Best gardens of 2011
It’s high time we updated our garden portfolio. We were breaking ground on all sorts of projects around Nottinghamshire from January onwards. We laid thousands of square metres of paving, built hundreds of steps and boundary walls, erected hundreds of metres of fencing, laid dozens of lawns and planted up countless borders. Here are a few of our projects (and downtime images) from 2011. We’ll continue to update the gallery with more of our gardens over the coming weeks and months.
Last year was a long and busy year, starting with one of the hardest winters on record, freezing our Newark garden makeover into the ground. We conquered the weather though, finished the patio and turfing ready for the family’s new summerhouse to be erected. Not easy on nights of sleep broken by the newborn baby sister to our then three-year-old.
A winter garden makeover meant they were able to enjoy their brand new garden right from the start of the season, which last year started in April.
Remember those heady days of sunshine. We do, having taken off to Pembrokeshire for a few days with family and friends for Easter. We were blessed with a week of blazing sun. Perfect for the children (19 of them in all) to enjoy the beaches and a Sunday morning Easter Egg hunt. And our group made the most of the chance to eat, drink and generally be very merry late into the evening at our holiday hideaway.
One of our biggest projects to date (having built the walls and steps of this patio terrace in Mapperley last year), we set about returfing the extensive lawn, sculpting and planting the borders, building the seating area and creating the play area at the beginning of this summer. We also sourced the play equipment, which has provided a stylish and impressive place for a child and his friends to while away sunny days.
When we came to this West Bridgford project, there was but a large pile of rumble and tumble-down steps leading into the garden. The family had recently installed tri-fold doors to the rear of their house. They wanted a neat patio to create a relaxing seating area. The steps were to be reinstituted.
Working on such gradients is no mean feat but we’re pretty adept at creating beautiful and functional intimate spaces on different levels. The result is a lush, shaded and peaceful area to enjoy the fairer months.
Working out in the Vale of Belvoir is always a pleasure. The surroundings and characterful buildings create stunning backdrops to our gardens. None more so than these 16th century cottages, next to a churchyard in Denton. The cottages were knocked into one a long time ago and the current owners have been working hard to update this house, creating a stunning and tranquil family home. They wanted new pathways, walls and planting borders to create an inviting and homely entranceway. Particularly important as it sits next to an extensive open lawned area. Our design does just that, creating the perfect framework for lush cottage garden planting to be added over time.
Most of us, though, don’t have the settings of Beatrix Potter and Enid Blyton stories outside our kitchen windows. We do, however, want to make the most of our gardens. This snapshot of a modern-look patio and lawn updated the dishevelled garden of a Victorian Lady Bay villa. This flush contemporary look was the result of weeks of planning, sourcing materials, hard graft and painstaking attention to detail to ensure the angles were exact, pointing was precise and all the other details of the garden were just so. We’re pleased to say that our customers were pleased as punch with the results. We were quietly satisfied too.
Conversely, this family wanted a classic look for their modern but stylishly traditional home. The challenge here was to create a polished look on a respectable budget but in an awkward location. We dug out and stripped back the ‘bare minimum’ approach installed by the developers, which had become tired after just a few years. We replaced it with a new patio, curved walls, steps leading up to the new lawn, decking with atmospheric lighting, new fencing, a new gate and the foundations for the new shed. We delivered fantastic value for money for a very happy West Bridgford family.
The hard graft of a long spring and summer was rewarded with some time in our favourite landscape in the French Pyrenees. This view was worth the two-hour walk uphill carrying our nine-month-old on my back and plying our then four-year-old with malt loaf until she reached the top. She did eight-miles in all. Start ‘em young and she’ll not whinge when she’s older, we say.
