Country Garden Design in Kent

The Brief

This was as close to a blank canvas as a garden gets – a flat, exposed 1.5 acre field with no structure, no shelter and nothing to build from. Everything you see now was designed from nothing.

The clients had one unusual constraint that shaped the entire scheme: the garden could contain no permanent hard landscaping. No walls, no paving, no built structures. That rules out most of a designer’s usual toolkit, so the structure had to come from planting, levels and hedging instead of from materials.

They wanted structure and order without neatness – a garden that looks composed rather than manicured – and one that largely looks after itself. They were happy to wait for planting to mature, provided it would eventually look the way it was intended.

The Design

I divided the space into distinct areas, each with a job to do.

Deep borders of a mix of shrub-based planting with generous drifts of perennials and grasses give colour from late spring through to autumn, and hold their structure through winter. Circular lawns are cut into the space and are surrounded by floriferous planting, designed to enclose the user rather than to be looked at from a distance.

The kitchen garden takes the geometry of a traditional walled kitchen garden but is planted within raised timber beds to enable better soil incorporation.  The whole kitchen garden is boundaried in clipped Ilex Crenata heding which also divides individual planting ‘rooms’ holding vegetables, cut flowers and soft fruit.

An orchard of apples, pears, plums, apricots, mulberry’s, an almond and cob nuts was planted as young trees, alongside twenty-seven trees that will close in over time to become woodland, including Crataegus (Hawthorn), various Prunus and Sorbus (common Whitebeam). Hedging rectangles of Taxus (Yew) and Carpinus (Hornbeam) interrupt the sightlines so the spaces reveal themselves in stages rather than all at once and compost areas sit where they are practical but also hidden by further hedging blocks.

Throughout, the planting was chosen to feed and shelter wildlife; nectar for pollinators with provision for future bee hives, long meadow grass, hedging for an array of wildlife and log piles left as natural insect habitat.