Designing Your Garden To Make The Best Of British Sunshine

Spotlight patio in the sunshine

One of the gardening assets of living in the UK is our weather. Not everyone sees it that way if you’re not a fan of our greyer days and volatile weather, but as we’re all garden lovers here, you can’t deny the beauty that our seasons offer.

Seasonal Aesthetics

Many of our plans when our team landscapes gardens includes the seasonality of the garden.  There are a variety of factors we look into when planning garden design. We’ll look at the flora and fauna, and how that looks throughout the year and try to include focal points to delight the eyes with each season. Colourful displays can be incorporated into the design, from the glorious splashes of summer blooms breaking up your garden, to autumn foliage providing beautiful backdrops – a well thought out garden can be stunning all year round.

If looking at parts of your garden in the cooler months is a rather barren affair, take a look at how you can inject some colour and warmth into parts of the garden. It often doesn’t need to be an overhaul, but simple additions like an autumnal trellis can really warm up an otherwise dowdy area.

Patios In The Spotlight

Last week we were discussing patios and some of the considerations to bear in mind whilst making your patio design decisions. Let’s also look at how to mix that in with the sunlight we have available to us in our not always sunny climes.

Watching the position of the sun helps you to maximise the use of your garden, regardless of the season. Often, patios are positioned with functionality in mind, but a smaller ‘spotlight’ patio could be the perfect feature for your garden giving you additional utility all year round.

The position of your garden as a whole will have a bearing on how you use it, but in terms of patio positioning, this may help you choose the perfect spotlight position to have your patio centre stage when you’re most likely to be using it:

East Facing Garden – You’ll see more sun in the morning
West Facing Garden – You’ll see more sun in the afternoon
North Facing Garden – You’ll see far less sun than a south-facing garden

You’ll know what a difference the sunshine can make to your day. Even the coldest of days can feel fantastic if you’re wrapped up warm with the sunlight on your face. With this in mind, the autumn and winter can be great times to think ahead about the landscaping of your garden while it’s not seeing as much traffic as the warmer months.

See Your Garden Through Seasonal Eyes

Many of us are guilty of seeing our ‘outside territory’ as a fair-weather pastime. The cooler months are the perfect time to pay attention to how you could use your garden differently. We’re creatures of habit, so we often ‘plonk’ features in our garden without too much thought in the middle of the summer, and it doesn’t always occur to us to look at whether that was the best decision.

Use the cooler months to really explore how you can make more use of your garden throughout the year. Watch what the sun is doing in your garden. Where is the garden being underutilised during it’s warmer parts of the day? Maybe you have foliage or established plants inconveniently positioned?

Wrap up and wander around your garden on a cooler day to see what changes you can make to enjoy it all year round. Wander around your local area during the autumn and winter to see what you like about other local gardens at this time of year which you could incorporate.

If you would like a chat on how you can improve or overhaul your garden to make the most of it all year round, get in touch with our team on 0116 210 0760 and they’ll happily put their years of working with our climate to good use with you!

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