Walled Garden, Bradford Upon Avon
The Brief
This new home was built within the grounds of an old walled garden and presented a completely blank flat canvas in which to work. The site was approximately 50 square meters in size and surrounded by high stonewalls. I had completed a garden for the same clients some years before and was delighted to be asked to carry out a design for their new home. I was asked to provide a garden that would include areas for further development in years to come and to provide enough space for both adults and children to entertain and play respectively. The client also wanted a new vegetable garden and green house within the scheme and a possible area for a swimming pool in due course.
My design
The garden needed to sit comfortably next to the contemporary house within the confines of what was originally an old wall kitchen garden. The only borrowed view is of the large cedar tree beyond the boundary walls. I needed to create a garden that would soon give the impression that it had been there for some years. The use of natural materials throughout the scheme blend with the surrounding building materials and helps to soften the scheme within the landscape. Larger gardens require large planting beds that help divide and break up the garden into smaller sections that can be explored by way of pathways and avenues. These new pathways and avenues provide focal points and vistas through out the garden and create a journey around it. The vegetable garden and children’s play area was placed further into the garden to allow for a large formal lawn area where the children could also play and was also large enough for croquet and games of badminton etc. A semi-mature avenue of trees runs along the left hand boundary wall in order to lessen its impact. Large swathes of perennial planting run down both sides of the avenue of Cornus Kousa chinensis.
A mixture of hornbeam, ilex crenata and portuguese laurel hedging help divide up the different areas within the scheme and aid privacy within them. A large curved hardwood deck with curved planting bed and hedgerow provides a place to sit in privacy outside these rooms and breaks up the straight lines of the facade.
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