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We decorate the garden with our own hands: photo
How to create a Garden of Eden on a site at no extra cost: tips from the famous English landscape designer Jeff Hamilton.
Jeff Hamilton, an outstanding English landscape designer, has become famous all over the world for his TV shows, books and celebrity clients. In addition, he created a large garden complex in England, where he collected gardens for all occasions and for every taste. Before you is “Village Corner” from the series “Gardens of Eden”.
We decorate the garden with our own hands photo
WHOLE OBJECT
One of the advantages of “Gardens of Eden” Hamilton considered the relative cheapness. To create them, he used economical materials and plants common in England – practical, hardy and also not very expensive.
1. Tile paths. The natural look of the patio area (the one adjacent to the house) is created by using tiles of different shades, shapes and sizes. The colors are extremely natural – from ocher and orange to dark brown. Grass breaks through the gaps between the tiles, of course, deliberately planted by the designer
2. Natural style. The garden imitates a forest glade, which determines the choice of colors: shades of green prevail here with a small amount of bright accents – flowers. Of course, there cannot be any roses in such a garden. Daisies, bells and daisies will look best here.
Despite the name, there are no exotic delights in the garden. But there is a very clear feeling that this is how heavenly bushes should look like. How did the designer achieve this? Mainly with the help of plants. Hamilton actively used vines with rich foliage here, decorating them with elongated hemispherical pergola structures.
3. Rustic picket fence. The English and Russian dacha, of course, are not at all the same thing. Our fences are usually four times higher. But if your site is located in a protected area, you can deviate from this rule. What for? Yes, just low fences have a significant advantage: they visually increase the size of the garden, since it is not limited
4. Sandy paths. Garden paths should look as natural as possible. For filling them, the designer used a mixture of clay, earth, sand and small twigs.
As plants evolved, the designs began to resemble shaggy green wigs more and more. “Caps” are the frame of the garden, the starting point for all other landscape solutions. It was they who determined the appearance of the “undergrowth”. The lower level of the Village Corner is forest glades. There are many plants here, and they are planted deliberately randomly, as if this is happening in a real forest.
5. Lawn. One of the interesting tricks used by the designer in the garden is the combination of “natural” plantings with a traditional English mowed lawn. Without a lawn, the garden would look neglected and much more like a forest clearing. If you prefer the overgrown “grandma’s” garden, replace the English lawn with a Moorish one and never cut
6. Pond. It is desirable that the artificial pond at the summer cottage resembles a small forest lake. This solution is not only beautiful, but also convenient: if you use a waterproofing film for lining the bottom, a large number of plants “on the shore” will help mask the edges of the film. In such a decorative pond, you can plant nymphaean and water lilies. But if you are planning to plant water lilies, know that they do not bloom in the shade, so the pond will need to be arranged in the sunny part of the garden.
Add to ideas collection: pergola
Pergolas are rare in small gardens. Typically, such structures decorate palace parks, where their main purpose is to protect paths from the scorching sun.
Hamilton used pergolas in a very different way. In the Garden of Eden, they replace missing trees, give the space a structure and compensate for the lack of foliage. The basis of each pergola is a metal structure made of repeating arched sections, though not quite ordinary ones – narrow and elongated upwards.
Hornbeams (in our climate, linden trees are usually planted instead) are attached to the frame on one side and repeat its shape.