The Era of Instant Gardens Is Over

When I started out in garden design, I would do rather naive black-and-white sketches in an attempt to convey my design ideas. They were hit and miss. One client asked if I would colour in my sketches so they could get more of a feel for the garden. I was reluctant, because how could I even start to conjure up the garden in all its different guises, and across its entire lifespan?

Somehow I managed to convince them of my design, and went on to build the garden, but I shall never forget their faces when the plants turned up – little pots of seemingly bare soil and twigs. It wasn’t the instant garden they were hoping for. But three years later, almost to the day, I got a call to thank me. “We get it now,” they said. “The garden is wonderful.”

These days, seductive CGI images show picture-perfect gardens you can even fly through on screen. Add in the many influencer videos on social media, and it adds up to quite a skewed perspective on how quickly and easily a garden can be transformed. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when some clients expect their gardens to be amazing on day one.