INSPIRATIONAL DESIGN BLANK CANVAS TO DREAM GARDEN


Having worked for years as a designer in the luxury home building market, Sara Edwards decided to combine her design experience with her passion for plants into a garden design business. To launch No.30 Design Studio, she designed and built a show garden at RHS Malvern Spring Festival and was awarded a coveted Gold Medal and ‘Best in Category’. Sara now works with discerning clientele throughout the borders and West Midlands to bring their dream gardens to life.


Last month I spoke about how people are spending more time in their gardens and wanting more from them because of the pandemic. But where do you start when confronted with a blank canvas of a garden. For creative sorts, the hardest part is getting started, artists stare at a blank canvas, writers intimidated by the blank page, waiting for inspiration to strike, suffer writer’s block.


For those who are not green fingered or uninterested in ‘gardening’ the typical garden has been a lawn surrounded on three sides by fencing or hedges, maybe with narrow flowerbeds down each side, a patio area at the rear of the house and possibly a shed at the bottom of the garden with a path leading down to it. On new build sites, the developers will just turf the whole garden. This is about as ‘blank canvas’ as you can get for a garden.


As a garden designer I am problem solver, my clients tell me their needs and wants, and parameters are set by the location, aspect and conditions, existing features to be retained; and my skill comes from finding a solution what works with all the parameters and meets the brief and gives my clients a garden that they could never have imagined.


So how do you turn an uninspiring garden into the garden of your dreams? I am sure most people have an idea of what they want from their garden, whether a place to dine and entertain friends, with a BBQ or outdoor kitchen to show off their culinary skills, maybe a pergola or covered area for when the weather is not so good, or a firepit to sit snuggled around in blankets on chilly autumnal evenings. It is bringing all these ideas together where people get stuck.


The first and most important thing to do is observe and listen. Pay attention to which areas get the morning sun, which the evening sun, what if anything casts shadows, whether nearby properties or trees?


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