On-line garden makeover.

One of the advantages of new technologies these days is that they allow you to be "virtually" everywhere. It is great to know people from around the globe who share the passion for gardens, mostly thanks to social networks like twitter or facebook but through blogs like this one or professional forums too.

Everyone can eventually know about your work and what you do at anytime, which is actually both, scary and exciting at the same time if you think your potential market is "the world".

This virtuality is what in the last few weeks, has allowed me to work in the design of a planting plan for a garden that I have never visited. It all began meeting the client at the Grand Designs Live Show in London, where I had the opportunity to work for a couple of days at the Garden Design Studio with James Alexander-Sinclair.

The clients, a middle age couple living in West Sussex, were keen on introducing a bit of colour in their garden, with the addition of new beds and borders to the existing lawn area.

They liked my initial ideas and a few days later, they contacted me to prepare a complete planting plan for their garden. Just a couple of emails were needed to get all the information, including their aspirations for the garden, preferred plants and colours and even a scaled 2D plan with some more pictures of the site.

So that was it really. If the client gives you all the information you need, it is easier to achieve a great result. It was time then to make a selection of plants suitable for dry soil, choose my colour palette and finally give structure and all year round interest to the new proposed borders.

That is the final result, including general gardening advice, a basic maintenance guide for the selected plants and an indication of the approximate costs to purchase these plants. All the information the client wanted without the hassle of site surveys and meetings to fit in an always busy agenda.

What do you think? Do you like it?

Community Project in Fulham. Any help is welcome.

Today I am going to talk to you about a Community Project I am collaborating with in the area where I live, Fulham.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a local developer with the idea (maybe a little unrealistic one) of improving the look of a quite devastated piece of land for a better use by the whole community. The area itself, opposite to the Fulham Palace Garden Centre, has been left without maintenance for several years now so everything in there is overgrown, full of weeds and in really bad conditions, something that promotes the place to be seen completely unattractive and unsafe when it gets dark.

After a couple of meetings to better know how the Project was going to be managed I decided to put my hands on it as much as possible, as the main idea was to contact volunteer people to help with the labour while trying to collect money through donations from shops and businesses nearby to supply plants and other materials needed.

The first point though is to improve the general look of the place, clearing all the creepers growing on the external fences to then chop down most of the overgrown and old shrubs, as the only thing they are doing at the moment is to hide the views of the garden from the streets and shade almost all of the area. And that is exactly what the first group of volunteers have been doing today, with the help of the Community Payback Scheme from the Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham and some other anonymous volunteers. Here you can see a couple of pictures taken during the day but tomorrow I will tweet some more so you can really see the difference.

Works will continue every Wednesday morning for the next 2 to 3 weeks, so the area can be cleared of roots, tree suckers and rubbish for then, condition and improve the existing soil with some new manure, compost and fertilizer. But where do we want to get with all this? Well, here is I come into action, as I have prepared a small but interesting design to plant up an area of 65 m² approx. which we are all expecting improves the general perception of this garden and therefore, its use by all the people living in the area.

The problem as you can all imagine is the money, as the funds at the moment do not allow to even buy the first complete lot of manure/compost. As previously said, we are in talks with shops and businesses in the area, will have a meeting tomorrow with The Fairbridge Garden Society and the closest neighbours seem really interested but at the moment, that is all we have got. So if you feel having an idea to help or want to donate towards the purchase of plants, please feel free to contact me through this blog or e-mail me instead. Any help is welcome!