cottage Garden -Forest Hills Design and Install
Before the redesign
The Brief -to create an American cottage garden.
Our client was a keen gardener with nostalgia for her childhood growing up in the English countryside. Our brief was to create an informal lush ‘American cottage’ garden with inflections of the traditional English garden. The Forest Hills garden was to have a warm color palette to brighten up the space and create floral interest, incorporating flowers suitable year-round to cut for the house or other occasion.
The Process Of Garden Design.
How Plantasia Design Group created the American Cottage Garden
First I selected a palette of colorful and textural plant selections that were both robust but with lower water needs, (and therefore better suited to the California climate). Then I set about designing the shape and the layout of the Garden.
The Design constraints of the Out Door Space .
A Gardens Shape and Grade.
It is important to understand how to deal with the design constraints of all the wonderfully shaped San Francisco Gardens. The original garden was long and narrow, bisected by an awkward level change. We addressed this by regrading the site to remove the offending step. We installed a curved path to create more movement and interest by further detracting from the linear proportions of the site.
We utilized the vertical axes for espalier jasmine, which in turn hid the fence, thus creating the illusion of greater width. If you have a small garden, there are many ways that you can design it to create the illusion of more space.
The Problem of Low Light Gardens.
Extenuating factors made this garden quite challenging. In some areas, neighbors' overhanging plants heavily shaded it, which we mitigated by pruning back where appropriate and installing variegated plants to lighten up areas where this wasn’t feasible.
Upcycle for Low waste.
The client requested we make use of as many existing plants as we could and we were able to reuse almost all of the existing plant material, reintegrating worthwhile plants into the new design. An old Akebano cherry tree that was hollow and slated for removal was pruned and fertilized and made a remarkable recovery, becoming a key focal point of the garden. We added additional younger specimens of the tree to complement (and ultimately succeed) the aging tree for future generations.
The finished Cottage Garden
The client was delighted with the garden and described it as ‘a sanctuary from everyday life'. The palette of water-wise plant selections and California natives make this a low-maintenance garden with an abundance of beauty and ready-to-cut flowers. I was particularly delighted that we could incorporate a side dead side space, an ugly alley next to the house (normally housing bins and junk)- and join it to the garden, recreating the meandering paths of English country gardens but here as an urban oasis.
