Whether you’re making a feature of it or trying to obscure it, certain clever rules will help you make the most of your garden’s boundary. Helen Elks-Smith and James Scott offer their expert advice
The dream for most garden owners is not to have a boundary at all – given a choice we’d probably all prefer an unbroken ‘borrowed’ view, preferably of idyllic countryside or suitably breathtaking scenery. The reality for many of us is that some sort of boundary at the border of our gardens, or between us and our neighbours, is essential. So, given that most of us aren’t gazing at our estate over a hidden ha-ha, how best can we treat our boundaries for maximum aesthetic appeal?
Helen Elks-Smith, of Elks-Smith Landscape & Garden Design (elks-smith.co.uk) says that even in an urban garden there’ll still be a landscape you can draw on to help your garden feel less hemmed in. “You think you haven’t got a wider landscape, but if you stop, pause and look up, actually you do,” she maintains. “First look for the things you don’t want to look at – a building or somebody’s window, something like that – but then the chances are that there’ll also be something quite nice: a patch of sky, a tree or a shrub in the distance – something green that you can connect up to.” The trick, according to Helen, is making visual connections to those things.
“When you’re sitting in a garden with strong linear elements like a fence or a wall, they give you that feeling of being slightly hemmed in – like you’re sitting inside a fortress. You want to try to change what you’re looking at, so if you’re standing looking at your fence and someone has a tree or shrub in the distance, put something that’s a similar shape in your own garden to break that fence or wall line. Your brain will pull these elements together and the fence or boundary immediately becomes less dominant,” she says.
“The other thing you can do,” she adds, “is to break that wall up. So you might have a block of a climber and then a bit of fence showing, and then maybe a shrub – to get some visual ‘push-pull’ on the boundary, where some elements come towards you and some recede and you break up those linear elements. That can work really nicely.”
Although it seems counterintuitive, your garden will feel bigger if you can’t see a hard boundary. Sacrificing space for deep planting that completely hides its edges
