Traditional family garden design for Nottinghamshire country house - designed to be child friendly whilst adding year round colour, Rufford, Notts, UK
This large country house still bore the ‘theme park’ design of the previous owner when I was commissioned to draw up a new garden design in 2007.
The front of this Notts garden was dominated by a giant rockery and water feature that made the front of the house difficult to access, and was a worry to the new owners who had small children and wanted to create a family garden, free of danger.
The awkward shaped short and wide back garden was made to feel very small by a series of timber raised beds and screens and the evergreen planting of skimmia and spotted laurel did not provide any seasonal interest.
The new garden was designed to be a family space, a child-friendly garden to play and learning. With 2 young toddlers and a boisterous puppy, the garden had to be robust and engaging as well as the relaxing and beautiful. It was certainly a challenge fit for a garden designer!
In the front of the house, a clean new garden design repeated the motif of an evergreen holly hedge to enclose the pedestrian approach to the house from the car parking area and garage.
This new cocooned garden room allowed for the creation of a relaxing terrace, surrounded by fragrant evergreen planting and summer flowering roses in a green and white colour palette. This aspect of the garden is low maintenance and looks neat all year round with its formal backbone of hedges and evergreens. Seasonal accents in white provide a real wow factor.
To the back of the house, the garden design was opened up to reveal a much larger family garden! The elegant mature trees in the garden were retained to give the space a sense of history and to retain privacy whilst a new terrace area surrounded by traditional herbaceous borders in plums and purples was created.
A large play area was also created with a wooden play house and climbing frame. Cossetted by child-friendly planting textures of stipa arundinacea, witch hazel, bulbs and colourful winter stems, this playground is not only a large functional and safe space, but also a wide sumptuous planting area with year round colour and seasonal interest right through the year. This planting takes centre stage in the winter with it’s hot oranges and reds lifted by the white splashes of snowdrops and narcissi.
This traditional English country garden design in Notts, UK was constructed and planted in Autumn 2007
