Glam Up Your Garden
Landscape designer Franchesca Watson explains how to add glamour to your garden with sophisticated lighting, the newest trend in pruning and creative screen play
When lighting up your trees, do so from their base – place them on the side of the tree that faces your terrace so that it shines up the tree and not towards the terrace. Place submersible lights in water features, but only if the water is filtered in some way and therefore clean. Gentle lights in the middle of a shrub in a pot gives a lovely soft glow. If you have a great wall of creeper such as tickey creeper or Boston ivy which is neatly clipped, place lights to wash up the wall for a wonderful texture. Try out the cost-effective solarpowered spike lights available – pop them in all over the garden to create your own instant wonderland.
These are wonderful to cut out ugly views and also to link spaces to your garden where you are unable to plant, such as walls alongside your front door. Choose a pattern of leaves or twigs for a botanical influence and perhaps be a little daring with colour. If placed against a wall, put a strip of LED lights at the base to shine up behind for instant glamour. planting is below the lawn level. This also works particularly well for steps.
Gone are lollipops. The new topiary stylises nature. Think Japanese cloud trees, bamboo with the lower leaves stripped off to create a less clumpy feel and shrubs cleaned up from the base to expose the wonderful bendy architecture of the plants. My best are curvy, wandering hedges with rounded humpy tops and sides – easily and quickly done with plumbago if you can’t wait too long.