Blog

 The Role of a Garden Designer

It is a garden designer’s role to harness both their creative experience and horticultural knowledge to produce tailored, affordable and desirable garden designs. The aim is to make the owner truly love and want to engage with their garden. Understanding an owner’s wishes is critical to achieving this goal, making the consultation phase between the designer and owner/client the most crucial step in the whole design process. The rewards of walking and talking the garden with its owner cannot be underestimated, for it ensures candour and clarity is delivered in the final design.

It can be quite a commitment to at first entrust a designer to develop a design you can love, and then to commission that design. The one place where the design lives with the greatest clarity is in the designer’s mind and getting that vision across is crucial. At Gaian Garden Design I believe in presenting designs in the clearest and most effectual way and as such all Concept and Working Plans are produced using computer imagery to present designs in 2D and 3D - the latter really placing you into the heart of the garden. With these interactive plans you can view the garden from different angles and 'walkthrough’ the garden, enabling you to see the design at different times of day and even in different seasons. It really is the very best way to experience your new garden before actually being able to stand in it… before actually even commissioning it.

Strictly speaking the designer's role is just that, to produce a concept that you would like created in your garden. Depending on the scale of the design, the work of physically creating that concept may require the input of a landscape contractor. At Gaian Garden Design, all planting and small-scale construction works are carried out by myself. However, as and when a design needs more input, reputable landscaping contractors can be proposed. Alternatively, if you already have a contractor that you would like to use, I would be more than happy to work with them to give you the garden you've always imagined.  

The Four Dimensions of Garden Design

Garden design is unique in the wider world of the design disciplines. Far from being passive pieces of work, gardens are living, growing and evolving creations. Gardens change both spatially and temporally, across individual growing seasons and beyond across the years, and different design styles manifest differing degrees of change. Formal, contemporary gardens for example may exhibit minimal transformation over time, with their tight clipped hedges and straight maintained lines. In contrast, a newly planted woodland garden will continually change with maturity each season, as the canopy heightens and shade slowly dominates the underplanting. At the other end of the scale a typical cottage garden will look wildly different throughout a single season, reverting back to its former self at the beginning of the following year before going again. For a designer the art is ‘designing-in’ these spatial and temporal changes to allow the design to be maintained across time. Good design must see itself in the seasons to come with foresight for how it will evolve in time, in the space it has been designed for. Achieving this will allow the garden to ‘grow’ into itself.

Just like a work of art upon a canvass, an aesthetically pleasing garden will possess a sense of balance. Symmetry, (alternatively Asymmetry), Rhythm, Repetition, Scale, Proportion and Perspective are all principles that designers use to create this balance in the three spatial dimensions. Yet it is important that the fourth temporal dimension of time is also considered. The use and combinations of these techniques are unique to every design and must be considered not only within the context of the garden space, but also with the clients wishes, wants and desires. 

Whilst designs may contain grand structural centrepieces or focal points, the plants remain the stars of the garden, and once again balance comes into play. Planting schemes focused solely on summer flowering perennials and shrubs may look great for four months of the year but be rather bereft for the rest of it. Similarly, a garden consisting mainly of trimmed evergreens and slow growing perennials may hold the design over the course of each year, but will provide less seasonal interest in terms of flowers and foliage. Obtaining a sense of balance within a planting scheme is as much about what a plant may look like out of season, as it looks when coming into its own. Embracing all of these elements together is the true art of great garden design.