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Could Car Less

Could Car Less is designed for a family committed to giving up their car and choosing to travel more actively. The garden provides practical and creative ideas for bike storage and features that help increase urban biodiversity. A rainwater harvesting system directs water to a compact forest garden, which is contrasted by an area of dry-garden planting where there is no irrigation.

The Cotton Traders Greener Future Garden

The city centre garden is imagined as a space for a downsizing retiring couple who like to get out into the countryside. They choose to use their outside space for parking, relaxing and pottering. The garden is planted to be attractive all year around, and to attract wildlife, especially butterflies. There’s even a small clump of stinging nettles, Urtica dioica, essential food for the caterpillars of red admiral, painted lady, comma and tortoiseshell butterflies.

Petrus Community: Journey Home

Petrus Community: Journey Home focuses on reconnecting with nature and on activities that support health and wellbeing. It considers green corridors, materials we use and the physical ways we can live in a more sustainable and eco-friendly way.

Paradise Retained

Paradise Retained imagines how a paradise for wildlife and humans can persist even in a front garden incorporating a parking space. Inspired by lockdown tales of brightly planted front gardens making passers-by smile, this garden features year-round uplifting colours and playful elements. A parking space is transformed into a whimsical ‘quilt’ using brightly coloured SUDS-compliant parking tiles; the bespoke durable enamelled copper wall hanging echoes the planting colours and tiles.

Unpave the Way

The garden encapsulates two differing approaches to front garden design. The first garden focuses on DIY retrofitting of sustainable drainage (SuDS) and rainwater harvesting (RWH) solutions into an existing front garden. The second garden utilises readymade SuDS and permeable paving products for use in a new garden design. The gardens present options for rainwater drainage for householders whose gardens may have either sandy well drained soil, or poorly drained clay soils.

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Children With Cancer UK ‘Raines Repurposed’

A shaded seating area provides a place to relax and enjoy the scented flowers and gentle movement from the surrounding grasses. The clear lines and simple colour palette create a calming, uncluttered and practical space for reflection. Soft evergreen planting, with muted tones of pinks and burgundy, lies beneath the statement multi-stem Taxus baccata.

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Tomie’s Cuisine the Nobonsai

Tomie’s Cuisine the Nobonsai is a garden that supports living together with creatures, including fungi and microorganisms. Plants surround the space, softly blocking the line of sight from the outside for privacy and giving the balcony the feel of being another room. The planting is harmonious, creating an aesthetic closer to nature than a container garden.

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La Mia Venezia

The idea of the balcony is to enhance your surroundings from within, while spilling out for others to also enjoy, thus decorating towns and cities for all. The scheme encourages the vibrant use of plants to create an intimate space. The plants highlight how a balcony can have a unique microclimate, and so more unusual plants may thrive, where they may not in an exposed garden setting. The use of overhanging plants and pergola makes full use of the space, creating an enveloped outdoor room.

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The Addleshaw Goddard Junglette Garden

The hardy tropical planting of the balcony mirrors the structural layers of the jungle: the emergent (towering plants), canopy, understorey, and forest floor. The design provides a serene sanctuary, shielding residents from the city's relentless commotion. A seating area is enveloped by cascading flora, evoking the splendour of a colossal hanging basket.

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The Folio Society’s Reading Room Garden

The space immediately outside the balcony doors is surrounded with plants creating a green oasis – a bubbling water feature creates white noise, zoning out the sounds of the city beyond. Around the corner, the space opens out to oak seating for enjoying the view or socialising. The back wall is decorated with hand-crafted oak cobbles (the galls found on oak trees were used in ink production up until the 20th century). Designed to be lit from behind, casting shadows at dusk and night.

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The Restorative Balcony Garden sponsored by Viking

By mixing reclaimed items with carefully selected new materials, The Restorative Garden demonstrates how to create a space which is environmentally conscious without compromising on aesthetic or quality. Planting has been designed to attract pollinators and birdlife into the garden with fragrant trees, climbers and herbs providing a sensory experience for visitors. A water table doubles up as a birdbath and source of meditative sound, whilst reclaimed teak is used for practical shelving.

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The St George ‘Alright Here’ Balcony Garden

Inspired by daily city life, the garden is designed for a young professional in London, providing somewhere to sit with an after-work drink or a morning cup of coffee. The garden aims to create a relaxing but playful atmosphere, reminiscent of a good local pub – familiar, comforting, characterful. The space is divided into different areas to sit, surrounded by plants that are multi-functional, being fragrant, edible or good for cutting.

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Arcadia

Arcadia offers pure escape. The aged door becomes a portal between reality and fantasy and the notion of the infinite is played out with the painted backdrop, an idealised English landscape, which hints at the exotic with its red earth and boulders. The planting feeds into this, lush and green at low level, becoming more tropical at canopy height with the Yucca and Punica granatum (pomegranate tree).

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Sky Sanctuary

The planting on this balcony, which includes anemones, Geranium Rozanne and a hardy ginger, is designed for a north-east facing balcony.

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The Landform Balcony Garden

This is a place for the homeowner to relax and entertain with early modernist architecture inspiring the craftsmanship and detailing of the planters. The plant choices, primarily for pollinators, provide a habitat that contributes to the valuable wildlife corridors in our cities. The palette is bright and sunny, using colours attractive to honey, bumble and solitary bees.

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Green Sky Pocket Garden

Designed as an antidote for busy city living, this lush pocket garden illustrates how best to maximise every part of our outdoor space. Vegetation cloaks the garden with textural, scented and edible plants offering enjoyable surroundings, in which the occupants can connect with nature. The green roof adds height and seasonal colour, while two strawberry trees, planted within feature pots, appeal to pollinators.

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Balcony of Blooms

The Balcony of Blooms demonstrates that small spaces can be practical, productive and enchanting. Two trees provide a sense of enclosure, while a continuous green edge is planted with herbs for culinary and medicinal use, as well as with pollinator-friendly flowers. Next Garden The Parsley Box Garden The Parsley Box Garden.

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Sanctum

Sanctum offers an oasis amid the chaos of contemporary life. Featuring a striking black charred wood pod at its centre, which creates a visual contrast with the lush green foliage. As a tranquil refuge, Sanctum provides a space to escape from what can feel like the relentless digital overload and hectic pace of corporate life. Sanctum highlights the importance of incorporating natural elements into corporate environments for a more balanced, health-conscious work atmosphere.

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The Anywhere Courtyard

On either side, trees form a natural canopy of gentle shade. A tiled courtyard continues the symmetry theme with seating framed on either side, incorporating a sensory mix of herbal and perennial plants, along with an evergreen structure to create a year-round space. The design is modular and practical, with raised beds forming the back of the seating, with the seating providing built-in storage. The design seamlessly brings together land, water, space, and life.

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The Ecotherapy Garden

Imagined as a small London courtyard, a Thames-yellow brick wall supports a hanging green garden that aligns with biophilic principles of people’s innate attraction to nature. A cold plunge pool enveloped in lush planting is the centrepiece of the garden. The clear water reflects the surrounding greenery.

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The Water Saving Garden, sponsored by Affinity Water

This contemporary courtyard space has water saving measures at its heart, featuring interconnected sleek planters fed with rainwater. The garden is a love letter to the Chilterns’ iconic chalk streams, highlighting the urgent need to save and re-use rainwater, a cause championed by Affinity Water’s Save Our Streams campaign.

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mgr Changing Tides Garden

mgr Changing Tides Garden is a coastal garden that celebrates the resilient plants that have adapted to the harsh conditions found along the strandline (the shoreline above the water), of the UK’s vegetated shingle beaches. Here, just beyond the normal reach of the waves a few plants will seize the opportunity to form a row of vegetation, a risky life where one storm too many could eradicate them forever.

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Feels Like Home

This garden is inspired by the designer’s childhood in New Zealand. Plants, colours and natural materials are used to create a green oasis in which to relax and be in a place that ‘feels like home’. These materials include, handmade clay pots, charred timber cladding, sliced boulder paving, a bench seat made from reclaimed kauri (an ancient New Zealand native timber sustainably sourced) and a bespoke stainless steel water feature of a fern leaf.

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The Hampden Stargardt Garden

The garden is designed as a sensory healing space for a visually impaired person, with the calming sound of running water and the scent of plants creating the feeling of being immersed in nature. The theme is one of drama – contrasting light and dark, as well as emotional calm. Ash planters, preserved using the traditional wood burning Japanese technique of yakisugi, coordinate with the blackened water feature to provide contrast with the soft, light and airy planting, interspersed with apricot.

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The Mary Anning Space to Learn Garden

Imagined in the grounds of a Dorset primary school, this small, fun outdoor educational area surrounded by shade-loving plants in tree stump containers, provides a Jurassic atmosphere. Seats carved from a single tree trunk for the teacher and children creates an inspirational and interactive learning space. The limestone crazy paving path, with individual ammonites between each stone, is engraved with the schoolyard tongue twister 'She Sells Seashells'.

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The Platform Garden

The Platform Garden is inspired by unused overground platforms in London, to create a platform garden of the future, with a focus on community-led gardening and education. The garden focuses on key areas where more green infrastructure could be incorporated. It highlights the importance of planting in transportation areas to improve biodiversity, rainwater collection, carbon capture and enhance people’s wellbeing.

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The Shifting Garden by the Chelsea Gardener

The garden is designed to maximise the limited space typical of urban gardens, whilst reflecting how the climate is shifting and carrying us towards a UK dealing with extreme weather patterns. An emphasis on sustainability is throughout the garden which uses natural, bio-composite and recycled materials. At the entrance of the garden, is a sentinel Albizia julibrissin, with its filigree canopy providing a sense of enclosed sanctuary.

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Petrus: Full Circle

The garden features a rain garden system that collects water from a living roof and channels it into a large pond at the bottom of the garden. The plants included can cope in gardens that experience flooding. The industrial and farming heritage of Rochdale where water was crucial to the town’s survival has been a key inspiration.

United Utilities Garden of Resilience

At the centre of the garden, a sculptural timber pergola with green roof is part of a rainwater-harvesting system, which captures and directs water to a rain garden planter, water feature and water butt bench. A permeable path, constructed from locally-sourced sandstone, feeds water to a sunken rain garden. The planting is resilient to prolonged spells of dry and wet weather and includes Amelanchier lamarckii, Carpinus betulus (hornbeam) and self-seeding perennials.

Crescendo

This garden is a fusion of the designer’s two passions – music and plants. The planting rises front to back to form the crescendo from which the garden takes its name. The piano-keyboard-style deck is reached by drum-skin stepping stones, made from hoggin self-binding gravel contained in metal drumhead hoops. Percussive sounds accompany the visitor as they walk through the garden.

Re-inventing the Wheel

Being creative with materials and bringing style and impact to a small space at low cost were the impetus for this garden design. The client is a keen gardener with a limited budget, who has requested a stylish and impactful garden. Bicycle shapes and structures are reflected within the hard landscaping, while the carefully chosen colour palette of the planting helps provide an ambience of relaxation.

Nacro: Connect

Connect is a garden filled with herbs, vegetables and fruit, as well as beautiful plants and flowers that provide a calming atmosphere. The theme is ‘connect’ – connect with each other, with the garden and with the food we eat. It features raised beds, a table and seating area, in which the garden’s users can enjoy the setting and sit and chat with other people.

Equilibrium

A bamboo enclosure gives a sense of safety and exclusivity to the garden. This is a space to help the visitor’s mind roam, leaving their worries behind and allowing for reflectiion. The soft trickling water from a stone water feature is calming, while the rocks are metaphors for mountains climbed in life. Green tonal plants enhance the oriental theme with Cornus kousa giving height and dimension and a hint of colour. Acers, ornamental grasses and bamboo provide colour, texture and movement.

Trail of Thoughts

The Trail of Thoughts Garden is designed to raise awareness of dementia. The planting represents the fading of memory. Exuberant and colourful planting with flowers of all shapes and sizes from shrub roses and salvias to erigeron and verbenas give way to a garden that becomes grassier and less colourful. Here the focus is on Stipa tenuissima and Echinacea before reducing to ferns.

Cyber Crime

Aiming to raise awareness of the five simple steps that can be taken to help stay safe online, this garden’s design draws attention to the ‘five Cs’ – create, cover, confidentiality, click and connect. This method is used to combat cyber crime and the five Cs are represented throughout the garden and engraved on bespoke Corten steel structures. The planting scheme illustrates cyber crime with the lighter tones representing crime prevention and the darker shades depicting crime being committed.

Petrus’ Paradise

Designed by staff, volunteers and service users from Petrus Community, a homelessness charity in Rochdale, this garden has a Persian paradise theme and represents a service user’s journey through life with Petrus. The entrance of the garden shows a road to recovery – the pathway is relaxing, while the scents and sights entice the user further. A shelter sits at the far end, offering a place of shelter, safety and reflection.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

This reinvention of the urban front garden contains colours and forms inspired by the children’s fictional classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Inspired by work being carried out across the Tatton Park estate, the garden features plantings of ivy, mosses, grasses and clipped box, designed to draw attention to the serious decline of invertebrates in our cities and towns.

The Art and Nature of a Port Sunlight Garden

A central linear path made from reclaimed York stone leads the visitor through the garden to a seating area, located under an arch of fragrant climbing roses. Visitors can sit back and enjoy the wild and rich planting of the garden. Its pink and purple colour scheme features delphiniums and phlox softened with feathery Stipa tenuissima grasses and punctuated throughout with large topiary spheres.

The Start in Salford Garden

Central to the garden is a patio area with seating, designed to be a space for drawing, painting or weaving. This central hub is surrounded by beautiful plants in bright and warm colours representing light and wellbeing. Herbaceous perennials including penstemon, achillea, verbena and rudbeckia feature and have been chosen to represent happiness and wellbeing.

Every Cloud has a Silver Lining

The planting in this garden is predominantly dark with silver undertones. Plants include black-leaved elder Sambucus nigra f. porphyrophylla ‘Eva’, purple-leaved Fagus sylvatica ‘Atropurpurea Group’, Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’, silvery Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ and Athyrium niponicum. A swinging pod, the central feature, sits on a circular dark patio. A dry slate stream, jagged at the outset eventually flattens to a still pool.

The Perfumer’s Garden

The Perfumer’s Garden shows how urban spaces can be transformed by plants. It is inspired by an area behind the perfume shop, Pulse of Perfumery in Knutsford, and how this space could be transformed to benefit wildlife and people. Scented plants reflect the shop owner¦s passion for perfume and attract wildlife into the space. Hard landscaping is softened by pastel flowers in pinks, blues and whites.

Let’s Go Fly A Kite!

Hope and possibility is a key theme and is represented with gabions filled with equipment parts and outdoor play items, alongside a planting scheme made up of symbolic plants. Borago officinalis represents courage, Leucanthemum shows patience, Foeniculum strength while Campanula and Delphinum depict gratitude and joy.

Glean

This garden hopes to encourage visitors to reconnect with seasonal, locally grown produce by creating a space in which people can gather and unwind through growing, cooking and eating together.

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Big Picture Garden

The garden acknowledges the construction methods and ideals of Peak District residents past, who lived and worked sustainably as a matter of course. Found objects and materials sourced from a 19th century Peak District farmstead are here refreshed and restored, put to innovative use to create a cohesive garden.

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The Corten Garden

The Corten Garden maximises the plantable area while causing minimal disruption to an existing outdoor space. Designed with a busy family in mind, this garden uses Corten steel to create a series of clever ‘rooms’ that add height and interest, and provide valuable growing space, while eliminating the need to dig up or remove any paving that may already be in place.

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The Orchid Garden

The Orchid Garden is a celebration of these fascinating exotic plants, but also a showcase of native British cultivars that can be incorporated into small space schemes. Tropical species such as Cattleya, Epidendrum and Oncidium are shown in all life stages within a glorious greenhouse, while native British types, including Dactylorhiza fuchsii (common spotted orchid) and D. maculata (heath spotted orchid) are set within characterful dry-stone walls and dotted among wildflower planting.

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The Secret Garden: For Us, By Us

This garden draws inspiration from designer Hilary Newhall’s favourite childhood book, The Secret Garden, with high planting and fencing evocative of the story’s eponymous enclosed sanctuary. Herself autistic, the design aims to create a safe space for autistic individuals. The planting in some areas is deliberately restrained, for sensory-avoidant individuals; whereas other areas have a wilder feel, for the benefit of sensory-seeking garden visitors.

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Brickyard

Inspired by the traditional brick-walled backyards and industrial fabric of great northern cities, Brickyard envisages how these historic spaces can be adapted for modern life, and how nature can thrive in them. The heritage of our urban architecture is reflected in the reclaimed red brick that has been hand selected by Reclaimed Brick Company at their Sheffield yard, and corten steel hand-crafted by artisans at Cheshire’s Steel and Scape.

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Terrace Garden Retreat

The focus of the garden is the floral snug with raised planting and low-level seating, creating an enveloped, immersive environment for relaxation, contemplation and re-connection. The structural shapes of Buxus sempervirens and Stipa gigantea, and the clean lines of the design, instil a sense of calm. The addition of the multi-purpose louvered pergola, combined with the adaptable planting that is suitable for both sun and shade, provides plenty of take-home inspiration.

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The Apothecary

The Apothecary is a working garden that incorporates naturally medicinal species for health and wellbeing. It was inspired by the designer’s lifelong passion for healing plants and the ancient knowledge of their medicinal qualities, which he learned about on a trip to the Colombian Andes. Plants used include elder, lavender, rosemary, dog rose and Verbascum bombyciferum ‘Arctic Summer’.

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The Balanced Garden

This is a relaxing garden with strong design elements and colourful, sensory planting, which also includes some clever touches to provide space for children to play. The key features include a vibrant tiled wall and a water feature alongside a generous floating timber bench and sandbox. The garden’s ambition is to create an enjoyable place both for adults to relax and entertain, and children to play and explore, within the same small space.

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Elements

This small urban garden brings together natural elements of wood, fire, water and wind, and represents a section of a larger terraced garden. It is an area of rest, relaxation and retreat from city life. Designed for a young, environmentally-conscious couple, it invites biodiversity, provides privacy and offers a tranquil setting for the appreciation of nature’s cycles.

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The Empowerment Garden

At the centre of the space, curved seating built around a barbecue area encourages reflection, immersion in nature and sociability. Surrounding this, taller edibles such as peas and beans enclose the area, and provide more of a connection to the natural world, as well as access to fresh, nutritious produce. Meanwhile, a bubbling water feature introduces a calming soundscape.

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