Future-Proofing Your Family Garden

One of the important jobs of any garden designer is to ensure your investment can stand the test of time.

In the same way that the way your flora and fauna will grow is all borne in mind, it’s important to look at how your family will grow over the next five, 10 and 20 years, too.

If you have children using the garden now – they will want to use it as they evolve through childhood, so where your investment is concerned, a well designed garden needs to keep up with those family transitions. Here are a few The Garden Design Co designers normally take into account when making sure your family garden will still make the cut in the short and mid-term.

Look at the Age of Your Children Now – And in 5 to 10 Years Time

If you take a look at the first garden design on this video, you’ll see how we planned out a garden for a family whose children were under the age of eight. They wanted jungle gyms and a play area the children could enjoy now, but they knew the play apparatus wouldn’t always be needed.

They also needed the functional use of the garden with sheds and the like being given a place too. The first section of the garden as you look out from the house is all landscaped with a real lawn and plants which you could enjoy as they grow. We then created a screened section of the garden at the bottom which housed an extensive section where the children could play happily, with artificial lawns to counteract the wet grass issue we’d often have in this country!

This area also housed two sheds, which gave the owner the functional utility they needed. The screens were built with the mid term plan in mind. In the short term they cover up all of the toys and trampolines that can clutter the aesthetics of a nicely landscaped garden, yet allow the children to use them and play with them freely.

When the children are older and no longer use the play equipment, it can all be removed, and the screens can come down, revealing a section of the garden that still merges nicely with the existing landscaping in front of it. The artificial lawn will follow on from the natural lawn with barely any changes apart from the removal of the screen, so the cohesion of the garden is there, through both phases of the garden’s design.

Think About Shade in Relation to the Position of the Sun

If you’re a parent you’ll know that the sun in this country does strange things to us! We all abandon most of our clothes, and just want to be outside as much as possible. Which is great, unless you have young children with tender skin. One thing to bear in mind with your garden is where the play apparatus is, in relation to the sun. If you’re able to incorporate the shade into the placement of the play areas, it’s well worth doing so.

Installation Options When Shade is Bare

If there isn’t any natural shade from trees, foliage or garden structures such as sheds or pagodas, installing screens like the ones included in the garden shared above, can just provide a little respite from the sun, when the kids just want to be outside for as long as possible. We will also factor in the positioning of the equipment itself – a raised playhouse like the one in the picture would create shade at certain times of day, so we can look at the position of the sun, and when the children are most likely to want to play, and position equipment to maximise the use of the garden throughout the whole day.