Beautiful garden ideas for your outside space

What you need to know about garden ideas for the part of your garden that’s closest to the house, so that you can really enjoy your garden when you step out of the back door or look out of the window. Ideas that we’ve tried, plus more from other gardens or garden shows.
00:00 The principles of designing the garden near the house
01:06 Make the area nearest the house more formal or structured
01:20 Reflect your interior or architectural style in the garden close to the house
01:43 The parterre in the Middlesized Garden
02:04 Balance mass and void in garden design
02:28 Ideas for balancing mass and void
03:08 Many garden transformations take either a lot of time or a lot of money. An instant cheap transformation is rare.
03:21 How to save money on garden design video: https://youtu.be/D19oIwWgj54
03:40 Plants can fill a void
03:50 Use pots as a focal point
04:19 Or a sundial as a focal point
04:33 Or a pergola, including pergola tips
05:04 Put the main planting area close to the house
05:47 A pond for the centre of the garden
06:16 Or a fountain
06:24 Or even a rill
06:30 Break up the space with walls or a ‘garden ruin’ video: https://youtu.be/LEa9vtQlJuE
06:58 Place trees in the centre of your garden: Wide shallow garden video: https://youtu.be/AYWpiVp-pzE
07:39 Video with ideas for a difficult shady corner: https://youtu.be/C6F6Reobj78 (this will be changed to Video 2 on difficult corners and neglected areas when it’s published!)

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Garden designers quite rightly would suggest that  we treat our gardens as a whole in design terms,   but in reality it’s much easier for most of us  to do things bit by bit. And also you may be  

Basically quite happy with your garden as a whole,  but there’s a part of it that’s got neglected,   or you’re not really happy with it, or you’re  using your garden in a different way. It’s   Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden  YouTube channel and blog, and this is the first  

Of two videos about redesigning various bits of  your garden that may not be exactly the way you   want them at the moment. We’ve redesigned  various corners and parts of our garden,   so I’m picking up the garden design ideas that  we’ve used, plus adding some that I’ve spotted in  

Other gardens or the shows. This is the first, and  we’ll be dealing with the area close to the house,   because that’s what you see when you step out of  the door – look out of the windows. And the second  

Video will be dealing with difficult corners and  neglected areas. So do tap subscribe if you don’t   want to miss that. There are two quite important  principles about the area just outside the house,   and the first one is that it’s often good to  make it the more formal or structured area,  

And then you can get a bit wilder or more relaxed  as you go further away from the house. And that   works even with quite a small garden. And the  second thing is that when it’s close to the house,   it’s really good if it reflects either  the architectural style of your house,  

Or your own interior style, so there’s a sense  of flow. For example this garden designed by   garden writer Francine Raymond is linked to  a house with yellow bricks and gray slate,   and Francine has picked up both the shape of the  bricks and the yellow and the gray in everything  

She’s done around the garden, particularly close  to the house. For our garden, our garden slopes up   as you came out of the back door, so we decided to  get rid of the slope by creating a terrace and we  

Call that the parterre, and we used four paths to  mimic the four rooms of the house, so that there’s   some kind of architectural link from the house  and the garden. However another important garden   design principle is that you need to balance  mass and void. And mass is things like trees and  

Pergolas and sheds and shrubs and planting. And  void is the flat areas like a terrace or a lawn   or even a path. Now looking at our parterre, when  it started it was a lot of void, it was very flat,  

And so the question is what do you do when you  want to actually bring some mass into a void like   that. Well of course mostly it’s called a focal  point. If you’ve got a small garden it’s likely  

That this area immediately outside the house will  be used for seating, and that’s one very good   idea. We already had seating in a terrace just  outside the house, so the parterre wasn’t going   to be used for seating. An artist friend of ours  pointed out that actually we needed some height  

In there – that’s the mass/void thing – and he  suggested we get a pergola. But that was over 10   years ago and it’s taken us all that time to find  a pergola that we could actually afford, and that  

We liked. And that comes up to another important  principle of garden design, which is that there’s   a direct correlation between time and money. The  garden makeover programs on TV would suggest that   for really quite a modest budget you can suddenly  have your whole garden transformed. But most of us  

In the gardening world suggest you add a nought to  those budgets that are put on Garden TV makeover   programs, and that when you’re doing your own  garden, if budgets are tight, be prepared to   take some time. But of course you can have great  fun experimenting along the way, because we’ve  

Loved our parterre in the 10 years it didn’t have  the pergola. We started off by putting planting   in there, and of course planting is a very good  way of filling that void. We’ve got lavender,  

And we also had pots, big pots, a group of pots  which had plants in them. Then I decided to go for   one very structural pot, and so I chose a topiary  spiral which was in a big pot in the center. Now  

A big pot also is going to cost you quite a lot of  money, but I got that as a seconds – it’s actually   got a firing crack in it, but that doesn’t affect  the way it reacts to frost or cold or anything.  

It won’t crack. Then after a few years of the  topiary spiral, we moved the topiary spiral   over into this corner, and then we got a sundial  which was given to us by some friends. And by that   stage the lavender had grown up and it was enough  mass because the sundial otherwise would perhaps  

Have looked a bit small in the middle of the area.  And then we heard from a friend that a pergola was   actually in her garage. She was renovating it, and  she was able to sell it to us for a good price. So  

At last we found a pergola that we liked, and that  we could afford. If you’re going to put a pergola   in the center of your garden, you do need a flat  space. So we got some landscapers in to make the  

Space in the middle of the garden a little bit  bigger – that’s to make it easier to walk around   and through – but also you do need a support for  the four corners of the pergola. You can’t just  

Put it on lawn. If you do want to put it on lawn,  you can get posts and they can be concreted into   the ground. Another really successful thing you  can do near the house is to have a big border,  

Or lots of planting. And actually, because the  area outside the back of our house is quite wide,   we’ve got both the parterre and a border which we  can see from the kitchen window all year round.   Now obviously the downside of a big planting  area just outside the house is it’s more work  

Than anything that you have further away, which is  perhaps a little wild and a little more neglected.   However if it’s close to the house it’s easier  just to pop out and do a little bit of weeding.  

There’s much more motivation to work on it.  A variation on this is to have a path down   the center of the garden and lots of planting on  either side. Once again, that’ll give you loads of  

Colour and life when you look out of the window or  step out of the door. You can also have a pond in   the center of the area. This pond in the center of  the Great Dixter Barn Garden has made this garden  

Area the most biodiverse part of the garden  – and indeed one of the most biodiverse areas   that their ecologist had ever actually analyzed.  You could have a raised pond – that often looks   good – it’s worth remembering if you’re doing a  pond for wildlife that wildlife can’t get in and  

Out when there’s very high sides. So you might  have to think that one through a bit. You could   have a fountain such as this Charleston Garden at  RHS Hampton Court. Or you could have perhaps even  

Just a rill, like this garden designed as a show  garden for Liz Earle. Another thing you might want   to do is to break up the space in your garden a  bit more, and for example you could use a sort of  

Fake ruined wall or folly. And we’ve got a video  – which I’ll put in the description below – about   garden ruins and follies. The great thing they  can do is that they can create a microclimate as   well as looking like an ornament. They’re actually  quite practical, because the sunny side of them is  

Often warm because of the wall, and then there’s  a shady side where you can grow things like ferns.   And of course one of the things that is quite  successful and quite surprising that you can do  

In the middle of a garden, is actually have trees.  Now this works very well if for example you’ve got   a wide shallow garden, like in this garden  designed by Posy Gentles. It’s wider than it  

Is deep, and so if you come out of the back door  and there’s nothing in the middle of the garden,   your eye hits the back fence almost immediately.  But if you’ve got something like perhaps these   two fruit trees, your eye kind of works its  way around it, and it’s a bit longer journey.  

And therefore the garden looks and feels bigger.  So don’t discount having trees in the center of   your garden. So, now let’s have a look at what  you can do in neglected corners and difficult   areas. And so let’s go over to video 2 which  is here. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!