Glorious garden ideas from 5 country village gardens...

I've just visited five stunning gardens in a picturesque country village in England and there's lots of ideas for your own gardens. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and I'm often asked for my recommendations when visiting gardens and one of the first things I say is go to the NGS, the National Garden Scheme, and find a garden near you. There are some big famous gardens in the NGS but most of it is private gardens and of course private gardens are the ones that you will be able to relate to most and one of the things they've been doing is building up their group open gardens. So what I went to see was five of the gardens in a group open gardens in a village called Stanton. Stanton is in the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire and it's absolutely picture postcard beautiful. Of course all the traditional things like the dairy and the forge and the post office and the shop are now homes but the conversion has been very sensitive and it is still the very idea of what anyone might think an English country village would be. Because the Cotswolds are hills, all the gardens are sloping in one way or another, so I'm going to start with the smallest of the gardens. In the country you generally expect gardens to be bigger than in town but Elaine and Kevin's garden is actually really quite a small garden for a country garden but it is beautiful, it's so perfect. It slopes down away from the house so there's a seating terrace near the house, an arch and then a central path that slopes downwards towards another terrace at the bottom of the garden where there's a fountain, a pond, a bench, some planting and behind that is a greenhouse and a potting shed. I also love the way Kevin and Elaine manage their colors. There's lots of green and white but they've also got clumps of pink and blue, really pretty clumps where they're planting together quite similar shades of different plants and that I think is really effective. When Elaine and Kevin moved in there were several established trees in the garden but they removed most of the lower branches so that they could create light and space for planting which is of course a very good option rather than removing trees altogether. So from the smallest garden in the group to one of the largest, Liz Philpott's garden slopes upward away from the house to the open countryside although the house is in the center of the village. With a large garden there's a limit to how much use you can make of terracing because obviously it's very expensive, so apart from terraces near the house they've also got a terrace halfway up where they like to sit in the evening watching the bats swoop and dive around the pond. There's a stream running down this garden and their predecessors put a pond in halfway up. Liz has used the slope very effectively for planting, obviously when you're planting a large garden it can be very expensive and she said that after renovating the house there wasn't much budget left so she's had to go with plants that she can get easily, grow herself from seed or propagate, so she's used really large clumps of groups of plants to create splashes of color around the garden and I think that's a really effective way of making the most of quite a big space. This border is essentially a raised bed although obviously the raising is the slope of the garden. She's got geranium macrorhizum and several other things and I'll just take you round through this border with just a little bird song in the Another thing that a large garden needs is seating areas so that you can look at different parts of the garden and as well as near the house and halfway up the garden they've also got a little bench that looks over the garden to the side and then in one corner they've got a wilder seating area. Although most of the lawns are well maintained and quite short they've also got a long grass area beside two ancient apple trees and some vintage rocking chairs and once again look at the trees these are very very old apple trees and they're gathering moss and lichen but the moss and lichen isn't going to kill them and it gives a lovely texture. Another thing to check out when you're visiting gardens is how they've managed the hard landscaping. Liz achieved her lifelong ambition to get a greenhouse and so the paths around the greenhouse are made with the leftover greenhouse bricks and that's not just an economy, it just makes it look much more harmonious and similarly the pavers on the terraces are made of a Cotswold stone that's very close to the Cotswold stone of the house. Jackie Jones Parry's house is a former farmhouse and in the old days farmhouses always had a big pond next to them where the livestock could drink and it could be used as a source of water for all the farm activities and about half of Jackie's garden is taken up with what must have been the old farm pond and this means that trees are also a really big part of Jackie's garden and what I think we can take from this is when you're planning a border, quite often you will be advised to think about foliage contrast but it's much rarer that people remind you to think about contrasting your trees. Here there's a fantastic weeping willow which is very good for stoking up extra water and it contrasts with a nice sharp shape of a conifer of trees that have been beautifully sculpted and are quite geometric and then other trees that are much more relaxed and wild such as the variegated sycamore. It's just a beautiful peaceful site and it's done by contrasting the foliage and the shapes of trees. What is important to remember is of course you have to maintain trees properly and that can be expensive although you usually only have to do it about once every three to five years. Another thing I think we can take from Jackie's garden is the use of climbers up the house. It used to be that in the UK most houses had climbers up them, it was just normal but over the past few decades builders and decorators have very much advised against it. It is very difficult for them to work around climbers and also there are some climbers that can cause damage to brickwork particularly if the brickwork's not in good condition. You would need to research climbers quite carefully to make sure you got the right ones if you want climbers up your house but most of them are not damaging. Jackie has got Virginia creeper, hydrangea and grapevine. Jenny's garden was originally designed by her predecessors and what they have left is a very formal parterre area with an urn in it. Jenny's garden slopes sideways rather than up and down and it's quite a gentle slope so on the whole it hasn't had too much impact on the garden. The parterre has cut into it but up towards the side she's got some what could almost be called raised beds but it's actually making the most of the slope plus some arches and a path along that and around the corner from the formal area she's created a wildlife patch with piles of logs and an old roller and plants that just self-seed themselves so there's a lovely contrast here between very formal and very wild and Jackie Tucker's garden is also a wonderful balance between structure, good planting and a certain amount of wildness. Once again garden visitors should pause to admire the trees. Right in the center of the lawn Jackie has got an ancient sycamore, it's really quite old and many people would have been tempted to cut it down and make the lawn more open but actually a very old tree offers huge benefits to the garden. It gives it a sense of age, a distinction, it adds vertical interest, this tree frames both the building and the garden. The older a tree is, the more valuable it is to the environment around it, so it's wonderful that Jackie has left that tree there. And once again this is a garden with short mown lawns but a certain amount of contrast, she's got a beautiful sculpture in one corner and around it is a wild semi-wild planting, she's planted a rose and some other things but she's also allowed things like plantains to soften the planting and it looks so pretty. Over by her log store things like Linaria Cannon-Went have just popped up, they chose to be they're not self-seeded from her garden, she doesn't know where they came from, but they just add a little something and she does also have some very unusual plants. In the corner of the garden she's grown a massive Paul's Himalayan Musk right up to the top of a tree and this is beautifully fragrant, so this is another thing you can use trees for is to show off climbers. And then if you go beyond the Paul's Himalayan Musk you'll find something that I really don't think you've seen before and that's a tortoise garden. Jackie has tortoises and so she's created a little gated area where there's planting for food and shelter and they're so happy there that they actually laid six eggs which she managed to hatch in an incubator and all six survived. You can find which gardens are open by going to mgs find a garden and one of the things you'll have noticed is that I've talked a lot about how important trees are in creating the atmosphere in a garden, so don't miss this next video and what you need to know before you call in a tree surgeon or charge up your chainsaw because actually how you treat your trees will make a huge difference to their impact and thank you for watching. Goodbye!