focus on garden design Garden design
in Wiltshire IN THIS ARTICLE ON GARDEN DESIGN, LEADING GARDEN DESIGNER JANE STEWART EXPLAINS HER PLANS FOR A COUNTRY GARDEN
By Jane Stewart
Donhead St Mary is a beautiful village in Wiltshire between Shaftesbury and Salisbury. My clients have a plot of two acres in this village which includes a dilapidated old 1950’s bungalow.
T
hey have received planning permission to replace the current dwelling with a very traditional looking stone farmhouse style home. This will have an oak- framed garden room at one end with views over the incredible grazing land beyond the garden. As the proposed building will be two story, the planners have requested that the house is built at a level 1.2m below the existing floor level. This will create an enormous volume of spoil. The garden has to be designed to accommodate this in order to avoid disposal costs. The whole garden is totally
overgrown with some mature oaks, beach, willow and hazel on the boundary in one corner. Between those and the lawns are scatterings of native trees, cherry, rowan, hawthorn, hornbeam and one
huge semi mature ash. This is all set in a neglected site with meadow grasses and brambles which provides a great opportunity to create a little woodland corner! Planting a native woodland will benefit wildlife immensely. INCREASING HABITAT DIVERSITY The first thing to design is where the clearing or glade is going to be. Creating sunny glades will increase the habitat diversity of a woodland. In this case it will be positioned by the mature beach and oak trees. A fire pit will be created in the clearing with log seats and a swing from one of the existing beach trees. Shrubs such as box and holly are going to be used to frame and provide shelter for the glade and to improve privacy from the neighbours. A path will wind its way through the wood to the glade. This will move around the existing trees, be framed by shrubs and fallen branches and covered in wood chip.
When choosing the trees to fill between the scattered mature species, I will be using early succession and fast growing species such as birch, small leaved lime and rowan. They will create a pleasant, light and airy woodland after a few years. Slow growing species such as oak will take around 50 years to reach maturity but are important to include. They will eventually replace much of the birch in the canopy. I always include sweet chestnut and hazels for the nuts. With most trees, shrubs and ground cover for woodland planting I favour basic native species. For the chestnuts and some of the hazels however I like to choose varieties selected for good nut production. Most trees should be planted at intervals of approximately three metres, but space silver birch more closely. Design in irregular groups made up of trees of the same
32 Garden & Hardware News - Retail Plants & Shrubs
will increase the habitat diversity of a woodland.
“Creating sunny glades ”
species following the landform. In years to come when these trees need more space, they can be felled leaving one to three in the group. Shrubs can be planted closer, between one and two metres from the trees is adequate.
WOODLAND LIFE
It is important not to tidy up the woodland too much by removing all the dead wood and cut branches. Dead wood forms the basis of life for many types of woodland, providing food and shelter for fungi, bacteria and invertebrates like woodlice and wood-boring beetles. These are the foundation of food chains, attracting many birds e.g. woodpeckers and nuthatches, bats and other small mammals. Dead and felled wood can be used in constructive ways within the wood for defining paths, providing dens for children and making habitat piles. The final layer is the ground cover where ivy, woodruff, archangel and wood periwinkle are a suitable choice. This cover can be punctuated with fern, native woodland grasses, foxgloves and spurge, and under-planted with bluebells and snowdrops.
For more information visit
www.janestewartgardendesign.co.uk
Jane Stewart was educated at Edinburgh University, where she followed an Honors degree in Plant Sciences with a postgraduate diploma in horticulture, and a Masters degree in Environmental Management. After working as an environmental consult- ant and then head gardener of a large country estate, Jane decided to follow her passion and trained in garden design. She has been design- ing gardens for 15 years mostly in the South West of England but also in London, Scotland and France.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44