David Hadley walks through a large garden transformation in Bramhall, which included a gin ‘n’ tonic seating area, glasshouse and vegetable beds. The brief with this amazing project was to reinvent a dated and tired suburban garden into one that inspires and facilitates the owner’s new gardening hobby including growing vegetables.
Video Transcript
I’m going to talk you through a fantastic project we did in Bramall about 3 years ago. So this is the garden before we started. The lawn was extremely waterlogged. It was an amazing house, but the back garden really let the side down. So you can see the paving was installed badly many years ago, and just looked like a real mess and didn’t match the house at all.
Plan and Visualisations
So we produced a plan for the garden. We retained a big lawn, but we’ve got lots of drainage and new soil to go in to help that drain properly so you could actually walk across it. Here there is a greenhouse. The client wanted to spend a lot more time in the garden and grow their own vegetables as well as maintaining the garden and enjoying it as it matured.
We’ve got a lot of paving for seating and dining areas, and then a path around the garden in stabilised gravel. We’ve also done detailed drawings including a steel pergola, which is made in core 10 steel, which rusts naturally and creates a really pleasant look. This is the project underway. We were using sawn versuro paving in large format flags.
You can see we’ve built the base for the greenhouse in brickwork. We were installing the garden during covid, so we obviously had to adhere to all the safety regulations. Here you can see the installation of a large tree. Then this is soon after completion – you can see that there are raised vegetable beds here, also made of core 10 steel to match the pergola.
Completed Garden
The planting’s yet to mature. This shows the gravel path running down to a gin and tonic patio at the bottom of the garden. Then you can see that a few years later, the planting has really matured, creating a really pleasant effect with it slightly overhanging the path. This is a great view of the dining area, and in the bottom of the garden you can see the gin and tonic patio there.
For the seating area, we’ve got some lovely clay paving to create a different surface to the main dining area. This is a bespoke corten steel water feature, which creates a lovely noise and drowns out the noises from the gardens either side. It’s a good way of distracting from that.
This shows the wisteria growing up the Corten steel pergola, and the vegetables have started to grow in the vegetable beds. This is the Hartley Botanical Greenhouse which really is a professional job and we’ve got cold frames for bringing on seedlings, etc.
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If you’re thinking about your next project and would like to discuss your design ideas, get in touch with the team at Creative Gardens & Driveways today.
