Esher Garden Makeover
The Brief
A family in Esher asked me to design a drive and rear garden for them, using the architecture of their pretty white house as a guide. The garden contained a wonderful cabin at the end, but it was only used as a bike shed. There was no path to it, and no-one really visited the end of the garden, despite it being a west facing evening sun trap. The brief included new seating areas and secure storage for bikes and to hide bins. They wanted more parking space for cars as they have teenagers coming up to driving age. The new landscaping needed to tie in with an existing grey patio.
The Design
Using the house as a guide, we decided upon a palette of grey and white landscaping materials, including modern white rendered planting walls, a gabion bench with white stones and a western red cedar seat, and soft grey cobbles both front and rear to tie the scheme together. A planting scheme of purples, whites, blue and silvers was used, including specimen trees and shrubs for height and year round interest. At the rear, the cabin was pulled into the garden by the creation of grey decking around it, creating a seating area for evening meals and gin and tonics. The decking was edged with a white raised planting wall, filled with Stipa and lavenders, which is complemented on the patio with a white rendered BBQ and pizza oven area.
The front was very hot and dry, so mediterranean plants such as cistus, lavenders, geraniums and artemesia were used. The boundary was marked with pleached purple beech trees, underplanted with Yew balls to match the existing shed, and Stipa tenuissima grasses to give movement and dance in the evening sun. We introduced a curve in the planting area to reflect the shape of the plot, and re-used the existing grey gravel to match the new cobbles.
Before
After
