Garden design & construction

Our Projects: £10,000 to £20,000: Project 3

British Association of Landscape Industries'

National Award winning garden 2004

BBC SMALL TOWN GARDENS

The Ripon Small Town Garden was created by the Scenic Blue's award winning team in Leeds and can be seen on BBC 2 at 8.00pm on Friday November 28th

The Crescent in Ripon is a beautiful Crescent in the true, original use of the word as a driveway to houses. This circular road has Victorian/Edwardian houses round the outside, with an inner grassed space with outstanding mature trees in the centre.

Because of the curved nature of the Crescent, the front gardens are relatively small, getting narrower from the house to the road. The houses are rightly listed, so the garden had to be something special.

The designer for the project was John Elm, and in his researches for the project, he discovered that the house had strong connections with Lewis Carroll, who was born in Ripon and visited the house often. He therefore used ‘Alice in Wonderland’ as a theme for his design, a formal design with box and topiary and bright coloured planting.

A formal design can be quite difficult in a wedge shaped garden, but John achieved this with squared shapes of reducing size flowing down the gentle slope to the road. The path was formed from four gently sloping panels with a small step between each. The porch of the house has a Victorian tiled floor, so this was echoed in the panels. Unfortunately for those building the garden, the size of the panels was dictated by the size of the garden, while the size of stone was pre-determined in a quarry in India. So each stone tile, including the small red stone tiles, had to be specially cut. Twenty hours later…

The main feature of the garden was three formal beds, with brick surrounds, flanked by six raised planters. To stay in keeping with the house we had to source re-claimed bricks of the older, larger size, and to cap the planters we suggested, and had made at a local quarry, large stone copings with rounded sides which matched the window cills of the house.

Despite the enormous effort which goes into the hard landscaping, it is the planting which rightly gets the most attention in the final result. The needs of a television programme are for an instant mature garden, so all planting, including the box hedge, had to be mature. We were also able to source and install six excellent topiary specimens at a price which kept within the budget.

Some will love, and others will hate the garden – as with every garden. But we think it does have the Scenic Blue touch – quality of execution, attention to detail, adherence to budget, and that something extra – the love of creating beautiful gardens.

Scenic Blue won four awards for domestic gardens in the British Association of Landscape Industries (BALI) awards 2004