Don’t you just love opening the door & stepping into your garden? Yes, me too. We are finally in the first stages of designing our dream garden. We’ve been in our house for a year now & all the time we’ve been having conversations about the garden.
We’ve always enjoyed watching garden makeover & design programs, making mental notes of likes & dislikes. Luckily mine & James’ tastes align most of the time, so it made it pretty easy to agree on things. This might come as a surprise, but James is taking the lead on our dream garden design & I’m just assisting (and writing about it).
Ok, let’s jump into our design.
Our Must Haves
- Decked area – as it tends to rain a fair bit in England, especially in winter, our garden transforms into a tiny ocean. While having 2 dogs is marvellous in other aspects- having 8 paws running in & out of garden & brining all the mud in- not so much.
- Built in seating – that will flow nicely together with our decking.
- Different ground textures – to add more interesting parts to the garden & also cut down of the amount of grass (due to dogs)
- Greenhouse – I’ve wanted one for a while now & we have the perfect spot for it now.
- Cherry blossom tree – since our trip to Washing DC 4 years ago, we’ve fallen in love with these.
- Water feature – we absolutely loved the idea of having a water feature of some kind, this is still not finalised.
- Living wall – the design of this is still up in the air, but I absolutely love the look of one.
Now that you know what our priorities were, let me show you some of the visuals. James spent a lot of time designing the garden & calculating materials.
You can see in the right corner our lean-to greenhouse & overall layout of the garden 
In real life we have double seater hanging chair. And you can see the built in seating area. (table is tbc) 
Planters & water feature will be the second phase of the garden design. 
Birds eye view of the garden design 
View from the back of the garden looking towards the house.
Breakdown
As you can see we’ve broken the garden into 4 areas:
- Seating – fully built in seats (L-shaped) with raised flower beds behind, filled with lavender. Seats will be covered with seat cushions, to make it comfortable. We will also have a pergola built over it, to give it shade & over time climbing plants will cover it nicely. As the dining table will be store bought, we didn’t add it in.
- Behind the seating area, top right corner we will have our double seater hanging chair, sitting on top of a paving circle. This area will be enclosed with ferns, ornamental grasses & bamboo (in pots).
- Greenhouse – will sit snuggly behind the garage. We had to go with the lean-to design, to make sure we optimised the space. I will be writing up a post later on, when we build it (mid-August), as the lead time is very long for these.
- Living wall & water feature – I am not entirely sure what kind of living/ green wall I want, but I’ve got a few ideas.
As you can see, there is a lot of work to be done. We will be doing all the work ourselves & I am looking forwards to getting stuck into it. Probably the thing I am most excited for is the greenhouse. I can’t wait to make it into my little escape oasis all year round.
Delays
At the time of writing, we will only do the greenhouse & the swingchair this year. Our eldest dog, Cooper, has injured his right knee while playing with our new pup- Shelby. He’ll be needing surgery which costs a pretty penny, so our garden budget will go towards that.
We will be picking this up in the spring next year. What will make it easier to plan & fit in- is that we will be doing all the work ourselves. James will be doing & leading the construction of the decking & built in seating. We cannot wait for the garden to be done & we can enjoy our dinners outside. Or sit in our swing chair in the corner, surrounded by plants while reading a book.
x
A
Love it 😍😍