After spending 12 years designing client’s gardens, I am finally designing my own front garden and driveway and I get to please myself. Now this is a great feeling, but it is also slightly scary. Garden designers find it notoriously difficult to design their own gardens.
Dan Pearson summed it up really well. “Designing my own garden was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. There were too many plants that I wanted to grow, an endless list of possibilities, and far too many ‘stories’ to try to squeeze into one place.”
I guess it is just hard to be dispassionate about your own garden, and to narrow down the possibilities. Will the design have straight lines, circles, organic shapes. Include paving, setts, a wood deck or a pond or pergola? What choice of colour scheme? Hot reds and yellows or cool whites, greens and blues? Will the garden style be Mediterranean, Japanese, contemporary or traditional? You see what I mean?
Also between you and me, I am not only pleasing myself, ‘him outdoors’ has some strong views and discussions have been ongoing for a while. Finally, we distilled our ‘wants’ down into a list or what garden designers call the ‘Client Brief” and the design is based on this. It has been an interesting exercise to be on the other side of the fence and pinning ourselves down.
So keep an eye on the blog for our garden story – and wish us luck…