A garden means all things to all people. For me, a garden is about satisfaction – visually interesting, encouraging wildlife, a place to relax , work and get your hands dirty. A place to share with friends and family.
A garden is a very personal space. Part of that personalization is the level of investment that goes into its creation and maintenance.Think of your garden as a balance sheet with incomes and outgoings . All the pleasure you get from a garden adds to the income – cost and time are the major outgoings. Working the garden is a positive, upto a point – beyond the optimum time investment it becomes a chore – a negative. This aspect needs to be considered during the design phase of a garden.
During the design of Andallen I was fortunate in that I had a wonderful sounding board for ideas – CP, the most important person in my life, made sure that my ambition for this garden stayed in line with my capability – future proofing the design by reminding me that at some stage his garden was going to be maintained by an old man!
After months of discussion we ended up with a design with 4 elements. A herbaceous perennial bed, a woodland walk, a ”japanese stylistic” element with all 3 pulled together by a purpose built crevice garden. With the exception of the woodland walk, we had created versions of all these elements before so we were building on our personal experiences, supplementing this with research about gardening in Georgia clay.
At the creation of the high level schematic design we were happy – would we feel the same way when installation started?
AndAllenGarden 