your garden with you, discover what you want from it and suggest how you can transform it: I promise to suggest five things (at least) that will improve it.
My suggestions will be both practical and aesthetic. I have long experience of gardening with little help and less money, so can offer ways of changing your garden which are inexpensive if you have a small budget.
I charge £140 for an afternoon plus travelling expenses. I can offer references from people who have used this service. (The Telegraph piece suggests you get Charles too, but he's extra - and sorry, I don't do a plan.)
Contact me:
by email: anne@veddw.co.uk
or telephone 01291 650 836
Garden Consultation by Lila das Gupta
Physician, heal thyself! But why is that biblical exhortation is such a difficult thing to do? I can go into other people’s gardens and remedy their problems, but when it comes to my own, I feel powerless to know where to start. The truth is that with gardens, as with so many things in life, an objective opinion can often help you spot solutions that hadn’t occurred to you, or give you ‘permission’ to carry out ideas that had.
A while ago when I trawled the internet, I stumbled on the Veddw House Garden web-site www.veddw.co.uk (Pronounced: Vedoo).
Veddw is a much feted modern garden in Devauden, Momouthshire, run by husband and wife Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes.
Anne offers a design consultation service costing £140, for which she offers you a 5-point plan (called ‘5 Things That Will Transform Your Garden). Since many designers charge thousands of pounds and I already know how to construct a garden, this seemed like a rather good option.
Now that frosts have started killing off all the lush growth in the garden, this is a good time to cut back perennials and take a look at the structure of what you have.
In my case, I have plenty of interesting plants, but I also have to contend with a 10ft high, ugly fence. On the other side the focal point of the garden is next door’s huge tree, which leads your eye to the back of the railway station, a view I don’t necessarily want to fix on.
Anne and Charles arrived in my garden on a crisp, sunny autumn day. They make a good team: Anne takes a cerebral, more exact approach to gardens which Charles builds on with practical ideas.
My first concern was the dominance of the 10ft tall fence with brick pillars. Anne suggested painting the fence on both sides of the garden black. “Not many people dare to do it, but you would be amazed what a difference it makes,” she says. “The garden will instantly look bigger and it shows off all the colours brilliantly”. (Chicken that I am, I will probably go for a very, very dark green made by Farrow and Ball (Studio Green). Use an oil-based paint and dilute it by adding the same amount of white spirits. Cuprinol’s Garden Shades ‘Lavender’ is darker than it looks on the tin and also a good colour).
The next thing was our lawn, which my husband was always sentimentally wedded to, until he got too busy to mow it. In recent times it’s been me that’s lobbied to keep it, on the grounds that it’s a more wildlife-friendly option. Charles advised me to pull the whole thing up and make a path that would go from the house to the end of the garden. Then build a pergola over it. The point of this is to force the eye to a focal point at the end of the garden and not to look across to my neighbour’s.
A wooden pergola would have felt too heavy, so we agreed that a good metal one made by an artisan metalworker would be a better option.
Small gardens often benefit from ‘enclosing’ in some way to heighten the sense of intimacy they already have. I’d always felt that about my own garden but never quite been able to work out how best to achieve this. Anne and Charles suggested a bold idea: to use the height of the 10 ft pillars and get an ironworker to make thick, curved struts that would go down from the pillar to the pergola. These four struts would be mirrored on the other side, rather like giant ribs on a skeleton.
Having suggested I rip up the lawn and increase the amount of planting space, the next plan would be to go to a bed system, where I could organise plants by height, the tallest being furthest from the house. The extra planting space would also mean that I could give over a couple of beds to vegetable production as it’s always good to have something to pick at the back door for times when you can’t make it to the allotment!