Small Family Garden

The brief for this garden was to create a low maintenance family garden with all year colour, somewhere to sit and eat, and to also keep the shed and the vegetable planter.  The soil gets quite claggy in the winter as it is generally clay and is in the flood plain area near Ashford in Kent so planting had to be appropriate.  The client was happy with the design and the garden was built by Outdoor Creations once again.  I will upload some photos of the finished garden when I get some.

Terrace Design Photos

I have been sent some photos of the terrace area that has been built by Outdoor Creations and I thought I would share them with you.  I am very pleased with the result, as is the client, so big hugs all round!

 All photos by Graeme from Outdoor Creations.

Terrace Design

One of my designs has finally been built!  Those nice people at Outdoor Creations asked me to accompany them to a client near Brands Hatch to see if I had any suggestions for a terraced area to the rear of a rather nice property in the country. 
So, I had a ponder and decided that there should be room for entertaining with enough room to walk around and there should also be enclosure from the planting.  I wanted to use a dark coloured stone and luckily the client decided to go for a dark granite inlaid with some hardwood timber.  I drew up two versions and sent them off and the client decided to go with the second option without the raised planters.

The original plan with dining area and seating area with raised planters

The revised plan without seating area and ground level planting 

Outdoor Creations doing their thing, creating...outdoors

So, before...

...still before...

...and still before...

...and now, all shiny and new.

Planting at the Olympic Park

 I thought you might like to see some of the planting styles at the Olympic Park.  It has a definite wild meadow look about it with different areas showing or representing different areas of the world.  Some areas were looking better than others but all in all it looked very good and very colourful, I just hope it gets the chance to reseed itself and thrive from here.

Some gabions and EPDM for you Landscape Architects, ooh!

However, there were a couple of large screens cleverly located in the river with banks either side so people could view them easily.  We were there in the first week before the atheletics stadium had opened and people were already trampling the planting and sitting in the bioswales!  "Mum, my bum feels a bit wet!"  Still, as long as we can all herd together and watch tv.

The Olympics

Well, the Olympics, did it happen?  Was it real?  Two weeks of national glory and then it's gone.  We went to see a couple of hockey matches along with all of the Aussies, Dutch and Belgians.  May I say that the Dutch band is way better than the British band, a bit of Volare by an oompah band, lovely.

It was a bit strange to see such cheerfulness in East London (well any part of London), people being jolly, supporting GB and no snarling.  And even though there was the largest burger restaurant (!) in the world from a company whose name shall not be mentioned here, no litter!  Plenty of Wombles about doing their stuff.

 It's the fashion in East London these days, me and Dizzee, soulmates.

So, it was very good, well done to all.  I thought it was ironic that the Who played Teenage Wasteland at the closing ceremony, the future perchance?