Best garden design tips & inspiration from top designer Paul Bangay and A Life in Garden Design

Renowned international garden designer, Paul Bangay, shares his garden design tips, memories and inspirations from his new book Paul Bangay, A Life in Garden Design. Find out the most important garden design tip of all, discover where garden design is heading next and see round Paul’s amazing garden Stonefields.
00:00 Asking top international garden designer Paul Bangay for his best tip on re-vamping your garden
00:21 Paul Bangay – A Life in Garden Design: https://amzn.to/43DLQdi
(note that links to Amazon are affilliate, so I may get a small fee but it won’t affect the price you pay.
01:37 What’s the number one thing to think about if you want to make a brilliant change in your garden?
02:10 Is garden design going ‘softer’?
03:35 It’s important for garden design to evolve
05:03 Divide the garden up into rooms
06:35 How to increase resilience in gardens
08:30 Hard landscaping and resilience
12:40 You can buy Paul Bangay – A Life in Garden Design from his publishers Thames & Hudson:https://thamesandhudson.com/paul-bangay-a-life-in-garden-design-9781760763282
or from Amazon:https://amzn.to/43DLQdi

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I’ve just asked top International Garden designer Paul bangi for his best advice if you want to revamp your garden for example what’s the most important thing that you need to think about and what do you need to think about in terms of future proofing your hard Landscaping

How is garden design changing and we’re talking about his new book Paul bang a life in garden design and there are some lovely ideas from Paul’s own garden stonefields it’s a much more perfect garden than mine will ever be but it’s so interesting to see the way he uses clipped shapes very simple

Clipped shapes repeatedly to create a massive impact I also think you should look at how the herbaceous border is very definitely a herbaceous border it’s got strong colors and yet it echoes the soft muted Grays of the landscape behind it and best of all look at how he uses

Garden rooms and there’s always a path and a Vista and just a sense that there’s something interesting just around the corner it’s Alexandra here from The middle-sized Garden YouTube channel and blog and Paul’s Garden stonefields is in Australia in the southern part where the weather is quite

Similar to the climate in the south of the UK although the summers are hotter so it roughly equates to a USDA zone of nine but of course garden design principles are the same wherever you are in the world and Paul’s pallet of plants is very much the one that we all use in

Temperate Gardens everywhere so generally in terms of garden design What would you say is the kind of number one piece of advice you’d give to anyone sitting there looking at their Garden thinking I need to change this be bold I always say you know drama’s great in the

Garden think of drama but be bold overscale things don’t uncale things I think you know novices and hom gardeners tend to get the scale wrong I think that’s the difference between a professional and and a nonprofessional we we’re taught about scale and we learn about scale if you’re not sure just make

Something slightly bigger than what you think it should be like make SK slightly bigger make the garden beds deeper you know less lawn deeper garden beds you know if you’re thinking of a pot make it slightly bigger than what it should be you know a whole lot of little pots is

Not as effective as a group of of of larger pots also you’re very well known for a classical very clipped very tailored approach which is very smart you’ve been talking about getting a bit softer um so tell me a bit more about that so this book is is about my journey

In garden design and I started in the 1980s you know when things were formal think of you know roseme in the UK and we were very influenced in Australia particularly about from English Gardens and English garden designers so formality was everything back then that’s what my formative VI

Were you know creating gards that were very formal I still love formal layouts I just think a formal layout always works for my mind a classical layout lasts forever it seems to be timeless but we’re getting a rid of a lot of the hedging you know the hedging is labor

Intensive we got the problems with all the box and now we’re going softer so cutting out the hedging so much and doing lots and lots of perennial planting so I know that’s popular in Europe but it’s particularly popular here and it’s great because a lot of the perennials are very Hardy they don’t

Mind our cold Winters they don’t mind our hot dry Summers you know a lot of them are doing really well and don’t need much water so softness is coming you know lots and lots of diversity in in perennial plantings and mass plantings of of those perennials and I

Think that you know what inspires garden design is to to keep evolving I think that you know Evol in is very important I’ve been going for 40 years you can’t do the same look if I was doing the same super formal Gardens I was doing back in the 1980s I probably wouldn’t wouldn’t

Be working as much as I am today so you know inspiration what inspires you to keep creating different looks and a big part of that is travel so you know there’s a big chapter in there on you know me visiting Gardens that have similar climates to Australia so Iran

Syria Jordan you know parts of Italy Greece you know going to visit those places and seeing how if those really ancient civilizations used to Garden in very hot dry climates was was very inspirational for me so you know and and books that that influence me magazines that influence me podcasts like yours or

You know so I think inspiration is a big part of the book and and mentors you know there’s a lot of mentors in in there that were very important to me as I was growing up David Hicks for instance that you know your great designer was became a very close friend

And he was just hugely inspirational to me talking about these mentors and how they influenced a young designer so there’s there’s there’s lots more in there than just Gardens yes there is no it’s a really readable book actually I really enjoyed it yeah and one of the

Things about the garden here is it’s divided into Garden rooms now what would you advise people if they’re thinking about dividing even with a much smaller Garden you know the middle-sized garden is sort of under an acre but you know you could have someone with a long thin Garden in a town what

Would you say about dividing into rooms I just think it creates a more interesting Garden like if you can see the whole Garden in one GL glance it tends to you know you get that view it’s all over and done within no time but if

There’s areas that your eye is Led on to then you that process of discovery and enticement is what creates interest and drama in a garden so you know even if you’ve got a quarter acre or half an acre you know just don’t divide into too many rooms but just create spaces that

You can’t see all at the one time and then you know maybe even it’s just a curve path that’s winding through deep beds of penals and you know that path’s taking you somewhere but you can’t see where it’s taking you that’s really interesting and that’s what people love

You know looking at and seeing seeing in the garden so you know I think that the Garden Room principal still holds up to this to the this day here here at stonefields ours was largely jous response to environment so we’re sitting on top of a hill you get this lovely

View down the valley and it’s windy it’s just really really windy and so you know I wanted to create the effect of a wall Garden so it a garden more resilience for me is always looking to plants that are more native to the area so more endemic to

The area that that always helps drought resistant plants and you know Ju Just being aware of what the surrounding landscape is requiring of you you know don’t pave over whole areas you know allow for drainage allow for water to seep into the ground using plants that

Don’t need so much water um just being conscious of of the environment and how that envir environment is changing but for you know for the the gardens we do in Australia it really is incorporating a lot more Australian native plants you know that’s been the big movement here

And it’s been a really great movement and you work in both the states and in Britain and all over the world basically so how do you approach the native plants issue in different countries well it’s kind of funny because you know you go I go to England and we got a little house

In England so we’re getting to to know the plant material there a lot more but plants that we would say are exotic in Australia like Oaks and Elms and and those species are endemic to to to England so you know I would call them exotic in in England so you know it’s

It’s just learning what is is native to that area and that I find you you you you can learn by visiting nurseries visiting the botanical gardens I think the botanical gardens are always a great resource and just just driving around and seeing what’s growing in the forests

You know in the local forests around there and that’ll teach you what will do well in that area and in terms of hard landscaping and resilience yeah what are you sort of moving towards and what are you moving away from we I mean we we are moving away from lots of

Paving like you know it used to be that Paving was was really sort of easy to do and sort of durable you know you could do a lot of things on it you could set a lot of furniture up on it you could have play on it but now we’re using a lot

More perious material so that might be gravels you know creating Gardens within gravel areas Ground Covers as opposed to lawn so it’s not so intensive in terms of chemical and mowing all the time and just thinking about how the water moves through the garden like you know

Obviously a lot of hard Landscaping it just channels water in the drains that’s what we’re trying to avoid and when you say Ground Covers could you give us a few suggestions for some good ground covers that aren’t Lawns we experimenting with this a lot because the big question is Lawns have been such

A great feature of gardens for so long you have kids they’re just such wonderful areas to play on aren’t they so we’re we’re using a lot of dandras they’re they’re proving quite tough in terms of traffic movement on top of them and we’ve got a native Violet in

Australia called Violet Viola heter racy that’s proving to be quite tough zoia the grass zoia I don’t know whether that grows in the UK it might be slightly too cold for zoas but zoas are a great grass don’t need Mowing and take a lot of wear

And tear so in fact what what you might say is that if you go to your native grasses anywhere then that’s going to mean less care isn’t it but I mean we I mean lot of the Native grasses are too big to walk on so you’ve got to youve

Got to be careful what you what you actually plant I mean the zoia still stays quite low I think it’s a Japanese grass in fact but it it doesn’t need much water and it doesn’t need Mowing and it’s just great and it gives you that sort of lumpy bumpy sort of softer

Feeling to the to the lawn space and what about things like chamomile and herbs or is it they just don’t tread on well they just don’t tread on well and they tend to like chamomile tends to you know gets too wet it rots out doesn’t winter over winter very well so you know

Time we are using a lot of time like the little time of sehim is is working out quite well but again if you walk on that too much it does tend to wear out and what about moss Lawns well Moss lawns in Australia don’t work because we’re just

Too hot and too dry here but you know you got Shady spots and damp spots in the UK and parts of America works extremely well and in terms of the actual hard landscaping materials what would you advise people to sort of look at and what would you advise them to

Steer away from well again we’re talking about resilience and sustainability we don’t want to be importing materials from overseas so look to your local Stone materials I mean you know our little house in the cots we use our local cotsell Stone it’s fantastic it comes from 2 miles down the road and I

Think that’s extremely sustainable you know in Australia we’ve been great culprits of importing everything from China it’s relatively close to us but you know it’s there’s a lot of miles there’s a lot of carbon miles in importing Stone from China sadly at one stage it was a terrible indictment that

We were cutting out Sandstone which is one of the great materials of Australia the whole of Sydney’s made from sandstone as is Tasmania and we were sending blocks of the Sandstone to China to be cut into pavas and then brought back again because it was cheaper to do

It in China was just bad so bad for the environment so you know look look to what is is local in your area you know local stones are the things we we tend to be using or gravels from our area um brick do you use much brick we don’t use

Much brick it’s coming back into fashion you know it was really quite popular here in the 70s and ‘ 80s and then went totally out of fash but it’s coming totally back into fashion again recycled bricks I think are a really great sustainable material and what about wood

Well wood we a lot of Timber decking is used it tends to rot out tends to need a lot of Maintenance we are and I I hate to say this but we are looking at a lot of recycled plastic modwood we call it here which is very durable lasts forever and

It’s made from recycled plastic so it tends to be a great thing I’m not a fan of fake materials like fake grass or fake wood but this is actually a very good product so if you’d like to find out more about Paul bang life in garden design there’s a link in the description

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