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Contemporary Wildlife Garden
By West Yorkshire based garden designer Tracy Foster MSGD. This small, awkwardly shaped suburban garden overlooked by surrounding houses was redesigned following the construction of a new extension with a huge picture window.
The owner’s dream was to look out onto a fabulous, ever changing view with a large pond and the prospect of visiting wildlife.
The design uses interlocking rectangles of pond and paved areas to fit together around the extension. These are the shapes that define the structure of the garden. Dark fencing allows the planting to stand out and makes the garden feel larger and the generous planting blurs the boundary and disguises the awkward shape of the garden.
The owner loves wildlife but in such a small garden a formal style of pond worked much better. However it has shelves for planting and a set of ‘wildlife steps’ so that visiting hedgehogs and other creatures can easily climb in and out and take cover in the lush planting nearby.
Plants by the window were chosen to represent a meadow and from the house the pond is viewed through a veil of tall grasses and flowers that dance in the sunlight.
Elsewhere there are cottage garden perennials, fragrant and aromatic shrubs, climbers and perennials, to complement the existing apple tree and berries. Bees, Butterflies, Dragon flies and other insects bring the whole space to life in summer, there are suitable plants to provide nesting material for birds and small mammals and of course there are hedgehog holes in the base of the fence to allow these prickly characters to come and go safely.
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Designed by Tracy Foster MSGD
Other gardens by this designer