Create a modern garden

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Whatever size or shape garden you have, you can create a contemporary style following these three rules:

  1. Crisp, clean design lines with geometric forms
  2. The use of natural, timeless materials (such as stone, concrete, hardwood…even steel)
  3. Co-ordinated colour palettes

A modern garden is the opposite of a traditional English Cottage garden where plants can roam free and pathways and borders are curved and organic. Modern gardens are dynamic yet relaxing with clean lines and order. Plants reflect the architecture and water is often added for movement.

Bring the outside in

With the rise in popularity of bi-fold doors leading out onto the garden, it is now, more than ever, important that your home interior style flows out into the garden and that the two compliment each other.

Design and Landscape

  • Clean lines – pathways and borders should be fuss free
  • Feature walls – light coloured rendered, composite, venetian slats with up lighting.
  • Screening – create privacy and seclusion with plants for instant screening.
  • Geometric seating areas (avoid soft, curved patterns)
  • Glass (Balustrades)
  • Organised planting – focus on simple colours, evergreens and fixed colour schemes to avoid colour clashes
  • Angular hard landscaping
  • Water features
  • Materials – concrete, stone
  • Clipped hedges, specimen trees, blocks or drift planting
  • Topiary

Which plants to use?

Here are some of our most popular large evergreen shrubs we recommend at the nursery:

For a more formal or contemporary look, use box balls and topiary cones in bay or yew to provide the perfect backdrop for more seasonal bulbs and flowers. It’s important to ensure your shrubs will thrive in your specific garden conditions so check how much light it will receive, and the soil conditions and we’ll help you choose.  

Instant Screening

  • Pleached Trees
  • Evergreen Shrubs
  • Trees
  • Living screens
  • Evergreen Hedging
  • Deciduous Hedging
  • Bamboo

<Click here for more information on instant screening>

Things to avoid:

  • Messy planting and unmaintained lawns/shrubs/hedges.
  • Soft, curved edges
  • Pathways that weave through the garden
  • Aged materials & planting, old trees
  • Clutter!
  • Avoid planting colour clashes – everything must be well thought out