After over 10 years living in Australia, we came back to live in the UK in 2018. I never really got to grips with gardening in Australia. I tried – I worked quite hard on a couple of gardens we had – but somehow it never felt like gardening as I knew it. When we …
The productive garden I’ve featured the development of the fruit and vegetable garden separately, as the images seem to work better that way. But this part of the garden was developed at the same time as the rest of the garden. I was luckily enough to be able to include a Gabriel Ash greenhouse and …
The mature garden – after only one year On this page you’ll see the garden at its zenith in its first year and then a few more pictures from the following year. As I look back on it now, there are of course lots of things I’d have done differently. But that is the essence …
The pictures on this page show the garden in its first spring and early summer. One thing to note is that I planted this garden up very fully. Normally, there are recommended spacings for plants which allow them room to grow to their mature size. I deliberately did not follow these recommendations with the perennials …
In progress: the garden design and its execution There were several design ideas at work when I was planning this garden layout: I decided to break the main part of the garden up into two circular spaces of lawn, bordered by deep garden beds. The space nearest the house would be the ‘exotic garden’, this …
This urban garden transformation was the first gardening I ever did. The garden was in Tooting in South London and was about 9 metres long by 5 metres wide. Although it contained a fair bit of rubble that I had to dig out, the soil was a surprisingly good loam, except in one corner where …
In this 5 part series, I’ll show you the process of transforming a good sized suburban garden from boring lawnscape to this riot of colour and texture: I’ve called it a garden makeover because it wasn’t a complete rebuild. There was very little hard landscaping involved and what little there was didn’t involve specialist skills, …