BBC Gardeners' World Live Small Space Gardening Ideas

I am a small space garden designer and today I'm going to be heading to BBC Gardeners World Live to find some small space gardening ideas for you guys at home. I started my balcony garden during lockdown. I had zero interest in gardening but what happened is I transitioned from hospitality into horticulture because of my love of this balcony garden and the first two gardens that we're going to take a look at today at BBC Gardeners World Live have been designed by two designers who are career changers. The garden is absolutely stunning. Can you tell us a little bit about the garden? Yes of course. So this garden is inspired to use a full use of pink plants and how it can be used en masse to create something that you love. You can use all different colours but I choose to use pink because there's so many different tones, textures, different varieties out there that you can use within the design as well. Really there's so many different variations. Do you have a favourite colour of the pink? I would probably say it's quite a fuchsia pink is probably my favourite but in contrast with the dark foliage as well. I do love the dark foliage. This is the second of your gardens that I've seen but you're not a garden designer by trade. I'm not. I'm actually a hairdresser. This is just a very big hobby. Wow. I know it's crazy. I don't know really where it comes from. I think you just get a bit of an obsession. We start doing a bit of research into planting and then you just go with it. You start reading the magazines. You find all different bits that grow from seed and then it just spirals into this basically. That is so inspiring. So there you are with this career in hairdressing and then you've got this little side hobby. Yeah. And it's not just a side hobby. You're not a multi-award winning garden designer. I am luckily. It sounds crazy saying that. I know. How awesome is that? Congratulations. Well before I go I did want to know are there any plants in here that we can use in a combination for a pot for example? Yeah so if I was planting up these plants but in a pot instead I would use something sort of spilling over the side. So we've got a bit of a geranium which will look quite nice a bit lower down and then I love a salvia because that will flower for such a long time. So that's a bit of a filler plant and then for thriller I'll go for a dahlia. Amazing. Yeah. Well anyway thank you so much for that because those are some really great tips and once again you've got an absolutely stunning garden. Congratulations. Thank you very much. What a beautiful garden. The next garden is looking at a softer colour palette. Hi Julie. Hello Jason. How are you? Wonderful thank you but this garden is looking amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about the garden? Thank you. Well this garden is in celebration of 10 years since I retrained from working for Open and Somerset Police as a garden designer and so we decided we would come back here again and asked to be in exactly the same spot as we were in 10 years ago with a little nod to the garden that we did then and then do a garden then which really represented my story from that time when I changed direction and then started my own business as a garden designer. What were you doing before garden design? I worked for Open and Somerset Police as a member of the support staff working for the CID department so it's taking victim statements, witness statements and things like that so yeah so a big change. A massive change. Julie one of the things I really love about this garden is the colour palette. Can you talk us through the colour palette and some of your planting choices here in the garden? I'm glad you like the colour palette. It's a really very soft colour palette of sort of pastel pinks and purples so I've used a mixture of heights to get the interest within the border so it's not all one level of planting and to do that I've used things like the ethereal verbena boryansis here because although it's quite tall you can see through it so it doesn't obstruct your view of the plants behind it so I've got things like lavender which we've got here this particular variety here is munstead and then we've got the butterfly blue scabies and also the kudo pink as well both very soft colours loved by the bees around the bottom of the beehive there you can see we've got borage and when we planted the garden up that was the first plant that really attracted the bees into the garden and they've been regular visitors ever since so what I've done is I've mixed perennials with some native plants wildflower plants which people will recognise the oxeye daisy and also the amy major to give a cow pasty type effect within the garden all of the plants are really pollinator friendly yeah and there's quite a lot of height as well can you talk us through some of that? Yes well the height is obviously given by the fox slabs which you've got in the back there around the beehive and also at the back of the garden as well and also the veronicastrum and that particular variety is fascination so again having those different heights and different shapes of flowers all add to the interest when you're creating borders and your choice of plants really to have those different flower shapes different leaf shapes etc different leaf colours different leaf textures and it all adds to the interest of your border when you're putting it together. Well it's absolutely no wonder why you got a platinum award the garden is stunning thank Some of the containers on this garden are pretty expensive and that's because they came from my RHS Chelsea flower show garden but not all of my containers are expensive some of them are old tubs and containers that I've upcycled and drilled some holes into but at the BBC gardeners world live show I found a platinum winning border garden that is absolutely jam-packed full of upcycling ideas but this garden is absolutely beautiful can you tell us a little bit about the garden? Well it starts off as the discovery of the spa water in Leamington so that's in the early 1800s Queen Victoria she visited in 1830 when she was still a princess and she loved it so much that when she became queen she gave it a royal charter which is only one of three in the country. Wow incredible what I find really interesting is there's almost a transition from the planting down the end to the planting here on this side of the garden can you tell us a little bit more about that? Well it's a journey through time so if you start off at the spa end then there's various parts of history referenced along the path and as you'll notice as you get more towards the modern end the paving changes to a more modern style and that's to reflect the fact that we're a silicon spa now and there's a big gaming hub where they develop computer games. Well I just got to say I think that you've managed to pack in so much history and create such a beautiful garden and just out the corner of my eye I noticed that this structure here is actually a trampoline is that right? It is a trampoline. Wow and what does this signify? This signifies circles of time because our design is called Echoes of Water Circles of Time and it also references typical spa town architecture which is crescents and circles. Wow absolutely incredible I do love all of your upcycled elements into this garden and I believe even the the tap is upcycled can you tell us a little bit about that? That is an old plumbing pipe that we've just connected to the inside of the water feature which is all handmade and we cut it at the end and then splayed it out to look like a daisy. It's absolutely stunning so even if we are on a budget we can still create a really beautiful water feature. We can. Incredible garden thank you so much for your time. Thank you. The next garden is called By the Light of the Moon and was designed by Kate McCallum. The garden was inspired by childhood fairy tales and the magic of twilight hours when light fades and imagination grows. A crescent shaped hammock evokes the moon surrounded by fragrant silver planting that glows at night to attract nocturnal pollinators. I have to confess I came back to this garden several times because I was just so mesmerized by the planting. You could literally imagine yourself just laying back on that hammock and feeling completely immersed in the space. One of the things I loved about the garden is the fact that there were so many scented plants in this garden. You can see exactly why moths would be attracted to this garden as well as other nighttime pollinators and that's something that we don't often think about in our gardens is how do we attract nighttime pollinators. It is absolutely no wonder to me why this garden won a platinum award. Congratulations Kate. Kate's garden and the next garden were part of the RAG scheme. The RAG scheme was launched in 1993 to provide paid part-time practical horticultural training. The trainees worked for 12 to 14 hours a week for the whole year in a carefully sourced garden under the instruction of the garden owner or head gardener. Joshua's garden tells his story from his journey of being a painter and decorator to retraining through the RAG scheme and starting his very own gardening business. It's a really personal design that celebrates how horticulture has changed his life. The left-hand side reflects that earlier chapter with softer, slightly unsettled planting and familiar tools from his previous career. A curved path leads through the border symbolizing movement and progress, guiding visitors beneath an arch as the story unfolds. The final section represents confidence, purpose and the establishment of his very own gardening business. The border celebrates change, growth and the courage to begin again. When I moved into this property, none of these tall buildings actually existed but in the suburbs more houses are being built, often with terrible gardens. I found a garden that tackles the curse of new build gardens. Jonathan, this garden is looking stunning. Can you tell us a little bit about the client brief for this garden? We wanted to look at a new build sort of property and the average size of that space was 10 by 8 meters and we found it's a lot of hard landscaping, fake grasses, a couple shoves in the background and that's pretty much it. We wanted to kind of flip it on its head, have a little bit of hard landscaping but as you can see it's a bit more soft landscaping. And one of the things I really love about this garden is, like you said, you were thinking about a new build garden but actually a lot of the ground on a new build garden is terrible. It's normally topsoil with bits of concrete in it but you've managed to tackle that by going upwards. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yes, absolutely. As you say, a lot of new builds these days, because of budgets and stuff, they normally scrape the top surface getting a little bit extra money out of it for themselves and then leaving a bit of the rubbishy soil. But we thought we would come by that by actually raising the soil level, so that gives us good soil to actually work with because the top foot is probably the most important of soil, so there's top 30 centimeters and then after that, not that it's not important, but the plants can cope after as long as they've got a good healthy section in the middle basically. And I think you've managed to achieve that really well here. Now, you mentioned some of this planting is a little bit more low maintenance, so I think I'm going to go and speak to your wife and find out a little bit more about the planting. No worries at all, thank you very much. Well, lovely to meet you, I feel like I have to give you a hug. So, can you tell us a little bit more about the planting here in this garden? Yes, so our planting is mainly shaded plants, so we have some really lovely tropical style planting because we found that the climate nowadays is more wetter winters and drier summers, especially today it's been quite hot and humid hasn't it? So the majority of our plants are canners and muses, we also have some lovely hadichiums from the National Hadichium Collection down in Chichester, so thank you very much Andrew for giving us those. We've had a lot of interest in it as well, so we've also got the Dixonias and Trachycarpus which are lovely shade loving plants, but they have like a nice big trunk and then the lovely ferns on top. We've had so much interest throughout which has been fantastic, especially for our first show garden. Yeah, and I think one of the things I really love about the garden is obviously it's almost like a play because you've got these wonderful arches with that really bright bold colour, but then you've got the slightly more muted planting, was that part of your planting design? Yes it was, yeah we've had a lot of show gardens seem to focus on mainly flowers, so we wanted to have more foliage based design with the odd pop of the yellows and oranges and pinks, as well as obviously the pink posts that no one can miss. Well I've got to say I think that you guys have done a fabulous job because this garden would look right at home on a new build site, so congratulations. Thank you so much, it's good to see you. You too. Black Fence really makes the planting pop and Jonathan's got a top tip to help us create our very own. Here we've got some fences, they're hit and miss. Hit and miss means basically there's a little gap in the middle, but the main thing that we've done with this is we've burnt them up, which means that when you burn them that they don't break down as much or they don't really break down with any water, same with like carbon dating, that's how they can get ages or stuff, but when you do that it's a Japanese technique, makes it waterproof and watertight and as I say it doesn't break down at all, and it lasts longer, there's no chemicals that have to be involved and also it's a bit of fun having a little bit of burning session. One of the things I absolutely love about my balcony is the fact that the fruit and veg and all of the edibles are mixed into the planting plan, but at the show I found a garden that had the edibles front, stage and centre. Our brief was typically upcycled, recycled, reclaimed as much as possible, so we've got 90% native planting, we've got a lot of the materials within it are reclaimed, so you've got the brickwork behind us and so that the steelwork that makes up the structure, that was from a show garden back in 2022 that we did here and furthermore the materials are going on to be reused again, it's not just a show garden, it will be instated somewhere else permanently. One of the things I've noticed as well is that you've got your herbs and your veg kind of mixed in as well and I really like the colours that you've selected here, was that on purpose? So that was 100% on purpose, I think that the reason we've put it bang in the middle is because traditionally you've put it in straight rows in the back corner of the garden out of the way and we've flipped that on its head and put it front and centre. One of the things I do love about this garden is this water feature, should we go and take a look at it? Yeah let's go. Now talk us through this water feature, what's going on here? The design was inspired by the ruin of a mill in Lancashire, an old paper mill and the particular building all had sort of decrepit building with the brickwork and it had a steel jib coming out of it and that's what they'd use to load the buildings up but what we've taken here is that sort of jib effect with an old oak beam, that feeds the rain garden. So that's a really important point, so if someone does have some form of a waterlogged garden they could implement some kind of a feature that will collect some of that excess rainfall that will fill up into the pond and over time I guess will then dissipate. Yeah so it's a system of attenuation, so a rain garden is there to manage that heavy water flow instead of putting it into a drain and then flooding somewhere down the road. In essence hold it here for a little bit. Exactly yeah, attenuate so to hold it there and then when the ground or whatever it's going can take it, it then goes on. Well I think you guys have done an absolutely fantastic job and lots of take-home tips for people at home hopefully. Thank you very much. Thank you. In the next video I'm going to be heading to the RHS badminton show so make sure that you're following to see the next video. Well I hope you enjoyed hanging out with me at the show and also here on my cloud garden and hopefully you found some tips and tricks that helped you with your very own small space. Hopefully I will see you all again very very soon. Bye!