The Ultimate Small Garden Makeover: An Outdoor Dining Room Anyone Can Create!

It's so easy for a patio to become a forgotten space. A few tired old pots, a bench, maybe a table. I'm going to show you how to turn that small space into a really useful outdoor room. You remember the patio, fresh cleaned, and we've got these wheeled planters here painted in a colour called warm clay, and they're just crying out now for the planting, which you'll see us right the way through the summer, to turn this into a dining area that you're just dying to be in. I'm starting off by putting in some sort of framework plant. It's always a good idea to get them standing up straight and keep going back. Now you look when you get to stand like this. So my main sort of focal pointy bits in, and then I'll fill in around them. I want height, I want to create sort of floral and foliage walls, something which is giving you a kind of stained glass window effect that you can look through and still see a bit of structure. These are standard lollipop versions of Ilex cronata, that small-leaved holly. Doesn't get box blight, doesn't get box moth, but looks very similar. And down here, these little golf balls of pittosporum, both of them evergreen, so these can stay in all year round. And when the summer flowers fade, you can either leave them in if you like them as perennials, or you can whip the summer flowers out and replace them with autumn, winter and spring plants. So that's that one on its way. I'll have a go over there now. You see what I'm trying to do? Just get a bit of height out of it as well. And the great thing about this colour here, this warm clay, is that it shows off plants of almost any colour and even green foliage. I'm pleased with it as a colour. And if you keep the pot handy, it becomes the container for your spare compost. And later on, you probably need a bit more of it somewhere else, so no point in getting rid of it just yet. And now I'll put a little bit back in there, always firming around it, not rock hard, but just making sure with your fingertips that there are no air pockets around it, otherwise it'll dry out. Raised containers like these, all raised beds, dry out much faster than soiled beds which are in contact with Mother Earth. Because they're isolated, they've got air all the way around them, and it does mean if you leave air pockets around them, they'll dry out terribly fast and you'll see them all wilting. I've arranged the troughs in this formation rather than just in long lines, in that I wanted to sort of create the feeling of a room with walls that surround it but don't restrict you when you're dining or get in the way of the quite hefty table and chairs that have got to come in. So by doing this, but doing a little bit out there, I do get this feeling of enclosure and at the same time being able to see through. And I've added into this trough, all four of them, a good compost mix, multi-purpose, organic, peat free, but with added John Innes which gives it a bit more stability, a bit more weight, but also it hangs on to nutrients for longer because there's a bit of loam in there as well as just being organic matter which is much lighter, fluffier and not quite so good at hanging on to moisture for long periods of time. Of course if you decide when you get to the end of your planting, oh I wish I'd moved that a bit further over, you can because they're on casters, you can change the scene every day if you want and really move them around which is quite fun. Foxgloves are really useful plants in either sun or dappled shade and here they're making this sort of semi-permeable wall that we'll be able to look through. You can use lots of tall plants in situations like this. I wouldn't choose delphiniums or lupins because they're fairly short-lived in terms of their flower and also pretty brittle in the wind. These flex about a bit. Another one to use is Verbena bonariensis, you know the thin wiry one with the little tiny pom-poms of purple flowers on the top that butterflies and bees love. They will flower their socks off right the way through the summer. Lavender is perfect for this situation because it loves full sun, it adores sharp drainage, you can get that in these raised containers and when you brush past it and come for your morning coffee, afternoon tea or whatever, oh you get that glorious fragrance rising to your nostrils. I love working out how plants work well together. Look at the golf ball here of pale green and the purple of the lavender and seeing the one through the other. We don't look and observe nearly as much as we should in life and little simple things like that give me a ridiculous amount of pleasure. You know I've been growing plants and remembering names for 60 odd years now but nowadays there are new varieties every single year which is how you end up with Salvia fashionista moulin rouge. Well it is a bit can-can isn't it really? It has these hooded flowers, Salvia's do like little dragons all the way up the stem and there's quite a few more to come. You've got side shoots down here that will carry even more which continues the succession of bloom right the way through the summer and I thought it would work quite well against the lavender over the lavender. When the trough's as narrow as this one is, unless the plants are very small, you can get away with a single sort of two litre potful right the way along it. One lavender, one salvia and then to bridge the gap between this salvia in pink and the yellow fox love but it's a pale apricot really and if you look at the spotting in the individual flowers there, the individual fox love flowers, you'll see there's a hint of, look at that, Geum mytai and with that red flushed calyx at the back of the paler flower I thought it would bridge the gap between the salvia and the fox love rather well picking up on both colours. That's the theory and I think it works in practice and there's just enough room around it now for it to fatten up during the summer and fill the gap so allowing it room to grow but at the same time pretty good instant effect. One done, a few more bits to go. I've chosen the furniture for our newly restored patio, good sturdy table with a hole for an umbrella when it gets too hot and sunny and two really good benches. They come in the natural state treated but just raw timber and I wanted to paint them just to give the kind of feeling of a bit of specialness over in that corner. Now I could have gone for warm clay which is the colour I used in the troughs themselves but I thought to complement the warm clay and be a bit different I'd go for this and this is evergreen. I started painting them yesterday, I've left a bit so you can see what colour the timber is before you apply the paint. This is a really sturdy table and benches, pressure treated so it will last outside for many years without being painted but if you want to change its colour, get yourself a good quality exterior paint and have a bit of fun. So there we are, ready to go and it's quite solid, give me a lift. Sturdy isn't it? Right, in there, back a bit I think. That should allow room, yeah, for the two benches, great. Will it fit? Yeah, there we are, fab. Great square, thanks Matt. One finishing touch and we're there. There we are, flowers cut from the garden. So now we have an outdoor room where it was just a piece of rather inconsequential paving that you walked across. The people on that side can enjoy those flowers, they can enjoy those and everybody can look down the garden and enjoy that. I'm really rather chuffed with that. Everybody will want to come and sit here and enjoy it and if this is all the garden you've got, you've extended the house outdoors and made another room. Nice, eh? Why not join our growing community and subscribe to the channel? I'm posting new videos on gardening every week.