This is diametrically opposed to a very traditional British garden, with a lawn and lots of flower bed borders. Part of a garden designers’ job is to challenge homeowners on how they can use their outdoor space to live life to the fullest and enjoy their leisure time wisely.
Our contemporary gardens are designed to be lived in, using available space for seating, dining or cooking areas, surrounded by beautiful naturalistic planting. Here at Warnes McGarr & Co, our ethos is to create outstanding gardens that enhance our clients’ experience by enabling them to use their outdoor space all year round while maximising the garden’s ability to produce food and sustain wildlife.
Despite our poor weather in the UK, homeowners want to spend more time outdoors. We believe this desire to connect with nature and the outdoors stems from our busy, office-based lives. Trends that began in Australia or the West Coast of the US, such as outdoor kitchens and multiple outdoor seating areas, have really begun to gain traction here in our cooler climate.
As lifestyle trends such as the ‘tiny house revolution’ and new minimalist living practices grow, we can see how these trends are being extended into the garden and outdoor spaces too.
We encourage homeowners to think about how to really maximise all of their available space, designing and planting within three dimensions. For example, homeowners should think about how green roofing can increase growing surface areas. We have experimented with growing herbs and vegetables within these structures to great effect over the years. Green walls, in particular, play a huge role in increasing the surface area for growing a variety of food species, while protecting garden architecture from prevailing weather cycles. Of course, our outdoor kitchens and living areas are equipped for the cooler weather with slimline heating panels and covered pergolas. We can also install fireplaces, wood-fired ovens and even televisions and speaker systems.
Edible planting is another trend which we’ve been witnessing for some years now, but we can only see this growing in popularity. To sit alongside outdoor living and cooking areas, we love creating edible planting areas, borders or containers filled with plants that can be snipped and added to a salad or thrown straight on a meal cooking on the wood-fired oven. These work in a contemporary garden because, compared to a more formal vegetable patch, they are very low maintenance.
In terms of planting, naturalistic and textural styles are going to grow and develop in terms of popularity. When designing a planting scheme, I don’t just think about colour and visual aspects, I consider the texture the plants and flowers create when placed together and how that will look. A textural planting scheme can be achieved by mixed, tall, dramatic flowers with native grasses, ferns and succulents for visual appeal.
We have been using cacti and succulents in our outdoor living spaces for some time, which are also a hugely growing trend in the UK for indoor plants. However, we have been experimenting with creating ultra-low-maintenance and drought-tolerant gardens with these desert plants, using gravel to retain moisture. In a walled microclimate this can be a particularly useful tool in our design armoury and, combined with rainwater harvesting technologies, can massively reduce maintenance of a modern landscape while keeping aesthetic appeal.
Currently, we are using porcelain as a landscape material in an extra-large format for that ultra-contemporary look. Casa Ceramica is a fantastic, extremely high-quality supplier of porcelain tiles for outdoor terrace and patio areas. Although porcelain is constructed using cement, which is a carbon-intensive process, the result is a highly durable product which lasts forever – when installed correctly – and who can argue with the sustainability credentials of a product that should never need replacing? Porcelain doesn’t absorb water either so is less likely to stain and need cleaning.
We are also experimenting with other fantastic materials including Accoya, a sustainable, treated wood product perfect for the outdoors and longer-lasting than the best hardwoods available.
Lastly, another fantastic trend we are seeing is that homeowners are embracing and encouraging biodiversity and wildlife within their gardens. For example, we always install hedgehog passes in our fencing and predict this will become much more popular as homeowners learn how to preserve and encourage their garden’s wildlife. We’re really excited about what 2017 will bring and already have a really busy year planned – including an application for RHS Tatton in July.