Red Oak Garden

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The garden for Red Oak House was previously a long sloping paddock and was made from scratch in 1994. The planning-led house position meant a large sloping front garden was created when the house was built on a plateau. This left an area to the rear sloping down to woodland.

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The brief was to minimise steps, create a wildlife pond, orchard, borders and vegetable gardens, and to incorporate storage buildings into the design.

 

Because I was asked to design the garden simultaneously with the house build, I could instruct for large quantities of earth to be moved to sculpt areas and deal with height changes, giving me the chance to suggest concealing sheds with land modelling and create an accessible level terrace and lawn.  The mixed borders for year round interest lead to an orchard and  progressively more natural areas that seem to merge with the neighbouring wood.  Utilising the woodland stream to create a pond provided a lovely reason to walk to the bottom of the garden. 

 

I designed and sourced the parkland fence providing a safe boundary for the pond area and supervised the pond excavation, the naturally occurring clays sealing the  pond without the need for a technical liner.  All garden plants were chosen to be deer resistant and suitable for heavy clay soils. As a planning condition I provided a boundary design and planting plan for the road boundary. 

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The clients named their new house after the specimen tree I choose for their front garden.