Designing and Creating a Coastal Garden

Introduction

A GARDEN BY THE SEA

This book is going to set out, as a step-by-step process, how you can design and create a beautiful and practical garden in a coastal setting. The seaside is an exciting and inspiring place to make a garden, but it has some particular and tricky challenges. By planning carefully and using the processes and information in this book, you can make a coastal garden that will be a life-enhancing joy for years to come.

To make beautiful, successful gardens you need to know about a lot of things. You need to know about plants, of course. They are our primary materials, providing colour, scent, and form. There is a bewildering number of species for us to choose from, each with its own contributions and its own requirements. You need to know something about the hard materials, paving stones, bricks, timber, metals, and how they are put together to make patios, retaining walls, and pergolas. You will also need a good sense of how colours and forms work together and how this living work of art will change over time. Additionally, if that was not intimidating enough, each space you are working with is never the same as any other. Each garden we work on has its own combination of sun, shade, wind, shelter, soil, and topography. It has its own difficulties and its own capabilities. If the garden is in a coastal setting, those difficulties could well seem to outweigh the capabilities. You could be forgiven for giving up and deciding to pave over the whole thing.

But a garden by the sea can be an enchanting thing. For those not lucky enough to live on the coast, for whom a day trip to the seaside is an occasional treat, there is something about the first glimpse of sun reflecting off the ocean, through a break in the trees or a gap in the hills, that awakens a sense of childish excitement. To have a garden with such a view can be to have some of that feeling every day. It could be a view that greets you as you drink your first coffee at the kitchen table looking down the garden. Or it might be a view that you must explore the garden to find, rounding a corner to suddenly be presented with a beautiful ocean view and a cosy, sheltered bench in just the right spot to admire it from. Even if your coastal garden doesn't have a sea view, there is something distinctive about coastal settings. Coastal towns and villages always have a different 'feel' to their inland counterparts; there is something in the combination of the quality of light, the sounds, the smells, something about the air itself, that never quite lets you forget the near presence of the sea.

This book will help you deal with the difficulties of establishing a coastal garden. It will help you respond to the inspiration of that coastal setting to create a garden that not only copes with the conditions but has a great sense of place, somewhere that enhances and beautifies its setting. We have worked as a father and son garden design practice, based in the town of Lymington on the south coast of England, for the past twenty years. Many of the gardens we have created over that time have been in very exposed coastal settings. This book will show you the step-by-step method that we use to design a coastal garden, and give you the practical information about plants, hard landscaping materials, and techniques that you need to make that garden a long-term success. The design process we will lead you through will be very similar to the process used by professional garden designers around the world. It is not the only way to approach making a new garden; in fact, it is not at all the way most gardens are created. Most domestic gardens have, throughout history, been produced by a trial-and-error method, tweaking and experimenting over many years. This will always be the heart of good gardening. If gardening is an art form, it is the long art, something that moves, changes, and develops over the seasons and over the years. But we believe a structured design process is a very good beginning. This is particularly true for coastal gardens, where using the wrong plants or the wrong materials in an exposed position could result in costly failure. We hope that this book will also be useful to professional garden designers, perhaps starting out in their careers or designing a coastal garden for the first time, or as a reference book for inspiration and plant or material choice. But we firmly believe that non-professional gardeners, who have the inclination to devote some time and effort to creating their garden, can follow the process set out in this book to produce a result that any professional designer would be proud of.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

We have arranged the chapters of this book so that you can follow a process from start to finish to design and create a garden in a coastal setting. This could be your own garden or one you are working on in a professional capacity as a garden designer. You could be starting with a largely blank canvas, that is, a plot which has little or no existing planting or hard landscaping features that you wish to retain. Or the garden may have some successful planting, a perfectly good patio, some well-established shelter belts or windbreaks, but have planted areas that need improving or need some work on the overall design feel and styling.

Whatever the scale of the work that needs to be done, the process can be followed, but smaller projects may not need every step to be completed. If you just want to work on a planting scheme for a particularly exposed bed, it would still be a good idea to survey the bed, think about the practical limitations and possibilities, the colour scheme and plant textures, any hard landscaping features that might help practically or aesthetically, and produce a drawn planting plan to work from. Of course, you could also just dip into a relevant chapter to find some ideas for solving a particular problem, such as a salt-tolerant large shrub to fill a gap in a windbreak, or some ideas for coastal themed path materials. Some of the best gardens are created in this way, slowly evolving over time, experimenting, and adapting, and this book can be your guide and companion through this process.

In Chapter 1, we will first consider what it means to have a garden in a coastal setting. What are the typical conditions that the garden will be exposed to? We will then look at some specific types of coastal plant habitats. As our design practice is based in the United Kingdom, our examples will come from there, but they will be applicable to similar environments across the world; the overall design process and many of the principles and ideas will also be widely applicable. Wherever you are based, a better understanding of the habitats surrounding a coastal garden should be an important source of inspiration for your design.

Chapters 2 to 4 cover the core design process that professional garden designers use, which you could use to produce a design for your own garden. Chapter 2 sets out a step-by-step design process, beginning with the survey and working through how to produce an outline design, construction drawings and planting plans. Depending on the scope of the project you may not need to follow every step but going through the relevant parts will be an excellent start and help you achieve successful and beautiful results. Chapter 3 goes into more detail about how to ensure that any built parts of your design, such as paving or a pergola, will be suitable for coastal environments. Styling ideas and some sample construction drawings are included to help you create an attractive coastal theme with these features. Chapter 4 explains the process of producing a planting design: the practical considerations as well as ways to work with colour, texture, and seasonal changes, to create beautiful, harmonious effects. This chapter also includes planting and maintenance techniques.

Chapter 5 is in many ways the core of the book, as it lists the plants that we recommend for use in coastal gardens. Although domestic outdoor spaces have many practical functions, such as entertaining and cooking, sunbathing, children's play, sport, and exercise, if you are going to the trouble of carefully designing that space it is likely that you have some passion for plants. For us as garden designers they are the part that excites us the most and, given a free hand, we would probably be designing almost every part of the garden as a chance to show them off to their best effect. But the coastal environment can be hard on plants and our choice is usually much more limited than it would be in an inland garden. We have worked on many coastal gardens as professional garden designers and in that time have developed a list of plants that we feel we can trust to thrive in various levels of exposure to coastal conditions. This list forms the basis of Chapter 5 and although nothing is guaranteed in gardening and the safest choice of tough, coastally adapted plants can mysteriously fail to thrive, these planting choices will help you produce schemes with the best chance of success.

How we can design and maintain our gardens in the most ecologically sustainable way and how they can attract and provide habitats for wildlife has become of increasing interest and concern to amateur and professional gardeners in recent years. In Chapter 6 we will look at some ideas for how to approach these issues in a coastal garden. We will look at how we can design our garden to harness nature rather than fight it, how to use plants (often native) to increase biodiversity, and how we can reduce our use of water in the garden. This does not need to be a worthy but limiting influence on our work: it can be a source of great interest and satisfaction, particularly when we learn to...