Colourful garden in West Yorkshire

I thought I’d walk you through one of my favourite garden design projects here in West Yorkshire. The owners are amazing people who wanted a colourful wildlife friendly plot and to only reuse existing materials on site. It’s a wraparound garden with an ornamental terrace to the front of the house and a heavily sloped meadow bank to the rear.

Starting with a blank canvas it’s been an incredible transformation. The garden is directly next to a moor, meaning it’s at a high elevation, very wet in winter yet can be extremely dry in summer and is exposed to blasting wind and sun year round.

Before

Since moving to Yorkshire many of my design projects I’ve been commissioned for have been to remove paving and restore areas for wildlife with plant communities. When the owners moved into their new home, the garden terrace had been completely covered in quite a dramatic quantity of paving and gravel. The owners wanted to remove almost all of it (rehoming it) but we decided to keep the oddly shaped black brick path and the step into the house.

I wouldn’t have designed this exact shape of path - the kink is too severe - but felt I could certainly work with it. There wasn’t any point ripping up the concrete sub base only to relay it slightly differently when the plants could make sense of it.

We also kept some of the stone sculptures and pieces of wall from a secondary unnecessary gate that cut the space in half.

As with many gardens I design in Yorkshire, it has incredible views that needed framing and very steep slopes. We decided to remove the gate that divided the paved and gravel areas to make the garden feel as one.

The above awkward corner is one with more shade allowing for a different mix of plants in this space and beyond, the meadow slope I will explain below.

Now

I visited in July, two years after planting and was blown away at how the terrace has developed. The garden was prepped, planted and then cared for by the owners, who really get stuck in, as well as a professional gardener. I always recommend working with a professional gardener for a garden of this size, which is just under one acre. Gardens can be a lot of work even when the planting is low maintenance, it’s well worth having a knowledgeable plantsperson who can help at points through the year.