Steal These 10 English Garden Ideas For Your Garden

The English country garden look is recognized all over the world, although people often ask what's the difference between that and a cottage garden. Basically a cottage garden has no rules, it's easy grow plants, things you might have found in a thrift shop, it's just a wonderful chaotic muddle, but an English garden has an underlying structure, it has formality to balance out the wildness. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and at the I have interviewed garden experts, head gardeners and garden owners of some of the most beautiful English country gardens, both in England and around the world, and so I've picked out some key elements that are in these gardens so that you can use them in your own garden. So let's start with the classic herbaceous borders. Now the main thing about the herbaceous borders is that they have to be deep and the reason why they have to be deep is because you need a lot of plants in there to get the effect. Tom Brown, head gardener at West Dean says that instead of planting in singles or in threes as you often hear recommended, a classic English herbaceous border needs to be planted in sevens, nines, elevens, thirteens. Obviously if you've got a small garden that's difficult, but the way to do it is not to have two narrow borders but to have one really big border and maybe only a path or a very narrow stretch of lawn. The other thing is that these big clumps of flowers need to be graded. The classic English herbaceous border look is taller at the back, middle sized in the middle, smaller at the front and obviously if these clumps of seven or nine plants they have to be three deep. The other important thing about an English country border is repetition. You've got maybe this big clump of irises in early summer and there'll be another big clump of irises further along the border or perhaps in another matching border and those two great blasts of color will give you your interest in early summer and then when the irises are over something else like dahlias will come out instead. The next thing that an English garden has of course is rooms and that's because they were traditionally large gardens, but even in smaller gardens you can have rooms. By rooms I mean areas that have a different theme or a different kind of planting and for example you might have a formal area close to the house and then a wild area further away. It's important to join up these areas as we'll discover later on in the video. In terms of the formal area close to the house there is something called a parterre. We have what we call a parterre and a parterre is a small formal area which is marked out in geometric patterns by paths, lawn, clipped hedging or borders. There's often something at the center of it such as a pergola or an urn. In inspiring garden ideas from five country gardens video which I'll put in the description below, Jenny has a parterre with an urn in the middle and clipped hedging around and roses. In our house our parterre has got a pergola in the center but we have had a sundial and we have had planting. Classic English garden roses, well a rose arch or a rose walk would be a classic English garden and indeed any sort of pergola or walk with a climbing plant up it such I went to Peter Beale's garden in Norfolk to talk to head rosarian Ian Limmer about creating a rose arch or rose walk and he said there are a few things you need to remember. If you do have a long section of roses like a pergola, be careful when you prune them and make sure you leave gaps in the top so that the sunlight can get through to the leaves and the roses below. He also says that you need to plant a rose on either side of an arch because of course a rose won't grow up and then grow down again and if you are planting a series of rose arches he says it looks best and more inviting to have the same rose on either side at the beginning of the rose walk. Focal points is another big thing that could be sundials, urns, statuary. It gives you a reason to look down the garden not just to enjoy what you're seeing but to enjoy the contrast with the planting around it. If you're trying to do this in a smaller garden the key is not to go small. Paul Bangay, the Australian garden designer, has an amazing 15 acre garden called Stonefields and it's divided into different rooms and they each have different themes so you can take lessons from that for a smaller garden and he says the most important thing is not to go too small so if you've got a or an urn or a plant or anything like that go as big as you can. Another key element is clipped hedges and topiary. Now the thing is about clipped hedges and topiary is that they give you structure during the winter and something to look at and in the summer the clipped hedges are a lovely peaceful green contrast to the riot of color. Hedges specialist Morris Hankinson of Hope's Grove Nurseries says that the main things that you need to think about when you're choosing a hedge is if it's in a shady position you must choose a hedging plant that is fine in shade and if your soil is damp you must choose a hedging plant that's happy in damp soil. I've got a video which I'll put in the description below which is about choosing which hedge is right for your garden. As for topiary it can be very expensive you can grow your own we did with our home oak trees and this lovely holly or you can make a big investment which we did with this topiary spiral but you can create a very good effect by buying simpler cheaper topiary cones and balls and simply arranging them in groupings like the Perry's did in their country garden. One of the things that really makes classic English garden style is the quirkiness the ruins the follies the stumperies the collections. These are gardens that are created by individuals or partnerships they're not designed by a professional designer they've often grown up over 30 or 40 or maybe even 300 or 400 years. In this stumpery at Doddington Place Gardens they've created tree roots to make sculptures they've put it in a shaded place they've used shaded woodland planting and the whole thing is magical and it's also very wildlife friendly because decaying wood is a great habitat. You could do the same in your own garden by creating a mini stumpery the way Posy Gentles did in her front garden with just a few little stumps and I'm trying to do one in my garden but I can't really find any very pretty stumps so not every tree stump you dig up is pretty but actually they're all valuable to wildlife. As for ruins you can make them yourself out of salvaged materials. Eric Cameron at Great Comp was picking loads and loads of flints out of the borders in order to make the soil better for planting and so he decided to create ruins in the garden. He bought seconds from builders yards and salvage yards and he even created a little hill on his flat area of garden which gave him an opportunity to create a bit of a microclimate do some vertical interest in the garden and also give him a view to look at the garden from below and when he created this hill the actual the middle of the hill is made of things like old washing machines and things that he picked up for free. So creating a ruin in your garden could be expensive or you could buy one thing from an architectural salvage yard as Bill and Linda Rudgard did which is in this old church window. Their garden isn't very large but it does overlook beautiful fields so they created just the semblance of a ruined church with this church window and a few stone pavers. Lakes, ponds and water features. A water element is very traditional English country garden. Houses were originally built where they were so that they were close to a source of water such as a river or lake and even a natural pond. Of course the smaller garden can't have a lake such as Hever Castle's lake which was actually hand dug in the 1920s or these beautiful ponds quite large at Doddington Place Gardens but you can have a source of water and it does give that English garden feel. You could try a raised pond or a container pond or just a small pond at the front of your herbaceous border as Frances Moskowitz has done here and she says that this attracts frogs and other creatures that actually are quite keen to eat the snails and slugs that eat her plants. Now for the lawn. This is the biggest distinction between the English garden and the cottage garden because the cottage garden doesn't usually have a lawn, it's just a mass of plants but the English garden has a sweeping lawn and it's a wonderful contrast to everything else that's going on with the plants and the structure. Many people criticize lawns these days but actually if you're in a temperate climate and you're growing native grasses in a lawn, it's a fantastically good environmental thing. Lawns absorb carbon, they absorb rainfall and their soil has worms microorganisms and fungi that are actually essential for the ecosystem. However in some parts of the world it's too hot to have an English style clipped lawn. It takes a lot of work to keep it going, it's not necessarily offering benefits to wildlife or the environment and that is what people call the green deserts. So whether an English lawn is right for you is very much about where you live and whether you have the right native lawn grasses. If you can have a lawn without giving it too much mowing, without too much fertilizers, without weed killers, it's a huge asset to both the look of your garden and to the environment. We never use weed killers, we never use fertilizers and we mow the lawn about once every two or three weeks when it's growing and it's not a perfect lawn but it's certainly good enough for us and the birds and the animals love it. The meadow lawn. In the large classic English garden there will be patches of meadow and now this is coming into smaller gardens too. Our friends Julian and Amanda Mannering have a small square lawn in the middle of their garden and they've kept that as a meadow lawn for about the last 15 years. They do look after it, it's not just a question of letting the grass grow and seeing the wildflowers coming and I will put a video that will help you about that in the description below. But even if you've just got a quiet shady corner where you can let the grass grow a bit longer, that creates the relaxing English garden look and also is helpful to wildlife. One thing the grand gardens do have is vistas. You look down a path and there is a wonderful statue in the or there's a hole cut in a hedge and you can see to the next garden. Vistas are something that are much harder to achieve in a smaller garden but still think about it because what you want to do is to draw the eye around the garden. One of the things that can help either a larger garden or a small garden is to unite all the different areas and themes with color. There's a lot going on in an English garden. The herbaceous borders, the statues, the urns, the vistas, the garden rooms, the paths, the parterres and so on. And obviously you don't want to be choosing a different color for every part of the garden, so it was quite typical in big estates to have one estate color and everything would just be repainted that color and taking that through to a smaller garden is really lovely. If you look at Paul Bangay's garden at Stonefield, you can see that he's painted the doors and parts of fences with lovely blue paint. The blue paint goes on whatever the garden room or the garden theme, far from the house, near to the house, this lovely blue paint carries the whole thing through and that works brilliantly in a smaller garden to make everything feel more calm, more peaceful and more pulled together. And of course seating. Well the thing is about seating, as James Alexander Sinclair said, treat garden furniture like sculpture because you're going to be looking at it a lot more than you're going to be sitting on it. And I have to say I agree with that. Now I know we can't all afford a really lovely teak bench but it is really worth keeping an eye out and choosing garden furniture you love, not some cheap plastic thing because it's only garden furniture. So if you want to know more about choosing garden furniture, don't miss this video coming up next and thank you for watching. Goodbye!