A gardening sage I know has for years told me that one of the best times to consider structural changes in the garden is in winter, once summer's go-go girls have removed their makeup and gone to bed, and the bones of the garden have become apparent.
My friend should know; her own lovely garden in Cape Town is open to the public every year and the locals can be a sniffy lot – even, contrary to conventional wisdom, the gardening ones.
I thought of her recently during a lonely week spent in a very large house and accompanying garden in Surrey. The garden belongs to an elderly couple who have long since stopped gardening in any real sense and the result is an empty space - even emptier in winter - of about an acre that's crying out for some input.
I began to dream about what I would do to the garden were it mine. I imagined ripping out the hedge and opening up the garden for wide herbaceous borders, a lavender walk or a rill; or keeping the hedge with its gap and mounting a sculpture or water feature beyond it for use as a focal point. I imagined it in summer with bunting strung between the trees and generous steps linking the upper terrace (lawned, bottom of picture) with the main lawn.
Can't you hear the sound of informal cricket matches played against a backdrop of flower beds filled with wonderful things like peonies, agapanthus, alliums, alstroemaria and eucomis or even clematis and jasmine winding up an arch somewhere?
There are about seven metres on either side of the central lawn that are not pictured. A rudimentary vegetable garden with a couple of fruit trees, wood store, greenhouse and garden shed lies beyond the hedge - you can just make out the boundary at the top of the picture. The stone terrace is about a metre high in front, but thins out on each 'arm'. The garden is in the shadow of the house for much of the afternoon.
What would you do with a garden like this? Have your say in the comments below.
