The humble rock, stones, boulders; whatever you want to call them, we are surrounded by these features daily either as natural or constructed features. Be it the pebbles on the beach or a cobblestoned Temple Bar, rocks have an undeniable omnipresence. However, they are perhaps overlooked as a garden feature....
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Designers Urquhart and Hunt’s collaboration with Rewilding Britain (see link https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/support-rewilding/rhs-chelsea-flower-show) at Chelsea 2022 has reiterated the need to incorporate rewilding into garden design. Through an active collaboration between man and nature, we can help to restore nature from our own back gardens (see more about Rewilding Europe here https://rewildingeurope.com/what-is-rewilding-2/)....
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Creating joy with water features What do we think when we think of water? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that we need it to survive. It keeps us alive. One could also take a more metaphorical point of view, that of peace, a cool refreshing dip in...
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Whist this subject has waxed and waned in popularity over the last couple of decades, I like to think that we are all now strongly concerned to ensure that our gardens are as eco-friendly as possible and/or, at least, incorporate some aspects of sustainable or green approaches to design. Since...
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[caption id="attachment_5169" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The grand canal water feature at Ballintubbert[/caption] In the summer, our design studio took a study tour to visit some gardens across the southwest of Ireland. En route to Cork, we stopped to have a look at a fascinating, complex, garden that has recently been reinvigorated near...
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Much of the time, we take our trees and plants for granted, never thinking too deeply about where they are from. I have mentioned the importance of native plants in several previous blogs but in our modern Irish landscape, we see plants from every part of the world. One of the...
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It may sound obvious but colour in the garden can come from both the plants themselves but also the materials that we construct the garden from. The colours that we choose to use in our gardens can have both personal significance related to our experiences, whether obvious or subconscious memories,...
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In Ireland, the spring has been slow to start this year, as we have experienced unseasonably low temperatures throughout March. Now, in early April it finally feels like it is underway: the sap is rising in the trees and the first leaves are breaking bud, daffodils are blooming and temperatures...
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Dealing with Levels in Garden Design In a board or card game, sometimes it can feel like you have been dealt the worst possible hand and yet sometimes starting from a seeming position of disadvantage can actually see the game play into your hands; as it unfolds new opportunities arise that...
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Whilst last week, we looked at some of the graceful floral forerunners of the spring, such as Snowdrop Galanthus nivalis and Winter Aconite Eranthis hyemalis, if we design our gardens carefully there are other specialist plants that occur naturally at other levels and locations, which can provide us with charming...
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