Front Garden Fruit and Herbs Design

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Design for small suburban front garden.

Featuring:

• Herb Spiral with perennial kitchen herbs (use Rosmarinus prostrate 'Spicata' for the top, as this is dwarfing and trailing in habit)
• Pear, Apple and Plum trees with a fan-trained Cherry 
• Herbaceous planting for cullinary and medicinal uses, for pollinators and other beneficial insect life
• Raspberries, Gooseberries, Blackcurrants, Strawberries and Rhubarb with wild strawberry (fragaria vesca) groundcover
• Rose bed with sorrel, strawberry, garlic-chive (Allium tuberosum) and french sorrel (Rumex acetosa)ground cover

Garden is West-facing (sun coming from the left)

Landscaping stage complete... ready for the plants and trees to go in!

Garden under construction..

mounded beds covered with cardboard and woodchips

nice helping of horse manure... the layers in this bed are original soil, old lawn, cuttings from clearance, cardboard, horse manure, organic soil improver/compost topsoil, straw mulch. into this will be planted the berry bushes and a grouncover of strawberries

the clippings and brush from the initial garden clearance were shredded and piled underneath the new mounded beds - worm food! over time this will break down and be added to the soil.

An image of this garden is featured on an american website gardens.com:

Kitchen Garden

This is a garden design currently in the conceptual stages. The clients asked for a kitchen garden that would provide fresh herbs, salads, beans and some root vegetables. The design includes a small Forest Garden, mandala planting beds and also an organic solution to some drainage issues using french drains and willow.

Ecological Garden

This Garden was designed for a client in Oxford. The aim was to mix form with function - at the house-end of the design (south) is mainly a formalised design language gradually molding into a naturalistic style at the North end of the garden. The white rendered walls at the house end are in keeping with the finish of the house, whilst the more wooded northerly end of the garden aims to mimic the surrounding countryside on a micro scale.

The plants chosen were all selected from the local biodiversity index, so they can all be found in the surrounding area. These were combined with a few exceptions and a few fruit and nut providing plants, so there is a slight Forest Garden element in the design.

This garden has now been built, photos to come soon...

Designed and draughted by Marcus Busby and Dario Balboni