By Michael John McGarr
Our niche within landscape design in 2019.
Our niche within landscape design in 2019 has developed from our passion to create gardens that people can use all year round, as well as a continuing trend for outdoor living.
We feel that a traditional lawned garden with flower beds around the edges is designed to be viewed through the window and perhaps mowed once a week in the summer to keep it looking spick and span. We can achieve so much more…
Contemporary gardens in 2019.
Our contemporary gardens are designed to be lived in, using the available space for seating areas, landscaping and surrounded by beautiful naturalistic planting. We challenge homeowners to get rid of their lawn and use their space for creating a better socialising space in a new landscape design in 2019.
It’s not true that long lawned gardens look bigger – a landscaped garden created with paths and different areas to explore can look and – more importantly – feel much bigger than an unusable stretch of grass.
The traditional British garden layout.
In fact, the traditional British garden layout is massively time intensive and the busy professionals that employ our services don’t have time to keeping weeding and mowing their gardens from spring to autumn. We are pushing what is achievable with landscape design in 2019.
Homeowners want gardens that are essentially another living space – or another room to their house – and we will design our gardens around how they want to use the space. Do they love outdoor cooking, do they host massive parties, do they have small dinner parties? These are all questions we ask our landscape design clients before they commission us.
Despite our poor weather in the UK, many homeowners want to spend more time outdoors. We believe this desire to connect with nature and the outdoors stems from our busy office-based lives.
Where landscape design trends for outdoor living began.
Landscape design trends that began in Australia or the West Coast of the USA, such as outdoor kitchens and multiple outdoor seating areas, have really begun to get popular here in our cooler climate.
Of course, our fabulous outdoor kitchens and living areas are equipped for the cooler weather with slimline heating panels and covered pergolas, for example. which are all welcome additions to landscape design in 2019 in the UK.
This is not forgetting that our job as garden and landscaping designers is to incorporate all practical usability elements into a visually stunning landscape design too. It’s vitally important to our clients that we don’t forget about ensuring they have somewhere to put their wheelie bins or somewhere to hang out their wet washing in the summer. It’s our job to find ingenious and clever solutions to these problems, rather than just forget about them.
Trends in garden design tend to develop over longer periods of time than interior design, for example. Of course, homeowners don’t change their planting, landscaping and accessories very often, like they would do with home accessories.
Trends in landscape design in 2019.
The main trends that we are going to see for landscape design in 2019 are the continuation of very high quality wood fired pizza ovens for the ultimate outdoor cooking experience. http://Www.thealfrescochef.co.uk
Homeowners are also more in touch with the needs of wildlife and able to see their garden as an eco-system they should work alongside, rather than trying to control. We are very into biodiversity and ensuring that wildlife can move from garden to garden as well as ensuring we create a planting scheme and landscape design that creates food for insects, birds and other animals. http://Www.wildlifetrusts.org
These insights are likely to grow much more during 2019 and we predict that more homeowners will be installing hedgehog passes in their fences, or creating a small basin for frogs and toads to lay frogspawn in.
Planting for 2019.
In terms of planting, our naturalistic and textural style of planting is going to grow and develop in terms of popularity. When designing a planting scheme, I don’t just think about colour and visual aspects, I think of the texture the plants and flowers create when placed together and how that will look.
Using a selection of grasses, meadow flowering plants, edible plants and even succulents creates a fantastically textural planting scheme or part of an extensive rain garden that conserves and deals with excess rainwater . Find further details in one of my previous blogs . https://www.wm-design-ltd.co.uk/2017/10/25/ultimate-guide-creating-rain-garden/
Edible planting, foraging and rain gardens.
Edible planting is another trend landscape design in 2019 which we’ve been doing for some years now, but we can only see this growing in popularity.
To sit alongside our outdoor living and cooking areas, we love creating edible planting areas, borders or containers filled with different edible plants that can be snipped or grabbed.
As opposed to creating formal vegetable plots, this approach to edible gardening is perfect for the busy professional because there is very little maintenance involved.
Edible plants can also be planted in among other border plants, with no need for a distinct area for crops.
Plants such as Globe artichoke, fennel, rosemary, asparagus, chives and cut and come again Mesclun salad crops can all be either lightly griddled on the heat, or snipped over a salad for the ultimate in fresh food.
In terms of materials, luxury material such as porcelain is very much on trend in landscape design for 2019, especially large slabs to create a very luxurious and contemporary aspect. Check out our page on Houzz for further examples of this versatile material. http://Www.houzz.co.uk
