We should admire the complexity of garden design

There’s much more to it than wafting around in a kaftan.

Photo by Lydia Goldblatt / Millennium Images, UK

The other week I sat on a stage with Proper Garden Designer Pollyanna Wilkinson. We were discussing her new book, How to Design a Garden (a rare example of a garden book that debuts in the Sunday Times bestsellers list), and I enjoyed drilling into the mysterious Venn diagram of taste, horticulture and practicality that manifests as garden design.

I’m not a garden designer, and I’ve never professed to be one. I’ve delved into a number of garden-design books and usually grown overwhelmed by the time a site survey is mentioned. I struggle to measure so much as a cake tin, let alone a garden. I have always gardened and cooked imprecisely: with hunch and sense, trial and error, and observation. Bulbs go in late, quantities are played around with, sunlight is measured by eye and the near-daily study of how it moves with the changing seasons. It works for me, but I wouldn’t inflict it on anyone else’s space.

This is why I find garden designers so interesting. They apply the creative vision necessary to evoke a feeling or capture the fleeting beauty of a particular morning in June – with the cold, hard realism of someone who knows how a patio should be laid. They dance in the rarely discussed hinterland of what we want from our gardens and how we actually use them. A case in point: I felt very seen by Wilkinson’s admission that she imagined herself “wafting around my garden in a kaftan and sipping Champagne, hosting sumptuous feasts”. I have also imagined this. The most I have actually served outside in recent years is booze, birthday cake and the occasional Deliveroo, usually consumed while under a blanket. It’s just easier not to have to cart it all out there. (Wilkinson also acknowledged that she is yet to reach her kaftan era: instead, she’s running a business and raising two football-playing children.)

Our conversation happened days before my husband and I went house-hunting. Viewings are an equally strange mix of desire and reality: can you imagine your life playing out between the walls that currently hold another? Can you contemplate using a different station or a new high street? Can you ever get your head around the insanity that is London’s house prices? And, in my case: does this garden feel like it could be mine?

In the brief seconds when the toddler wasn’t terrorising a resident cat, I tried to take in the gardens. My own tiny site survey of a stranger’s backyard: where the sun fell; where the space to plant things was, or could be; what kind of trees were there, and what birds. Where would I waft in a kaftan? (I wouldn’t.) Where could we entertain the notion of entertaining?

Part of the problem, I think, is the lack of realistic garden media. Someone messaged me recently asking where they could find inspiration that felt relevant to them – not from the expanse of a walled garden filled with golden-hour-captured grasses, but “gardens where people have come up with a way to make a breeze-block wall look less wall-y, or how to introduce some privacy in an overlooked estate garden, or to allow a regimented garden to go wild again”? It stumped me a bit. When I first started posting about my balcony on Instagram a decade ago, this was the space I was trying to fill. Then everything on social media got a bit more glossy – even if the reality is that I have to remove fox shit from my bench before sitting on it.

I suspect we need to embrace the reality of gardening – proper, at-home, cheap-daffs-and-some-ugly-hard-landscaping gardening – a bit more. Bring on the patchy lawns and the slug-munched tulips, the half-planted experiments and the overgrown shrubs. That’s where a particular kind of life exists. And as for making a breeze-block wall less wall-y, I suggested my correspondent acknowledge its brutality with contrast: the swaying heads of umbellifers such as fennel and mathiasella would cast swoony shadows on that harsh grey.