Formal Front Garden Design Makeover

Formal front gardens can offer a clean and contemporary look to your garden. Whether it’s a competitive Chelsea townhouse look or the more traditional period property parterre garden, formal gardens give a neat and ordered appearance. Fancy adding curb appeal to your property? Then this formal design maybe for you!

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All explained by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He’s an RHS winning garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester’s Saturday morning garden phone in.

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Having a formal front garden is a statement piece and ideally, should match the style of the property. Period properties, townhouses and turn of the century property lend themselves really well to a formal garden design. New build houses can also be excellent candidates for a formal garden layout. It’s about careful planning and getting the proportions spot on. In this example, I was asked to design a formal front garden for a listed period town house in Manchester.

The Victorian property had quite steep steps up to the property and a really over grown crazy paved front garden. You could tell at one point it has been a cottage style front garden, but sadly its plant and curb appeal had long passed! The oversized windows and the original front door had a really grand feel. When the client asked me to design them a garden fitting for the property I got to work to bring back this sense of effortless grandeur.

This garden design required careful and sympathetic consideration to the age of the property and local area. Being a period property you can’t simply slap bang some planters or bloc paving in there. You risk not only upsetting the neighbours but also ending up with a design that is at odds with the beauty of the building.

With it being a front garden and a small space a lot of the normal features would be absent, ie seating or somewhere to entertain. What was vitally important to the client was that the front garden welcomed them home and also looked gorgeous when looking out of their lounge that backs onto the front garden. As busy working parents they wanted something low maintenance that would carry itself through the winter but also had a real sense of interest.

I designed a formal arrangement incorporating some standard bay trees for height and interest. Mirroring this I used Buxus (box hedge) topiary balls to match the standards but at ground level. These two plants would provide the year round structure. I then used the classic formal garden plant of lavender to infill around these plants. Interspersed with alliums that would fire up out of the soil in summer mirroring again the circular habit of the standards and the topiary. Carex morrowii ‘Ice Dance’ was chosen as the edge plant to spill out over a gorgeous brick herringbone terrace.

To add a touch of modernity I included 4 corten steel planters which would contain bright blue Agapanthus. Their foliage provides excellent fleshy evergreen colour and then in summer, they spring into action with bright blue flowers. These would be seen from the lounge providing a vibrant glow.