Light up your gardenThe festive lights at RHS Bridgewater demonstrate how important it is to have good lighting in the winter. By using coloured uplighting at the bottom of individual trees, you can draw attention to specimen trees that you want to highlight.As designers, we wouldn't usually recommend going as far as the photo above (!), but we can certainly draw inspiration from the colours and ideas.The above image of one of our garden designs shows how we use uplighting to highlight certain areas and draw the eye around the garden.At a time when you may not use your garden much at
Read MoreJust this week we are starting to see stacks of potting compost bags in the supermarkets – mostly on some kind of offer. But what a lot of people don’t realise is that they include peat, taken from the UK’s valuable peat bogs. By grabbing those cheap bags of compost, we are unwittingly contributing to the destruction of the UK’s valuable peatlands – essential for our fight against climate change. So why is peat used in our potting compost? It has a great ability to retain water and nutrients so is a very good growing medium. Home gardeners use 66% of
Read Moreby Michael John McGarrThe first question that many clients ask me on that very first consultation meeting is can I design a beautiful garden that will stay beautiful? How do I create a high-spec luxury outdoor living space that is really and truly low maintenance?My contemporary outdoor living spaces are actually naturally low-maintenance. I would not design a stunning space and then tell you that the huge lawn needs mowing twice a week and you need to hand-weed dandelions out of it (who could be bothered to do that?!).I won't leave you with swathes of bedding plants that need to
Read MoreBy Michael John McGarrA landscape design survey for wildlife shouldn't just be an exercise in measuring the site backwards and forwards, anyone with a laser level can accurately achieve this task.The key to creating a garden design that is beneficial to wildlife is to understand the current site conditions on a deeper level.More often than not wildlife is abundant on sites that have either been neglected or mismanaged for any length of time.Ironically the biggest danger to existing wildlife is the potential threat of further construction and development. The onus is then on the landscape designer to cushion the effects
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