Town Garden Makeover – Garden Design Ideas

This guide shows you how you can create your dream back garden, even in the smallest of spaces. This city garden is heavily overlooked but with the design tips in this guide, you can create a feeling of privacy.

Most people struggle with creating their own townhouse or terraced house garden as space is often too small to imagine or they try and simply cram in loads of ideas making it look cluttered. Given the lack of space and adjacent properties, my clients often complain that there’s no privacy and that space limits what they can achieve. Many simply pave over them, scatter some plant pots around and stick a shed in the corner. However, there is so much more you can do with a small space not only making it feel much bigger than it is but creating a real wow factor even with just a couple of meters of garden.

Presented by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He’s an RHS Award winning garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester’s Saturday morning garden phone in.

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One method clever method to help make a garden look bigger is to use vertical gardening. Whilst living walls are beautiful they also require careful irrigation methods to keep them watered and fed. This can be expensive and time-consuming. In this garden design, I’ve used a number of large Trachelospurnum jasminoides which are trained over wires on the fences. Over time they will colonise the fence panels, blurring the gardens boundaries. They also have the added benefit of providing more privacy and a softer feel to the garden than fence panels alone.

The planting choice for any garden is key. It must satisfy the overall design aesthetic but also the amount of maintenance and skill of the garden owner. The young couple that the garden belonged to wanted to get more involved in their garden but were still relative newcomers. My planting choices carefully took this into consideration by choosing plant specimens that would provide seasonal interest all year round. You can see the plant list at the bottom of this post.

The couple had family ties to Guernsey and they wanted the planting scheme to reflect this. Now Manchester is not known for its tropical coastal weather so I had my work cut out. With careful research, I chose plants that gave either a similar look or feel to the garden to those coastal plants of Guernsey. Instead of Echiums, I chose Aruncus for height and Kniphofia for a yellow colour blast. Fleabane was chosen as a border filler which is also found in Guernsey along with a colour palette of blues and yellows.

Having a lawn in a garden is a quintessential aspect of British gardening. Ask anyone what one of the things you will find in a garden and I bet lawn is in the top 5 items. When consulting with the clients on this design they had originally wanted to keep some of the lawn. When we discussed the routes through the garden and how they used it we came to the agreement that actually a lawn simply wasn’t suitable for their requirements. It would have just become a walkway and when we discussed it further they didn’t want to mow it or need storage for a mower.

To help soften the transition between the herringbone brick pavers and the raised bed I designed in under seating planting. These shade-loving plants help break up the eye line and act as a soakaway from any rain that falls onto the hard surfaces. It’s essential when designing a garden that water runoff is taken into consideration to help reduce the impact on our sewer systems.

Even in a small garden, you can achieve a real feeling of peace and space. By carefully considering your requirements and then designing around these you can create a really inspiring garden. In this example, the owners can move around the garden depending on the time of day. Whether they are entertaining a group or sitting in quiet contemplation there are different spaces within the garden. By using consistent patterns and groups of plants it helps bring unity to the space.

I’ll be returning to this garden next summer to show an update as to how it’s getting on. What do you think of the design? If you have questions why not leave a comment? Why not Tweet, Facebook or Instagram me with your garden dramas for help and advice.