15 ideas to steal from a professional garden designer

We can all take notes from Andy Sturgeon's small courtyard garden at his Brighton home.

Acclaimed garden designer Andy is back for Chelsea Flower Show 2022 with The Mind Garden for mental health charity Mind – but this will be his final Chelsea. 'It's a funny one. In many ways I owe my career to this, but I think my time is probably done. I don't know what more I can get out of it,' he told The Telegraph.

Over the years, Andy's won an admirable eight medals, including the highest accolade of them all, Best Show Garden, three times. The Gold medal winner's last Best in Show award was for his M&G Garden at the 2019 Chelsea Flower Show, which the judges called 'perfection'.

Back in 2020, as part of RHS Chelsea's virtual show, Andy gave a tour of his garden, providing some great garden design ideas for small spaces, from planting choices to lighting. Hopefully these tips will give you inspiration for your own outdoor space.

Andy's new courtyard garden was only finished last year.

'My own garden is only about 10m by 7m and designing it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,' says Andy. 'I wanted to put everything in it but you can’t. The key to being a good designer is being brave enough to leave stuff out – you end up with what you need, but not necessarily what you want. It’s a compromise, but if you haven’t got much space you’ve just got to get over it.'

When it comes to designing a garden, it really pays to spend time planning.

'What we did was we sat down and drew up a list, so lounger area, storage, dining table, somewhere to cook, a pond, and of course lots and lots of plants,' says Andy.

When Andy was designing his garden, he restored the flint walls to its former glory: 'I had these amazing flint walls which are probably 180 years old, as old as the house, and all I had to do was pull all the ivy and the old trellis off and reveal them in their full beauty.'

Choose fencing that offers privacy and security, as Andy explains: 'On top of the walls I put cedar slats, this is good for security as burglars find it hard to climb because they can't support a person’s weight, but they also give a bit more privacy from the neighbours. And most importantly of all, they're an opportunity to grow plants.'

A beautiful array of plans is a surefire way of creating a vibrant, colourful garden, but there's another trick.

On the other side of Andy's garden was just a tumbled down brick wall, so he covered it in charred black timber. 'It's a trick I learned from Chelsea Flower Show last year, where putting a black backdrop means that you can just show off the amazing green plants in front,' he explains.

'The other thing about using that in a small garden like this, is the black recedes so actually it can make the garden feel a little bit bigger as it just kind of recedes into the shadows. You can get the same effect just by painting a brick wall or a fence just black, really simple.'

With small gardens, every square inch is precious. Andy says he made sure there was just enough space to walk around behind the chairs and dedicated more space to planting around the paved areas.

'I really hate it when gardens have paved from wall to wall, it makes it really soulless,' he says.

Small garden? You don't always have to ensure everything is small in size.

Andy explains: 'By bringing in huge lumps of the stone, by bringing massive things into a big space, a big pond, big rocks, big furniture, that actually works. If you flood a space with lots of small things, it makes it feel cluttered, small and claustrophobic.'

'The worktop and storage unit are cast concrete, it was made in situ rather than dragging anything big and heavy through the house, but the colour works really well with the Purbeck stone,' explains Andy. 'It's important in a small garden not to mix too many materials because it can look like a right dog's dinner.'

This is a really great garden idea, maximising space and taking every opportunity to plant, even in small spaces.

'Between the paving, I've put strips of Mind-your-own-business, the reason for that is because it means when it rains, instead of all the water going into the drains it actually goes down and into the ground and that's much better for the urban environment,' says Andy. 'I love this particular plant because where it gets walked on it's nice and tight and compact, and where it's under the chairs and out of the way it just goes wild and crazy.

'It’s just another opportunity to squeeze in a little bit more planting.'

'People talk of using small trees in small gardens but that's actually completely the wrong approach. You should be talking about using large shrubs.'

Although, if going on the small side, Andy recommends Osmanthus aquifolium (Holly Olive) for its amazing sculptural stems.

Great for wildlife and a fantastic focal point in a garden, a pond was at the top of Andy's list when he was planning his garden design.

'I grew up in a garden with a pond so I just had to have one in my own garden, it's one of the reasons I got into gardening in the first place,' says Andy. 'The brilliant thing about that is it masks the sound of traffic here in the town and you know all the neighbours are pretty close together so it cuts out some of that noise.

'This pond is about half a meter high, some of it's buried in the ground so it’s actually deeper than it looks, but it's just high enough so cats can’t fish into it from here or down from the rocks, so it just protects the fish a little bit.'

'This garden's south facing, it can get incredibly warm, but actually you can create micro climates even in a tiny garden, so by planting a tree or a shrub above you create the shade down below, and that's allowed me to have all these marvellous gems which I used at Chelsea last year.'

In this part of Andy's garden you'll find Cypripedium orchids, Beesia and ferns, to name a few.

On the other side of Andy's garden are plants which love the sun. In the sunnier, open parts of his garden you'll find Digitalis canariensis (Canary Island foxglove), which Andy says is a 'really well behaved' compact plant for a small garden.

There are also euphorbias and agapanthus, amongst others. 'I’ve got too many plants but I love it,' he adds.

'When the sun goes down, the garden transforms and when you don't have much space you need to make the most of it,' says Andy.

So what garden lighting tips can we learn here?

'I’ve got down lighters on the trees and shrubs casting a warm glow over the paving, uplighters on the trunks turning them into living sculptures, and then there are wall washers grazing the flints and picking out the rough texture of the walls,' he explains.

And there's more – among the planting there are small spotlights creating a romantic glow and, what Andy's describes as his 'favourite trick', is a light shining down onto the water surface which projects the ripples up onto the surrounding walls.

• Visit Andy Sturgeon's website here.

• For more gardening inspiration, visit the RHS website.

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