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3 tips for making the most of small garden spaces

Australian celebrity landscape gardener Charlie Albone has some smart ideas for working magic in small garden spaces

Small spaces

The small garden is the way of the future. As blocks of land shrink and houses get bigger, sadly it’s the garden that suffers – so it’s imperative you get the space right and make it feel as large as possible.

Even if you have a big garden, there will be a corner to which you can apply small-space gardening practices, thus maximising your outdoor experience, too.

The first thing I like to do in a small space is to blur the boundary edges of the garden. When the eye is drawn to a definite boundary, such as the point where fences meet in corners and where they touch the ground, the space immediately feels smaller. Well-positioned patches of greenery will soften the visible edges of the space and remove obvious sightlines, ensuring that the space appears larger to the eye.

If this point is a junction of hard surfaces, such as two bench seats meeting in a corner, then try to break up the solid vertical and horizontal lines with some soft furnishings, such as cushions. You could also add a textural detail to the surface – decorative panelling (wainscoting) works well for a vertical surface.

Bag of tricks

Deceiving the eye is key when it comes to successful small-space gardening, as this will make the area as a whole feel much larger than it is.

A focal point such as a sculpture is a lovely way to add a personal touch to a space and draw the eye into the garden. For long and skinny spaces, try including diagonal pathways and sightlines as these will accentuate the length of the space and thus make it feel bigger.

Throwing the eye out past the boundaries of your own garden and towards your neighbours’ scenery – utilising the borrowed landscape – is a great way to increase the visual size of your space. This can be as simple as incorporating the canopy of surrounding trees into your garden design.

People are often worried that plants will take over and congest a small garden area; however, the right amount of clever planting has the amazing ability to make a garden feel spacious. I like to play a trick where I use oversized foliage for my main feature plants to fool the eye into thinking the space is bigger than it is. If you do the opposite and have only small-leafed plants, then the space feels too busy and crowded. Ideally, you want a mixture of leaf textures and sizes to fill up the space yet allow comfortable movement around the garden.

Clever plant choices

Having lots of plants is great, but you have to walk the fine line between an appealing garden and an overgrown jungle. You need to be smart in the way you use plants in a small space, and try to get a lot of bang for your buck. So think outside the square and plant on the vertical plane.

Upright plantings – such as capital pear (Pyrus calleryana ‘Capital’) and slimline camellias – work well, but using walls to your advantage is actually a smarter way to add greenery to tight places. Growing climbers such as star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) on wires is a cost-effective solution; better still, look for climbers that can hold themselves fairly flat against a wall and will support themselves as they grow upwards, such as creeping fig (Ficus pumila) or Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata).

If you don’t want to take up any space on the ground, you can look for a high-impact feature such as a vertical garden (otherwise known as a green wall). However, these are not for the budget conscious, as top-quality ones range in price from $1200 to $2500/sqm. Although they’re expensive, these fancy vertical gardens will really give your small garden a huge lift and draw you out into the space.
If you have a little more real estate for plants, don’t be scared of including trees in your small-space garden – just be sure to select the right types. Certain maples (Acer species), dwarf fruit trees and specimens that can be pruned to a small size – such as crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) – add scale and a sense of maturity to a garden, along with a canopy that provides privacy and filtered light to understorey plants.

When looking at your remaining shrubs and perennials, research the varieties. Select the smaller and more compact ones, not the standard ones. For example, Liriope is a genus of strappy-leafed flowering plants that add structure to garden beds, and there are many different cultivars, from ‘Evergreen Giant’, which grows to 60 centimetres in height, to ‘Pink Pearl’, which reaches only 25 centimetres high. Choosing the right variety will give you a garden that looks well designed and not wildly overcrowded.

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