YOUR GARDEN MADE PERFECT: TAKE AWAYS FROM THE BBCs LATEST GARDEN DESIGN SHOW
St Albans garden design by Tom Massey for Your Garden Made Perfect – BBC2
The most recent take on the garden design show from the BBC – Your Garden Made Perfect – sees two designers competing in each episode to get their design built. What is clear from the garden transformations in this show is the impact of good design on a space – any space, no matter how challenging. And the most inventive designs, the ones that reimagine the very concept of a garden, are usually the ones that steal the show. We watched with interest as fellow London College of Garden Design graduate Tom Massey transformed a large St Albans garden (episode 3) with a stream that runs the entire length of the plot, a bold feature that defined the design, arguably creating more than a garden – rather, an entire landscape, and one that did not feel contrived or out of place in its surroundings.
YOUR GARDEN MADE PERFECT: MORE THAN A ‘ROOM OUTDOORS’
Garden design should go beyond merely dressing a space – a garden is more than the ‘room outdoors’, it also has a job to do. A garden should help people connect with nature, improve biodiversity, to sequester carbon and provide food, habitat and ‘corridors’ for wildlife. And in return, nature will provide colour, scent, shade where you need it, birdlife, bees and butterflies, plus of course healthier soil. A garden should bring us closer to nature, as well as providing a space to relax and entertain in. This is an important consideration regardless of whether a ‘wildlife area’ is listed on the brief, all gardens have a function to fulfil and can do so without compromising on aesthetics. Helen Elks-Smith’s stunning design for the St Alban’s garden used bug hotel walls to divide the space, and the entire design demonstrated that a positive environmental impact needn’t compromise on beauty.
Littlehampton garden design by Tom Massey for Your Garden Made Perfect – BBC2
GARDENS NEED PLANTS LIKE DESERTS NEED RAIN
No matter how ‘low maintenance’ the brief, a designer shouldn’t skimp on plants and trees. And here’s the thing, more planting doesn’t necessarily mean more maintenance. This was skilfully demonstrated by Tom Massey in his Littlehampton garden (episode 5) – the Mediterranean planting scheme ticked the low maintenance box despite appearing abundant and planted predominantly in containers. By carefully considering the types of plants that will survive without constant watering over the summer – and in this case choosing species that tolerate a ‘lean and mean’ approach (using recycled building spoil in place of nutrient-rich topsoil to keep the growth rate in check) – means those plants won’t become the high maintenance garden giants we see in the classic herbaceous border. They will, to an extent, look after themselves.
Plymouth garden design by Tom Massey for Your Garden Made Perfect – BBC2
A SENSE OF PLACE: YOUR GARDEN MADE PERFECT
The success of a design also hangs on the fact that it references its surroundings, whether through plant choice or the palette of hard materials, or both! Tom Massey’s gardens all have a strong sense of place, they connect with the landscape around them. Inspired by coastal brown field sites, a sense of place was wonderfully captured in the Littlehampton garden (episode 5) – this wasn’t simply a nod to an industrial style or trend, it fitted with the context of the site. In using limestone boulders from the local quarry and Devon slate for the paving in the Plymouth garden (episode 4), there was a significant saving in transport costs and less carbon footprint too.
St Albans garden design by Tom Massey for Your Garden Made Perfect – BBC2
VIRTUAL REALITY AND REAL LIFE BUDGETS
Your Garden Made Perfect uses Virtual Reality technology, previously the reserve of the gaming community, to help clients visualise the designs before committing to choosing one. As designers, we appreciate that there is often a ‘leap of faith’ moment when signing off a design to get it built, as 2D visuals can never replace the feeling of standing in a space. We build digital 3D models as part of our design process (and occasionally a physical one too!), but the technology is still a few steps behind the Virtual Reality we see in Your Garden Made Perfect. At the moment, we can commission a Virtual Reality rendering of our designs from a third party company and within the next decade, this may well become the norm.
The budgets cited in Your Garden Made Perfect are refreshingly realistic too. Constructing gardens properly costs money, regardless of who does the design. Previous garden shows have left viewers with a false impression of build costs: there has been a notable lack of transparency, with landscaping contractors providing seemingly ‘free’ labour and supplying materials at cost price. Helen Elks-Smith candidly explains cost misconceptions in episode 2, reasoning that a square metre of paved surface will cost significantly more than the cost of the slab itself. For instance a terrace paved with a £30/sqm paving slab, once installed (including the labour and materials required to prepare the ground, lay the correct base layers, as well as pave and grout) will cost around £150/sqm, so in this case five times more than the slab itself. Your Garden Made Perfect demonstrates that large sites, those with complicating factors like level changes, and gardens using high quality materials cost a substantial sum of money to build. And the reason people are willing to spend the money? For the couples and families featured so far, the answer is unequivocal: garden design is an investment: in the future as well as in the present, in lifestyle, health and wellbeing, and in their property too.
You can catch up on past episodes of Your Garden Made Perfect on BBC iPlayer HERE (originally aired on BBC2)