Susanna Grant is a garden designer and co-director of Care, Not Capital, with the irrepressible John Little (we wrote about him here). With help from “lots of excellent gardeners and ecologists,” they offer a free program that helps to equip trainees with the skills needed for “modern gardening.” Susanna explains: “The main idea is shifting the emphasis and some of the budget away from hard landscaping and infrastructure towards planting, habitat creation—and gardeners.”
This little yard in North London was transformed by Susanna for like-minded clients, who had already successfully campaigned with their Islington neighbors to get the local authorities to install some planters on a sad stretch of sidewalk, which they described as a “disused piece of pavement.” They asked Susanna to make a wildlife garden there; then asked her to help them with their own disused backyard.
Above: A lot of plants and a consistent palette in the hardscaping make a small space seem bigger. “It was a tough brief as the owner wanted interesting plants: lots of planting plus room. I think it shows what you can fit in a space.” Above: “The back garden is tiny, north-facing and quite boxed in,” says Susanna. “It backs onto flats, and rather than try to pretend they weren’t there, I wanted to ensure the view from the house focused the eye on the planting—not up and beyond.” Above: “The client wanted interesting plants,” continues Susanna. “Although my scheme was predominantly quite woodland because of the aspect, there was an existing banana, nandina domestica and acer palmatum which I needed to work around. I added an Abutilon ‘Canary Bird’ right next to the house as it flowers for most of the year and picks up on the vibe of some of the existing plants.”
Is your garden probiotic? In other words, is it teeming with beneficial microbes that vastly outnumber pathogens and keep you healthy? Looking at your landscape from this angle, suggests British ecological gardener and designer Sid Hill, can be an easy way to boost your gut health.
Gardeners tend to have healthier microbiomes than non-gardeners, he says, since handling plants and soil and working outdoors increases our intake of the good guys, which easily enter our systems. Biodiversity in plants boosts the biodiversity of our gut flora. So, removing even just lowly moss or pulling little plants out of cracks reduces this access. Instead, as gardeners we need to make sure our landscapes invite more plant life, and one way to do this is by using materials that have bioreceptivity. It’s simpler than it sounds.
Above: Gardener Sid Hill demonstrates on his YouTube channel that even the ground can be full of beneficial microbes if allowed to support moss and other small plants.
Sid is a gardener who also coaches other gardeners on how to make their spaces more effective in supporting biodiversity. His communication style is persuasive, seen to good effect on his YouTube channel and on Instagram. Growing up, Sid was home-schooled, traveling around Europe with his parents in a campervan. At age 15, he even set up his own gardening business. Sid’s style is thoughtful. He is not looking for instant fame.
Recently, we asked Sid to tell us more about how something as passive as paving or a wall can support biodiversity.
Why is it important to encourage plant life in overlooked places?
Above: Sid Hill lives in Totnes, Devon, historically a part of the ancient rainforest around the western edges of the British Isles. It’s mossy and the trees are covered with lichen. “Use materials that naturally host life on their surfaces.”
“Science is showing that our own biology is closely linked to the health and diversity of plants in the landscape. We are constantly exchanging microbes with the environments around us. When those environments are thriving with plant life, that microbial exchange helps to strengthen our personal microbiome. And diversity is key.”
What materials in a garden are bioreceptive?
Above: Sid made this paving using local slate and stone, and aged wood as seating. In a bucket of water, he broke up moss that he gathered nearby and applied it to the cracks, which soon became green.
“Natural stone, weathered wood, and other organic materials are bioreceptive in the sense that they have the ability to host life. Surface texture is a huge factor in whether something supports life or not (the ingredients for this are shelter, water, and nutrients). That’s why cracks in paving are so successful: those crevices provide shelter from disturbance, hold moisture, and capture organic matter, which offers nutrition for mosses and other plants to establish.”
How do you reduce the impact of paving?
Above: To bind together pathways, Sid uses soilcrete. “It creates a semi-permeable surface which helps soften hard landscaping and bring life back into those built areas.”
“I’m an experimental gardener, always testing ideas and playing with new theories. The idea behind ‘soilcrete’ is to create a mix of roughly 5:1 garden soil to cement instead of using sand. Sand extraction has a huge environmental footprint, although, of course, cement is even more impactful. It’s very easy to use, but natural builders I’ve spoken to have since suggested using lime instead of cement. I haven’t tested that yet, so for me it’s still open for experimentation.”
How can we adjust or improve the hard landscaping we already have?
Above: Resist the impulse to tidy every crack and crevice.
“The key is to make plant growth look intentional. Allow moss to grow in a geometric pattern through paving cracks. Lift a few paving slabs and plant herbs or ornamental grasses in those gaps. Or you can sow wildflowers into the cracks so you end up with a patio that offers bursts of flowers through the season, rather than something that feels neglected or overgrown.”
All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from March.
Anyone who knows British garden designer Jo Thompson’s work will not be surprised by the title of her book, The New Romantic Garden. Over the decades that Thompson has been working as a designer she, has always created atmospheric gardens with a softness and sense of atmosphere and mystery. The 30 gardens that fill the book show how a modern romantic aesthetic can be applied anywhere—from a tiny city garden to the meadows of a country estate. Thompson’s text is delightfully laced with romance, too, with references to fairies, sun goddesses, and Narnia.
Above: Benton irises and roses mingle in this romantic London garden designed by Thompson. Photograph by Jason Ingram.
The “new” in the title reflects the fact that while Thompson’s work may feel nostalgic in some regards (there are many an English rose in this book), it is firmly of-the-moment. A longtime advocate of organic gardening, Thompson designs to support biodiversity and soil health, which are on all gardeners’ minds today. There’s also a looseness and a naturalness that will appeal to fans of the new perennial movement and more naturalistic styles. This book is a fresh perspective on what a “romantic” garden is today.
Photography courtesy of The New Romantic Garden by Jo Thompson (Rizzoli).
1. Start with the story.
Above: Romantic and natural, this garden has a real sense of place and to whom it belongs (writer Justine Picardie and her husband, Philip Astor). The wildflower meadow of mostly native grasses is peppered with a few nonnatives to extend the season of pollen and visual interest. Photograph by Rachel Warne.
For all of her designs, Thompson develops a story for the garden based on her clients’ desires and the place itself. For Thompson this involves “beating the bounds of the place and really getting to grips with the space,” plus trying to understand its history and what might have been there before. But she says, storytelling can be a delicate dance. “You want to avoid creating a pastiche,” she cautions. “If I’m working with a Tudor cottage near Canterbury, I’m not going to create a little Tudor medicinal garden, but there might be elements, like medicinal plants within the planting.” Likewise, Thompson says she trusts her intuition not to take a garden too far from its roots.
Overhauling a townhouse backyard after a renovation is a fairly common assignment for a New York City landscape designer. For one recent project, Julie Farris, the founder of XS Space, was given different a task. “Rather than erase and start anew as most projects do, the goal with this project was to identify the aspects of the previous garden, and to try to magnify those aspects in a more targeted and precise way,” says Farris. The results are a garden that felt deeply personal from Day One.
Farris’s clients had lived in their Brooklyn brownstone for some time before deciding to add an addition to the ground level. The family loved their home and slightly wild yard, where they had built many memories. “It sort of had this secret garden kind of feel,” says Farris. But as is so often the case post-construction, the 20 x 45-foot garden was left in a sorry state in need of a total overhaul.
“They wanted it to feel very natural and organic—sort of revealing what was there rather than inventing a new landscape,” says Farris. The clients requested a stretch of grass for the kids and a little more privacy from the nearby neighbors, but they didn’t have a laundry list of outdoor rooms and functions they wanted to cram into their space. What they wanted was simply a garden.
“It was more about having a quiet sanctuary for their family and some friends and not being a showy kind of garden,” says Farris. The family was also intent on doing it as sustainably as possible. “They wanted native plantings, birds, and butterflies,” says Farris.
The resulting garden is something of a sleight of hand: It honors the spirit of the previous garden, but almost every inch of it was built from scratch. It’s a lesson in the power of restraint and resourcefulness: All the sustainable materials and climate-appropriate plants make this garden feel like it belongs here. Now it’s ready for decades more memories.
Above: Architecture firm Bangia Agostinho Architecture designed the two-story rear extension and deck on the house. The renovation resulted in three different outdoor spaces for Farris to design: The backyard, a new deck, and a little terrace off of the primary bedroom that sits on the roof of the extension. Above: Farris describes designing the garden as a process of “sculpting the edges” to draw the eye outwards. “There’s this negative space, and then you’re just kind of feeling how you want to structure the space in terms of hierarchy and softness,” she says.
As more garden and landscape designers aspire to create sustainable gardens, there’s one significant but often ignored aspect of sustainability they should pay attention to: hardscape materials. For most landscapes, the materials for the decks, patios, paths, and stairs will make up the vast majority of the project’s carbon footprint.
When people think of carbon footprint they often think of actions like driving a combustion engine car and flying on airplanes, but materials also possess an embodied (or upfront) carbon footprint. The “embodied” carbon is not, in fact, embodied in the material. Rather, it is an estimate of the emissions that come from making the material and shipping it. Unfortunately, some of the landscape industry’s favorite materials, including concrete and tropical hardwoods like ipe, have a high embodied carbon. (Taking in all stages of production, concrete is estimated to be responsible for 4 to 8 percent of the world’s CO2.)
“I don’t think clients are aware of the carbon footprint that concrete has,” says Sara Brunelle, co-founder of the landscape design firm Lu — La Studio, based in Cambridge, MA. “People are interested in pollinators and ecological properties, but they’re not really thinking about the material implications of their project.” However, homeowners and designers alike should consider the climate impacts of the materials they choose for their gardens.
We spoke to experts who are designing with low-carbon hardscape materials to ask them for their best advice when it comes to low-carbon hardscapes. Here’s what they said.
Want to lower the carbon footprint of your landscape? Use less hardscape material. It’ll also be better for the environment overall. “Hardscape mostly prevents water from returning to the earth—and water returning to the earth is the first thing that has to happen in order to support or create life,” says David Godshall, co-founder of Terremotto, a landscape architecture studio with offices in northern and southern California. “So, the more hardscape a garden has, the more lifeless it is.” Of course, gardens need paths, patios and the like, but Godshall encourages garden designers to ask themselves what is the minimum amount of hardscape needed to make a space useful and enjoyable to everyone, including people who are differently abled.
The depaving movement has become something of a national sport in the Netherlands, with municipalities competing to see who can remove the most paving from their town each year. Stateside the crusade to replace concrete and asphalt with permeable landscapes (ideally: gardens) may be slower to take hold, but it’s been around for nearly two decades, starting with Depave Portland in Oregon and spreading to communities across the country.
In Somerville, Massachusetts, Depave Somerville organizes “depaving parties” for homeowners. Landscape architect Sara Brunelle, one of the founders Lu La Studio, was selected for one of these volunteer-run events. So, one April day, an asphalt recycling dumpster and a crew of about 10 volunteers showed up to tear up the parking lot behind Brunelle’s house with crowbar and sledge hammers.
Brunelle and her business partner, landscape designer Katie Smith, had dreamed up a new permeable landscape for the yard, but they didn’t anticipate how gratifying the actual depaving would be. “It was truly joyful—like the best of a CrossFit gym and an awesome wild community,” says Brunelle. “It really was electric. Katie and I both have a background in urban gardening. This was an awesome moment of direct action.” It was also a little emotional: It began to rain right after the depaving was complete, and they realized the soil had not felt rain for at least 70 years. “That smell of rain on earth was so poignant,” Smith says. “That’s our responsibility as landscape architects to rehabilitate.”
Brunelle and Smith’s goal was to create a multi-functional, re-wilded garden for all the residents of the multi-family building. They managed to fit in an eating area, a play lawn, a permeable parking space, and a vegetable garden on the 30 feet by 40 feet lot.
Photography by Haley Dando, courtesy of Lu La Studio.
Before
Above: The gray-on-gray view of the parking lot from the street. Above: The yard behind Brunelle’s home was nothing but asphalt and a few conifers.
In this week’s installment of Quick Takes, we present a pair of Brooklyn academics with a flair for garden design, Corwin Green and Damon Arrington, partners in life and business. Corwin teaches communication design and social design at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. Damon teaches landscape design at Cornell, New York Botanic Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
The pair’s four-year-old firm, Verru Design, recently showed up on our radar when we spotted the naturalistic plantings they did for a charming townhouse garden (see Brooklyn Backyard Visit: A Fruitful Collab Between an Architect and Landscape Designers). Their M.O.: “We embed ourselves in communities, research their attributes and ecologies, and then actualize design projects.” The up-and-comers even have a podcast, Tree, Shrub, Flower, launched a few months ago, that spotlights the deep roots they have in their New York community. “Our guests are our friends and collaborators, who happen to have Tony Awards, and Emmys and are incredible creatives, whether it be a landscape expert or a leading actor on Broadway.”
Below, Corwin and Damon share the garden book they both assign to their students, the reason they like to plant when the moon is waxing, and more.
Photography courtesy of Verru Design.
Above: Damon and Corwin in their garden. Their next design? “We are working on a new project in New Canaan, CT, where we will be installing a pool. We’re excited to work on a larger scale—we could never fit a pool in our Brooklyn backyard projects!”
Your first garden memory:
Corwin: My first memory was in my grandma’s backyard in Waynesboro, Georgia. During summer visits, my siblings and I were tasked with picking figs from her trees, which she would use for desserts and preserves, and to instill a work ethic. As a kid, I didn’t like figs or the idea of working during often hot vacations. Even though I still haven’t developed a taste for them, I appreciate learning the practice of fruit picking.
Damon: I grew up on a dairy farm on southwest Virginia. My mother had greenhouses growing up and she kept my crib under the impatiens flats. My first memories of gardening were the smell of vermiculite and the sound of loud fans humming throughout the moisture-filled plastic rooms.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Planting in a Post-Wild World. We recommend it to students in our classes. It is the quintessential book for learning how to create ‘plant communities’. They teach you how to create landscapes that are layered.
Instagram account that inspires you:
Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design @mcldllc. His photos are always top-notch and the gardens he design are very much in our style of wild and lush, appropriately vegetated. He deals a lot with slopes, and we are currently working on a project where the client’s backyard has something like a 20 percent slope, so we’ve been watching how he crafts staircases and retaining walls into the landscapes.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
To steal the words of Laura Fenton from her feature [on our project] in Gardenista last week…”low-key wild.”
Plant the makes you swoon:
Above: A cloud of blooming Calamintha nepeta on a patio lined with teak tiles.
Calamintha nepeta. The compact foliage looks good in containers and along pathways and produces a nice show into fall. It has a consistent presence in perennial gardens and a quiet charm that hits you with amazing aromas.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Bamboo. We’ve had jobs where we had to extract bamboo from containers and the roots are really gnarly. We are literally scared of bamboo.
Favorite go-to plant:
Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina). For unexpected texture, the staghorn sumac has always delighted our clients. And its fall color is absolutely stunning. The seed heads that form are striking in the winter, so its seasonal interest is abundant. Sometimes we choose plants specifically for their winter interest.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Sun conditions. Understanding your garden at both solstices is of crucial importance. In the northeast the summer solstice sun is at a 72-degree angle, the winter solstice is at a staggering 27-degree angle. Mapping this on-site analysis is the most important step in your initial steps. We recently did a pinup at NYBG where the students had to show us the extent of the summer/winter sun in plan view, an integral step for young designers to learn.
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
Above: Verru designed the louvered fence made from locally sourced cedar in this Brooklyn backyard.
Post-renovation, the back yard was filled with debris, including shards of concrete. “Instead of dumping the stuff, we used what was there to create what I call an urban berm,” says Arrington. The berm was built on shards of concrete that were covered with a little landscape fabric, and topped with about two feet of soil, which was brought in for the entire yard. “When we pop elevations into a garden, the shadows change, the way we can see the plants inside changes. If you’re in the hot tub and you’re looking at a berm, it’s like the plants are surrounding you. That sense of privacy is something we wanted to create,” says Arrington.
3. Focus on local materials.
With the naturalistic aesthetic, hot tub, and gravel as their starting points, Arrington and Green leaned into local materials and native plants. Arrington notes that because the rock steps, pea gravel, and cedar are all locally sourced, they are more sustainable—and just feel right. “The colors are already a part of the landscape,” he says.
4. A small garden needs curves.
Sarah Jefferys Architecture Brooklyn Backyard
To create the wild, rambling feeling their clients desired, curves were essential, says Green. Using cedar shakes to edge the beds allowed them to perfect each swooping bed design. “The curves are informal, but still there is an art to creating and finessing them to feel natural, ” says Green, who describes how one of them would look down from the deck while the other placed the edging.
5. Rethink the privacy fence.
Not all fences are created equal. “The first day we stood back there, it was so hot and the air was really stagnant,” says Green of the existing fence. To get better air circulation in the garden, Arrington and Green proposed a louvered design. Crafted from rough cedar, it provides natural texture and will become grayer over time. Because privacy was still a concern, they designed the angle and span between louvers to be on the tighter side; relaxing the span would bring even more air in.
Caption: The bed at the base of the stairs is the sunniest spot in the garden, the amsonia turns golden yellow in fall. Photo courtesy of Verru Design.
6. Select a strong color theme.
A pale blush color theme holds the plant palette together in this garden. Designed to bloom throughout the year, Arrington and Green included Magnolia virginiana, which blooms a a silky white-almost blush color in spring; Geranium Biokovo, which is really light blush on the inside; and ‘Limelight’ hydrangea, which turns a twinge of blush at the end of the season.
We’ve long admired the work of New York architects Messana O’Rorke, so when we inquired about the glass-wall extension and surrounding landscaping of an impressive project in London’s Tufnell Park, we were led to the work of landscape designer Joanne Bernstein. The project is Bernstein’s own property and when she took it on, the garden was an abandoned mess. The 120-foot south-east-facing garden is shaded by the large London Plane trees in the grounds of flats behind as well as a group of established trees within the garden. The challenge was to create a natural progression from the sunlit section to the shaded section towards the rear of the property. Bernstein designed three garden “rooms”, each with a slightly different atmosphere and texture but unified by hardscaping material and a single sensibility towards planting.
With a previous career as an art historian and curator, Bernstein holds an interest in modernism and strong geometry which continue to translate into her garden layouts along with a reduced palette of hardscaping materials. This is all balanced with “exuberant textured planting of both perennials and shrubs with a naturalistic, slightly wild, feel to soften the hard lines of the layout,” she describes. Join us for a walk through Bernstein’s garden.
Above: The garden walls are the original Victorian walls dating back to 1870s when the house was built. Says Bernstein: “The first three to four meters of the walls nearest the house are taller than in the rest of the garden to provide more privacy. The trellising adds more privacy and the climbing plants now cover the walls and trellising both.” The pavers throughout the garden are Sawn York stone from Stone Heritage in Derbyshire. Photograph by Sarah Cuttle for Joanne Bernstein. Above: Messana O’Rorke played a key role designing an extension to support the transformed landscape. They extended a wall with a transparent cube made a glass steel frame and flat roof. The dining area is set on a two-level platform that steps down to a small terrace with pavers leading to a second terrace, defined with transitional planting and then into the back-most, shaded section of the garden. Above: The flat roof of the extension functions as a living roof. Above: Here, two perpendicular glass panels create a seamless corner that slide open creating, as Bernstein explains “a direct and continuous relationship with the garden experienced inside the extension.” Above: The grasses are Miscanthus sinensis “Hermann Müssel”. Yarrow planted here was Achillea “Mondpagode” but only lived a couple years due to the heavy clay soil. It’s since been replaced with Sanguisorba officinalis “Red Thunder.”
All week, we’re republishing some of our favorite Garden Visits that have a personal connection to our writers. No public gardens here, no vast estates, no professionally designed landscapes—just the backyards, vegetable patches, and flower beds that remind our writers of home. This story by Gardenista founder Michelle Slatalla is from 2017.
Whether it’s a new patio or a complete garden overhaul, any landscaping project can quickly outgrow its budget unless you plan ahead. I speak from experience.
In the six years since I moved into my house on a small lot (0.15 acres in downtown Mill Valley, California), I’ve changed nearly every aspect of the outdoor space, from the backyard to the front garden. The upgrades included a new patio, garden beds, paths, a gate, and a privacy hedge. Every step of the way, there were decisions to make on where to splurge and where to save.
As with most budgets, mine required more saving than splurging. Here are the top 10 ways I saved money on landscape design without cutting corners.
Photography by Matthew Williams for Gardenista.
1. Don’t toss; transform.
Above: My backyard gate is a repurposed vintage iron trellis, which we discovered leaning against the facade soon after we moved to the house and began to liberate the garden from years of overgrowth.
“Don’t toss; transform” is a lesson I learned from my friend Jean Victor, who wrote the chapter on Expert Advice: Garden Design in our Gardenista book: “Avoid the temptation to rip out and discard everything in your existing landscape,” Jean recommends. “Repurpose bricks from a planter for a new pathway; use old fence pickets to make a gate; dig up hardy perennials and move them to a new bed.”
2. Embrace the slippery slope.
Above: Rather than trying to change the grade of my sloping front garden, I planted perennials and grasses that would accentuate the lay of the land.
Too often pathway gaps are neglected and become a home for weeds. But where some may see awkward spaces between stepping stones, I see potential. Plants between pavers can soften hard lines, adding a lush, living element to a design.
It’s relatively simple to fill the cracks between pavers with creeping plants that will stay low, won’t mind being squashed a bit, and may even be fragrant. Ground cover can triumph over weeds, too. Read on for everything you need to know:
How do you choose a ground cover to grow between pavers?
Above: White blooming Isotoma grows in a pathway, framing pavers with texture and color in a California garden designed by Elizabeth Everdell. Photograph courtesy of Everdell Garden Design.
As a landscaper, I routinely feel like a boss on the plant employee search, hunting for highly qualified plant candidates for the position of ground cover. Listed below is my required criteria:
Height: A plant should be low growing, raging in height from basically flat to 2 inches tall. Anything taller could be trip pedestrians and make the pavers look as if they are sinking, even drowning. Rule of thumb: the larger the scale of the pavers, the taller the filler plants can be.
Foliage: The ground cover should be vigorous (but not invasive) and dense like a carpet to smother competing weeds and cooperatively traverse the spaces for continuity.
Above: Photograph by Matthew Williams for Gardenista. Cotulaleptinella ‘Platt’s Black’ (dollhouse fern) grows densely and has a shallow root system, which makes it ideally suited to creeping between stones to fill cracks. See more of this garden in our Gardenista book.
Hardiness: A plant that grows between pavers should be tough and durable to withstand occasional trampling by foot or paw.
No-Fuss: Ground cover plants for pavers must require as little maintenance as possible. A total given.
Design: The ground cover needs to meet the design needs of foliage color, texture, and form. The choice also should complement the colors and textures of the pathway material rather than compete with it, and be congruent with the current landscape theme.
What are the best plants to grow between pavers?
The options below are by no means the only ones, just some of the popular ones, and you have different options depending on whether your path basks in sun or hides in shade.
Above: Different varieties of thyme such as ‘Minimus Russetings’ and ‘Purple Carpet’ soften the pavers in this Brooklyn rooftop garden. Photography by Marni Majorelle. For more, see Brooklyn Oasis: A City Roof Garden, Before & After.
Full Sun:
Creeping thyme (Thymus spp): Considered one of the finest ground covers for filling in between flagstones. It meets all of the criteria of a good plant employee. This petite herb comes in many varieties, all with tiny, rounded fragrant leaves in shades of dark green, lime green, and even yellow with a white edging. Elfin or woolly thyme are especially good varieties that will grow in difficult soils, stay flat and are frighteningly easy to grow.
Dymondia (Dymondia margaretae) is a good alternative. Its phenomenally flat, tidy appearance bears slender leaves that are green on top and gray underneath. A slight upward curl on each leaf edge provides a frosted, two-tone look and it occasionally bears small yellow daisy flowers.
If you’re searching for tiles for an interior design project, the hard part is choosing from the gazillion options out there. Sourcing for tiles and materials for an outdoor space, though? Even if you’re working with a landscape architect, you may find yourself frustrated by the limited options.
That’s why Sausalito-based clé tile launched OUTERclé last month, a sister site for outdoor tile, materials, and sculpture. “We wanted to launch not just a collection of exterior forms and surfaces, but a destination that could inspire designers, architects, and their clients to consider that their outdoor spaces should be as compelling as, if not more than, their interior ones,” says Deborah Osborn, founder of the Sausalito-based brands.
“People have been asking our team at clé for outdoor tile for years now, but one of the biggest challenges is that selling tile and materials for the outdoors is far more technical,” she continues. “We wanted to be able to not only offer beautiful materials, but also to help address issues such as freeze thaw, UV, heat absorption, slippage/DCOF, submerged material issues (pools and fountains), and driveway usage etc.”
And lest you assume that clé has simply relocated some of its tiles over to OUTERclé, “95% of the products on OUTERclé are new (not the same as on clé),” says Osborn. “And for those surfaces that are similar to those found on clé, we have taken the opportunity to push these materials into a more exterior realm by either reconfiguring them through the use of color (either bolder or more in keeping with nature) and/or form (larger or thicker formats that better suit spaces without walls).”
Here’s a peek at a small sampling of the many (hallelujah!) outdoor materials offered on OUTERclé:
Above: The site offers several ways to browse, including: by area (patio, pool, driveway, etc.); by material (e.g., ceramic, brick, terracotta); and by collection (the tiles above fall under the Belgian Reproduction: Privé collection).
We generally save the “before” images for the end of our articles, but in this case, it’s helpful and inspiring to see upfront the space pre-remodel. Take a look at this entirely drabby and exposed rooftop. If a tiny, depressing roof can be transformed into a private urban oasis, one that invites lingering and relaxation, then anything’s possible.
The incredible terrace makeover is the work of London-based landscape designer Lis Eriksson. Her client gave her free rein over the design but did have a few requests: 1) adequate shade as he is fair-skinned; 2) low-pollen plants on account of his allergies; and 3) flowers in shades of purple, his favorite color.
Above: The roof of the Victorian coach house pre-transformation. Skylights protruding onto the roof made it unusable for the homeowner. The entire space measures just 9 square meters (or 29.5 square feet).
After
Above: The client can now walk out directly onto a tranquil rooftop deck. Partitions composed of Sapele slats, lightly brushed with Rustoleum paint in Chalk, provide privacy.
Above: Everything, from the plant design to the custom built-ins, was designed by Lis. A pergola offers ample shade, as promised. “I also added a heater hanging from the pergola so that he can comfortably enjoy the space in the colder months,” she shares.
In the first column of my series on creating a garden from scratch, I posed some starting points to think about before you make any radical changes to your space. In this second installment, I’m diving deeper and covering the key design decisions you need to consider for a strong foundation—both literal and metaphorical.
Here are the six elements that go into a beautiful foundation for your garden.
Above: My English garden in midsummer. When I arrived this area was a lavender walk with some climbing roses. The lavenders were tired and needed replacing so I decided to remove the whole border and start again, keeping only the climbing rose at the far end of the border. We widened the border to create depth and I planted two long copper beech hedges at the back of the border (buying very young bareroot plants to keep costs down. I then planted ornamental pear trees every two metres which introduces spring blossom and valuable upright structure and presence. Underneath is a succession of perennials and bulbs, mostly in blue and apricot; tulips and alliums are followed by hardy geraniums, nepeta, foxgloves, baptisa, penstemons, ornamental grasses, hydrangeas and salvias. Self-seeders are enthusiastically encouraged.
1. A Limited Materials Palette
Above: Putting in the hardscaping is the first job in most gardens. As it’s permanent, it’s also the most important to get right. I’ve used self-binding gravel for almost all the paths and terraces in my garden; it’s very easy to lay, essentially just spreading it out over a stable sub-base and then compressing it down. But the soft golden colour also blends beautifully into the garden so that it almost disappears. My one regret is having it close to buildings because tiny pieces of the gravel always migrate indoors.
One of the biggest investments of time and money in a new garden is the hardscaping, so it pays to take the time to ensure that any paths, terraces, steps, and other paved or graveled areas are exactly where you want them, feel appropriate to your home and garden style, and will stand the test of time. When planning these areas, be generous, because over time plants will normally encroach into hardscaped areas and soften the edges.
Hardscaping needs to feel in proportion to the house and garden—and look visually appropriate (e.g., a traditional brick path will always look right next to a period building with similar brickwork). To keep these spaces cohesive and harmonious, restrict your materials palette; using a wide variety of finishes can be jarring to the eye. Some materials, including gravel or self-binding gravels, can work with almost any style of architecture.
Just as you would with paints for the interior of your home, get samples of the hardscaping materials you’re considering and live with them for a while. Or plan a field trip or two to see similar materials in a real garden setting. If you’re starting with a true blank canvas, you can mark out areas with a line marker (use hosepipe to create sinuous curved lines) so that you can walk through areas and make sure they feel right.
Whichever surface material you choose, a solid, stable base—usually compressed crushed materials and sand—is key to ensure that the surface can cope with daily wear and weather. It’s possible to do most landscaping projects with basic DIY skills, but just like home projects a perfect finish by a professional is often hard to replicate.
2. Good ‘Bones’
Above: A clipped hedge, shaped shrubs, topiary and a specimen tree can all help to create the bones of a garden that have a permanent, year-round presence. When I bought my house, I had very little gardening experience but I knew that any green structure was potentially useful so I nurtured the hedges, many of which had been eaten down to stubs by horses. We allowed them to recover and grow before clipping many of them into cloud-pruned shapes. I added a few specimen trees including a multi-stem jacquemontii birch tree, pictured here. On the right hand side of this picture a self-seeded hawthorn was left to grow, providing a froth of white blossom in spring.
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.
“Mother nature is the ultimate landscape designer. We’re just her helpers,” says Emilia deMauro, who, along with her sister Anna, runs the East Hampton, NY, landscape design firm deMauro + deMauro. Their approach to design is imbued with a sense of community and responsibility to preserve the beauty of the native environment.
The sisters grew up shuttling between the rolling hills of rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, where their artist dad lived, and the farm fields and overgrown thickets of the east end of Long Island, where their mother was farming and gardening. “Both of those landscapes play a huge part in our designs,” says Anna, who studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. “There’s something so beautiful in the wildness. We’re constantly pulling from those memories.”
They found kindred spirits in architect Nick Martin and his wife Christina. The couple believed strongly in “pivoting away from green lawns that require chemicals and continual labor, and, most important, that strip our community of habitat for creatures big and small,” says Christina. They hired the sisters to design the landscape outside of Martin Architects, Nick’s new Bridgehampton office on the Montauk highway. A busy thoroughfare, situated just past a gas station and across from a bank, didn’t deter them from achieving their joint vision: a self-sufficient oasis, lush with native plants and alive with birds, butterflies, and wildlife, that looks beautiful year-round.
Photography by Doug Young, courtesy of deMauro + deMauro, unless otherwise noted.
Above: For the meadow in front of Martin Architects, the deMauros devised an interspecies matrix planting. They densely planted small perennials (grasses like prairie dropseed and wavy hair grass, and flowers including slender blue iris, gray goldenrod, and white heath asters) approximately 12 to 18 inches apart to help with weed suppression and water conservation.
The property was neglected when the Martins bought it. “To transform the space, we removed the asphalt driveway, regraded the land because the pitch was so bad, with the goal that it wouldn’t need irrigation,” says Nick. He also tried to reuse as many materials as possible.
What if your driveway were beautiful? If you have a typical American stretch of asphalt for a driveway, this question might come off as an absurd provocation, but Andrea Hurd, the founder of Mariposa Gardening & Design, has proven over and over that a beautiful place to park your car is possible. Her Bay Area firm uses their expertise in stonework and horticulture to create driveways that are an attractive addition to the landscape. Hurd’s interest in reimagining driveways doesn’t stem solely from aesthetic ambitions, though.
Trained in permaculture, Hurd worked with the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in the 1990s. There, she learned that the water that runs over your driveway picks up oil and gas that has leaked from cars. “That polluted water goes into storm drains that go straight to the Bay,” says Hurd. One solution to manage this problem is to replace conventional driveways with permeable ones, which allow stormwater to be filtered through the soil, keeping pollutants out of natural bodies of water.
The benefits of a permeable driveway don’t end there. By keeping rainwater on a homeowner’s property, the water soaks into the ground to recharge the groundwater table. Ripping out concrete can also reduce theheat island effect, as concrete reflects the sun’s heat. And if you add plants to your new permeable driveway, you can create habitat for pollinators—not to mention improved curb appeal. Perhaps best of all? Your newly beautified driveway can be used as garden space when your car is not parked there.
Here’s what you need to know to create your own beautiful, permeable parking spot:
Photography by Saxon Holt, unless otherwise noted.
Remove the concrete.
Above: Before and after—Mariposa Gardening & Design replaced this concrete driveway in Berkeley with a permeable design that created room for many new plants, including a mixture of creeping thymes and native strawberries.
The first step to creating a permeable driveway is to remove non-permeable concrete or asphalt surfaces. Unless you’re handy with a jackhammer, this is probably a job for a pro. “Hopefully you have a driveway that was built to code, which means you’ve got a sufficient amount of base material underneath the concrete pour,” says Hurd. But if that is not the case, your contractors will need to regrade the driveway so that water slopes away from the foundation of the house.
A scroll through landscape designer Molly Wood’s portfolio reveals gorgeous, rambling properties and infinity pools with views of forever, but it was a recent project on a much more modest scale that caught our eye.
Wood’s clients, a family in Newport Beach, had a ranch house on a lot measured in feet not acres, to which they hoped to add a pool, room to entertain, and more. “There was just an old entry pathway and some weedy grass on site when I got there,” says Wood of the yard. But Wood, who has been designing gardens in California since 1995, was undaunted by the constraints of the space, noting, “I always say, ‘This is California real estate: Let’s maximize it. Let’s use it.’ ”
But how? Here, she explains how to design a small, stylish outdoor space that takes advantage of every inch.
Photography by Lane J. Dittoe, courtesy of Molly Wood Garden Design.
1. Define the functions.
Above: A pair of chaise lounges and a scalloped umbrella offer a shady place to lounge on the far end of the pool. White sage softens the division between the entry courtyard and the pool.
“My first question is usually, ‘What do you want to do out here?’” says Wood. For this family, adding a pool was the top priority, but they also requested space to grill, eat outside, and entertain. Wood maps out the yard by function before she starts to even think about plants and hardscape materials.
2. Use the pivot point.
Above: The cabana is completely open to the outdoors. The home’s interior designer Mindy Gayer collaborated with Wood on the outdoor furnishings.
To maximize the yard’s L-shape, Wood placed the pool cabana at the pivot point of the L, so it can be seen (and accessed) from both the far end of the pool and the dining area on the opposite side. You may not want or need to build a whole structure in your pivot point, but consider how the corner can serve both sides of your yard.
