At the second attempt we made it over to my friend's new garden, and spent a couple of hours arranging lengths of rope and bamboo canes until we had a layout to her liking. We left her with the ropes, assuring her that there was no rush to give them back, and a can of white tennis court marking paint so that once she was quite sure she had a design she liked she could mark it out more permanently. It is impossible to cut beds out of a lawn guided only by the pieces of rope or hosepipe you used to mark them out. I know this having tried to do it. Five minutes after you have started digging, the markers will have got pushed out of position.
The new garden was roughly square, larger than the gardens on many new housing developments but still not very big, and the design needed to incorporate a fairly large wrought iron gazebo which my friend was slightly worried about, but could not leave behind for sentimental reasons. Slotted in behind the garage was another much smaller square, which was rather handy in terms of giving somewhere to put a shed and a compost bin where they would be out of sight from the house. There was one immovable object, a rotary clothes drier which had already been concreted into the ground. The soil from digging the hole was in a plastic flower pot and was sandy, as I thought it would be. Our previous house was only half a mile away along the same hillside, and although soil can vary a great deal in half a mile I had a hunch that in this case it didn't.
When planting up a new garden on a freshly built estate, and especially when the builders have already turfed the entire space, it is very easy to end up digging a border all around the edges and leave your nice new lawn in the middle. When designing a garden in a small space, especially when you previously had a large area, it is very tempting to make the borders small. Resist the obvious. Narrow borders are harder to plant than more generous ones, and putting them around the edges allows you to see the whole garden at once. On the other hand you don't want to go to the opposite extreme of trying to divide your little space into rooms until it feels more like a maze for laboratory rats than a garden. And you should avoid creating zillions of little beds dotted about unless you really enjoy cutting lawn edges.
The gazebo was a challenge. In the middle of the garden it risked looking like a bandstand, while pushed over to the edge it might seem arbitrarily large and simply there for the sake of it (which in a way it was). And we couldn't suggest digging up too much of the lawn the builders had left because my friend needed somewhere for visiting grandchildren to play.
The design the Systems Administrator had come up with on paper, based on my rough sketch, approximate dimensions, and description of the site, was based on two interlocking serpentine curves. A promontory of planting would project from the sunnier side of the garden to the centre, with the gazebo at the end of it, the SA reasoning that this would anchor the gazebo and make it look less as though it had simply been plonked down in the middle. A concave curve of planting would sweep round from the patio, up the shady side of the garden, and along the back, swelling outwards from the back fence towards its end so that there would be room for a damson tree and an Eleagnus that had to be fitted in somewhere. Half of the north facing side wall of the neighbour's garage would be left unplanted until the grandchildren were older so that they could kick a football against it, and when the grandchildren were not visiting a bench could stand there giving my friend somewhere to sit out of the sun.
The pond, also non-negotiable since my friend already had the plastic liner and her sister had given her a water feature, could fit into the end of the convex bed by the patio. The bench could sit on some hard standing within the line of the bed so that the smooth curve of the edge would not be interrupted and she would not have to move the bench when she wanted to mow the lawn. A drain cover that was placed rather obviously in the lawn close to the clothes dryer could be just incorporated into the end of the projecting bed, then it could be hidden by planting. The Systems Administrator suggested adding an extra square of paving to give more space for bins inside the side gate, and we were very careful to eliminate any stupid little corners or odd triangles of grass that would be a pain to mow. My friend asked if she should keep the grass inside the gazebo and we said with one voice No. It would be an utter nightmare to cut, and anyway as the climbers grew up on the gazebo it would be too shaded.
There were an awful lot of existing plants to be accommodated, plants brought from the old, much larger garden which were of sentimental value or which my friend simply liked, and housewarming presents of new plants. I am sure the latter were kindly meant, but I am not sure a plant in a pot is actually the best present for somebody whose garden currently consists of nothing but turf. They will have to look after it for weeks, and more realistically months, until their new garden is ready for planting, and then they will have to work out how to incorporate it into their design. Depending on the plants that could end up too much like a cookery challenge where you have to produce a meal from a collection of random ingredients including a tin of baked beans and a grapefruit. It was lucky I'd seen the stash of pots a month ago when it was easier to tell what some of them were, and so had a rough idea of how the borders might be themed into pink and purple versus yellow and red areas. I realized on the way home that there weren't really enough evergreens, though, and emailed her suggesting that if there was any space left over she could do with some more.
We got as far as you could with the ropes and bamboos, and then stopped for tea and cake, leaving her with the advice to check the design from the upstairs windows. I thought it looked very promising. She could have had professional designers in and paid a few hundred quid and not come up with anything objectively better, apart from having a nice drawn plan instead of some old ropes and a can of DIY spray paint. And they would not have been nearly so obliging about trying to find homes for the existing eclectic collection of plants. But it is up to her. In due course I'll see if it gets built out roughly as suggested, or ends up as something completely different.
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