Here's a quick peak at a new garden I designed which has recently been built in Rochester, Kent. 
The new design for this 13m x 10m (much loved) family garden followed in the old footprint in terms of the patio,  pond and lawn area, but was given a lovely new update. Inspired by a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show, the clients wanted to incorporate some textured walling, a new pond and to maximise the space an additional decked terrace was created to catch the evening sun.

The clients also had some lovely well-established shrubs and trees which they wanted to keep so the new planting scheme was designed to compliment - with a soft mix of grasses and perennials to create a succession of planting for year-round interest. 

This garden was built and planted by the talented Sam at Beetlestone's Garden Maintenance.

To see more images of this garden follow my link to Gardens Page - New Garden in Rochester
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Today I paid a visit to a front garden I designed last summer - transforming a square patch of lawn into a swirling mix of grasses and perennials. It's a brave move for a client to replace an existing lawn with something more adventurous, but I am lucky that she is a keen gardener and so we went for it!

One year on and  all the watering, weeding, mulching, dead-heading, staking and feeding... and sweeping... has paid off and the garden is bursting with joy and humming with insects. There's still space for parking the car, but it proves front gardens don't have to be square and green.

There are some formal elements, such as evergreen shrubs, low clipped hedges and simple linear geometry of the hard landscaping to see it through the winter months and give a sense of arrival to the front door.

The key bit of maintenance today was the Stipa tenuissima grass which had flopped under the weight of its seedheads. A bit of comb through its 'pony tails' with my fingers and it was soon billowing again!

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