Designing and Creating a Coastal Garden E-Book

Alan Edmondson

• Herausgeber: The Crowood Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 392

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Create a beautiful and practical coastal garden with this inspiring and comprehensive guide. The seaside can be a stunning setting for a garden, but it can be difficult to find plants that will thrive. Salt-laden winds make the careful selection of plants and landscaping materials vital. This book provides a step-by-step process, as used by professional garden designers, that will help you design, build and plant a beautiful, sustainable and successful garden in these conditions. From initial inspiration to planting and styling techniques, Designing and Creating a Coastal Garden will show you how to create your dream garden by the sea. The coast is a special place for so many of us. The quality of light and air, and the sense of space and freedom, have an irresistible draw on artists and holidaymakers. Those who make their homes by or near sea can feel very privileged to do so. A walk along an exposed sea front in a coastal town will usually reveal front gardens with battered specimens of the same few, not very exciting shrubs and trees. One could be forgiven for giving up on the idea of a coastal garden. But there is no need to despair. This book will show you, step-by-step, how to create a beautiful and practical seaside garden. Gardens evolve over the seasons and over the years with tweaks and experiments, as the gardener's taste and understanding of the garden develops. But a lot of frustration, disappointment and wasted money can be avoided by starting with a good design. And for no type of garden is this truer than for a coastal garden. Designing and Creating a Coastal Garden shows how, beginner or experienced, you can design a garden that will work practically, beautifully and harmoniously with a seaside setting. Detailed advice is given on what plants and what landscaping materials work best on the coast, as well as horticultural techniques and sample planting plans. It is also incredibly rewarding to create habitats and observe the wildlife in a garden. This book shows how to take inspiration from the type of coastal habitat found near a garden both for style and for successful gardening for wildlife. Whatever the scale of your project, from improving a tiny corner, to a major whole-garden restyle, this book will help you create a wonderful garden by the sea.

Leseprobe

First published in 2023 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

This e-book first published in 2023

© Alan Edmondson and Bryn Edmondson 2023

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7198 4171 2

Cover design: Sergey Tsvetkov

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the support and creative inspiration of Angela Edmondson. We would like to dedicate it to her and to Fred Edmondson, much loved father and grandfather, who taught a very young Alan to love gardening and was the beginning of it all. We would also like to thank The Crowood Press, whose patient guidance was invaluable.

Picture acknowledgements

We are very grateful to all our clients who have allowed us to work on their gardens and develop our design practice. Our particular thanks go to Ewan McGregor, Alex Finch, Mr and Mrs Bishop, Richard and Jenny Harris, and Mr and Mrs Stockwell, who allowed us to photograph their gardens for this book. We would also like to thank James Chichester of Chichester Trees and Shrubs, Neil Lucas of Knoll Gardens, and Compton Acres Gardens for allowing us to photograph.

The very talented Richard Bloom supplied us with photographs of gardens by the designers Helen Elks-Smith, Andrea Rubin, Sue Townsend Garden Design and Craig Reynolds. Photographs of the gardens designed by Paul Williams, Wendy Booth and Leslie Howell, Sarah Morgan, Jennifer Gay, Julie Toll, Rose McMonigall, Sue Adcock, Lynne Marcus, and the garden at Lip na Cloiche on the Isle of Mull were taken by the equally wonderful Marianne Majerus.

Paul D. Brock allowed us to use an amazing range of his outstanding photographs of insects and we would like to thank him, along with Barry Collet who supplied some beautiful images of butterflies and a slow worm. We are also very grateful to Keith Metcalf, a leading light in Milford-on-Sea Conservation Volunteers, for supplying us with excellent photographs of birds and the Jersey tiger moth, and Timothy Rosier for his very fine images of dragonflies.

Contents

Introduction

1The Coast

2The Design Process

3Hard Landscaping

4Planting Design

5The Plants

6Biodiversity and Sustainability

Appendices

 IGardens to Visit

IIPlant Nurseries and Places to See Coastal Plants

Glossary

Index

Introduction

A GARDEN BY THE SEA

This book is going to set out, as a step-by-step process, how you can design and create a beautiful and practical garden in a coastal setting. The seaside is an exciting and inspiring place to make a garden, but it has some particular and tricky challenges. By planning carefully and using the processes and information in this book, you can make a coastal garden that will be a life-enhancing joy for years to come.

To make beautiful, successful gardens you need to know about a lot of things. You need to know about plants, of course. They are our primary materials, providing colour, scent, and form. There is a bewildering number of species for us to choose from, each with its own contributions and its own requirements. You need to know something about the hard materials, paving stones, bricks, timber, metals, and how they are put together to make patios, retaining walls, and pergolas. You will also need a good sense of how colours and forms work together and how this living work of art will change over time. Additionally, if that was not intimidating enough, each space you are working with is never the same as any other. Each garden we work on has its own combination of sun, shade, wind, shelter, soil, and topography. It has its own difficulties and its own capabilities. If the garden is in a coastal setting, those difficulties could well seem to outweigh the capabilities. You could be forgiven for giving up and deciding to pave over the whole thing.

But a garden by the sea can be an enchanting thing. For those not lucky enough to live on the coast, for whom a day trip to the seaside is an occasional treat, there is something about the first glimpse of sun reflecting off the ocean, through a break in the trees or a gap in the hills, that awakens a sense of childish excitement. To have a garden with such a view can be to have some of that feeling every day. It could be a view that greets you as you drink your first coffee at the kitchen table looking down the garden. Or it might be a view that you must explore the garden to find, rounding a corner to suddenly be presented with a beautiful ocean view and a cosy, sheltered bench in just the right spot to admire it from. Even if your coastal garden doesn’t have a sea view, there is something distinctive about coastal settings. Coastal towns and villages always have a different ‘feel’ to their inland counterparts; there is something in the combination of the quality of light, the sounds, the smells, something about the air itself, that never quite lets you forget the near presence of the sea.

This book will help you deal with the difficulties of establishing a coastal garden. It will help you respond to the inspiration of that coastal setting to create a garden that not only copes with the conditions but has a great sense of place, somewhere that enhances and beautifies its setting. We have worked as a father and son garden design practice, based in the town of Lymington on the south coast of England, for the past twenty years. Many of the gardens we have created over that time have been in very exposed coastal settings. This book will show you the step-by-step method that we use to design a coastal garden, and give you the practical information about plants, hard landscaping materials, and techniques that you need to make that garden a long-term success. The design process we will lead you through will be very similar to the process used by professional garden designers around the world. It is not the only way to approach making a new garden; in fact, it is not at all the way most gardens are created. Most domestic gardens have, throughout history, been produced by a trial-and-error method, tweaking and experimenting over many years. This will always be the heart of good gardening. If gardening is an art form, it is the long art, something that moves, changes, and develops over the seasons and over the years. But we believe a structured design process is a very good beginning. This is particularly true for coastal gardens, where using the wrong plants or the wrong materials in an exposed position could result in costly failure. We hope that this book will also be useful to professional garden designers, perhaps starting out in their careers or designing a coastal garden for the first time, or as a reference book for inspiration and plant or material choice. But we firmly believe that non-professional gardeners, who have the inclination to devote some time and effort to creating their garden, can follow the process set out in this book to produce a result that any professional designer would be proud of.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

We have arranged the chapters of this book so that you can follow a process from start to finish to design and create a garden in a coastal setting. This could be your own garden or one you are working on in a professional capacity as a garden designer. You could be starting with a largely blank canvas, that is, a plot which has little or no existing planting or hard landscaping features that you wish to retain. Or the garden may have some successful planting, a perfectly good patio, some well-established shelter belts or windbreaks, but have planted areas that need improving or need some work on the overall design feel and styling.

Whatever the scale of the work that needs to be done, the process can be followed, but smaller projects may not need every step to be completed. If you just want to work on a planting scheme for a particularly exposed bed, it would still be a good idea to survey the bed, think about the practical limitations and possibilities, the colour scheme and plant textures, any hard landscaping features that might help practically or aesthetically, and produce a drawn planting plan to work from. Of course, you could also just dip into a relevant chapter to find some ideas for solving a particular problem, such as a salt-tolerant large shrub to fill a gap in a windbreak, or some ideas for coastal themed path materials. Some of the best gardens are created in this way, slowly evolving over time, experimenting, and adapting, and this book can be your guide and companion through this process.

In Chapter 1, we will first consider what it means to have a garden in a coastal setting. What are the typical conditions that the garden will be exposed to? We will then look at some specific types of coastal plant habitats. As our design practice is based in the United Kingdom, our examples will come from there, but they will be applicable to similar environments across the world; the overall design process and many of the principles and ideas will also be widely applicable. Wherever you are based, a better understanding of the habitats surrounding a coastal garden should be an important source of inspiration for your design.

Chapters 2 to 4 cover the core design process that professional garden designers use, which you could use to produce a design for your own garden. Chapter 2 sets out a step-by-step design process, beginning with the survey and working through how to produce an outline design, construction drawings and planting plans. Depending on the scope of the project you may not need to follow every step but going through the relevant parts will be an excellent start and help you achieve successful and beautiful results. Chapter 3 goes into more detail about how to ensure that any built parts of your design, such as paving or a pergola, will be suitable for coastal environments. Styling ideas and some sample construction drawings are included to help you create an attractive coastal theme with these features. Chapter 4 explains the process of producing a planting design: the practical considerations as well as ways to work with colour, texture, and seasonal changes, to create beautiful, harmonious effects. This chapter also includes planting and maintenance techniques.

Chapter 5 is in many ways the core of the book, as it lists the plants that we recommend for use in coastal gardens. Although domestic outdoor spaces have many practical functions, such as entertaining and cooking, sunbathing, children’s play, sport, and exercise, if you are going to the trouble of carefully designing that space it is likely that you have some passion for plants. For us as garden designers they are the part that excites us the most and, given a free hand, we would probably be designing almost every part of the garden as a chance to show them off to their best effect. But the coastal environment can be hard on plants and our choice is usually much more limited than it would be in an inland garden. We have worked on many coastal gardens as professional garden designers and in that time have developed a list of plants that we feel we can trust to thrive in various levels of exposure to coastal conditions. This list forms the basis of Chapter 5 and although nothing is guaranteed in gardening and the safest choice of tough, coastally adapted plants can mysteriously fail to thrive, these planting choices will help you produce schemes with the best chance of success.

How we can design and maintain our gardens in the most ecologically sustainable way and how they can attract and provide habitats for wildlife has become of increasing interest and concern to amateur and professional gardeners in recent years. In Chapter 6 we will look at some ideas for how to approach these issues in a coastal garden. We will look at how we can design our garden to harness nature rather than fight it, how to use plants (often native) to increase biodiversity, and how we can reduce our use of water in the garden. This does not need to be a worthy but limiting influence on our work: it can be a source of great interest and satisfaction, particularly when we learn to notice and appreciate the wildlife that we can attract. Chapter 6 will look in some detail at the fascinating species we may be able to encourage in our gardens. Although the wildlife we look at will be that found in the United Kingdom, the approach is applicable worldwide and should be an important part of all the gardens we create.

Finally, we have included a glossary of the more technical terms that we use and have listed some of the plant nurseries that specialise in coastal plants, and some coastal gardens that are open to the public and are well worth a visit.

Chapter 1

The Coast

COASTAL CONDITIONS

Some of the largest challenges for plants exposed to coastal conditions are salt-laden winds, sea mists or fog. The effects of these are most noticeable within about 300m (980 feet) of the seashore but salt scorch on leaves has been observed as far as 10km (6 miles) inland. The effect on hard landscaping materials can be observed even further inland with, for example, coastal atmospheric corrosion a problem for the use of architectural metal within about 900m (2,950 feet) of the ocean and observable up to about 50–80km (30–50 miles) from the sea. Salt can accumulate on plants and in the soil, pulling moisture from the leaves and roots. Plants that are native to areas prone to salt-laden winds have evolved adaptations to deal with salt stress and we will look at those in more detail in Chapter 5. However, salt-laden winds may not be a wholly negative environmental factor for plants. There is some suggestion that they may have an anti-fungal effect, which is beneficial.

Tree mallow, Malva arborea, is vulnerable to severe frost and so, in the United Kingdom, in the wild it is almost always found in mild microclimates within 100m of the sea. Here it is growing on a clifftop overlooking the Isle of Wight.

As well as carrying salt, the wind in most coastal areas tends to be stronger than that in low-lying inland areas due to the sea surface producing less friction. In the United Kingdom the prevailing winds are west to south-westerly and coastal areas are more exposed in the north and west of the country. Some air movement is beneficial for plants, tending to reduce humidity and so discourage fungal diseases, but high winds increase the amount of transpiration from leaf surfaces, increasing the stress from water loss. Strong, gusting winds can also cause physical damage to the plant’s structure, rocking it, loosening roots, and breaking off leaves and branches. The effect of this wind pruning can be seen in the typically low-growing shrubs in exposed coastal regions, shaped by the strength and direction of the prevailing winds coming off the sea.

The wind in coastal areas often exhibits a typical pattern across the day. Water has a higher specific heat capacity than soil and rock and so the sea takes longer to heat up and cool down than the land. As the sun warms the land during the day, the air above the land also warms and rises. The air over the sea remains cooler and the pressure difference causes the air to blow in from the sea onto the land. This causes the typical onshore, or sea breeze – a cool wind blowing in from the sea during the day. At night the reverse can happen: the sea cools more slowly than the land and so the cooler, higher pressure air over the land blows out toward the lower pressure over the sea creating an offshore, or land breeze.

These oaks, on a path through coastal salt marshes, have been shaped by the prevailing wind.

The yellow horned poppy (Glaucium flavum), native to much of the coastline of England and Wales, has a very long tap root to help its stability in grainy, sandy soils.

We will look at soil types in more detail in the next section, but sandy soils are typical. These tend be well drained, quick to warm and not subject to compaction, factors which can encourage good growth and root penetration. But the lower capacity to hold on to water and the increased levels of evaporation from the surface can be challenging in hot, dry summers. They also tend to be lower in organic matter and so are likely to need increased levels of good compost and other soil additives if you want to grow plants that are not adapted to these soils. Grainy, sandy soil also means that the roots are not as strongly held and so are more vulnerable to wind rock. Plants adapted to these conditions may have evolved deeply penetrating tap roots to deal with this effect.

Whilst many of these environmental factors are challenging for plants and so limit our choices as gardeners, making designing and establishing a garden a little more difficult, there are distinct attractions and advantages. We often associate the coast with bright sunny days and although this impression may be partly due to association with summer holidays on the beach, there is certainly a particular quality of light on clear days as the sun shines in a wide, unobstructed sky and reflects from sand and sea. It is also certainly true that coastal regions tend to have relatively milder climates. As previously mentioned, the sea takes longer to warm and longer to cool down than the land. The effect of this is observable across the seasons with coastal summers being cooler than inland summers and coastal winters warmer and less prone to frost. In the next section we will look at some of the habitats and types of environment to be found around the coast of the United Kingdom, and how we might take inspiration from their beauty and variation.

COASTAL HABITATS

Although there are some typical environmental effects we tend to find in coastal areas, there is, of course, a great deal of variation in coastal conditions and habitats. When you come to design a garden, wherever it is situated, it is a good idea to have an understanding of its context. At a very practical level it is vital to know your soil and climate but beyond that, some understanding of the plant habitats around you, the geology, and even the history of the use of the land, can feed into your design, inspiring you and setting your design firmly within the land around it.

There is, of course, a strong tradition in gardening, perhaps particularly in the British gardening tradition, of bringing in plants and design influences from across the world. This is one of the fascinating aspects of creating a garden and should be celebrated but there has been a strong recent trend for garden design to respond closely to its surroundings, something that Japanese garden design has long understood. This absolutely does not mean you need to limit yourself to plants that are local to you (although, if you are planting a wildflower meadow, there are good ecological reasons for doing that if you can). When we are designing planting schemes for coastal gardens in particular, the extended choices we get from borrowing plants from coastal environments around the world are very useful. But including at least some plants that are local to you, cultivars of those plants, stone or locally sourced landscaping materials, or any other local inspiration you can find, can very much help produce a harmonious garden design. This is why, even if your drawing skills are not great, taking a walk with your sketchbook can be very helpful in the early stages of producing a design. Photographing your locality is also an option but the act of sketching, even badly, is a good aid to close observation.

Whatever your level of drawing ability, some time spent walking around and sketching details of the local habitat will be a very useful source of inspiration for your design.

This section will take a broad look at areas of the coastline of the United Kingdom, their habitats and other features that may be important practically or as sources of inspiration for your garden design. Many of the habitats discussed will be common around the United Kingdom and around the world; others are more localised. The habitats vary in the amount of exposure to tides: some are regularly covered, others only during exceptionally high tides, and some are beyond the extreme high tide mark but still affected by salt winds and other coastal climatic features. Those habitats within the typical intertidal zone are unlikely to provide much inspiration for our planting but if your garden is close to such a habitat, it is worth having some understanding and appreciation of it so you can perhaps design a sympathetic transition from your garden to the landscape beyond. Coastal habitats are also divided into those that are eroding, producing features such as cliffs and caves, and those that are accreting, where the sediment produced by erosion is deposited to produce landforms such as mudflats or saltmarshes.

This intertidal zone is unlikely to provide any direct inspiration for garden planting, but a good garden design might create a tasteful transition to a view of such a habitat.

There are several classification schemes commonly used to describe habitats. We have based this list on the UK Habitat Classification, UKHab (further details of which can be found at ukhab.org), and we have included the UKHab codes and titles in italics within our descriptions. This is not an exhaustive list of the habitats to be found along the British coastline but is intended as a list of those of most interest to us as garden designers. We have listed some of the plants and wildlife that are typical to these habitats which could be used in a planting scheme to reflect some of that habitat in your garden. Further details about how to do this can be found in Chapters 5 and 6. Some of these habitats are under threat and plants should never be taken from the wild. Care should also be taken that you are not planting invasive species, not native to these habitats, which might escape your garden and establish themselves in the wild. But some native planting, particularly using plants that are typical of habitats surrounding your garden, can be very beneficial to wildlife and can create a garden design that is harmonious with its landscape.

Coastal vegetated shingle

UKHab: s3b Coastal Vegetated Shingle

Shingle beaches, formed from sediment with particles of 2–200mm ( to 8 inches) in diameter, are a reasonably common feature along the British coast but unusual outside of north-western Europe, Japan and New Zealand. The high energy waves that are required to deposit sediment of this size mean that they do not usually support much plant life but on certain stable spits or similar landforms vegetation can get established and some of those plant communities are unique to shingle. If your garden is near to a shingle coast that doesn’t support vegetation, this section could still apply to you and be used to help you design a garden that will work well in this setting.

The largest site in the United Kingdom is to be found at Dungeness, a headland on the coast of Kent which is of particular interest to coastal gardeners as it is the site of Derek Jarman’s famous garden at Prospect Cottage. This garden is a fantastic example of how to create a garden in sympathy with its surrounding habitat and if your garden is near a shingle fringed coastline, you could take much inspiration from it. His creative use of driftwood, fishing floats and other found objects from the beach would certainly work well in such a garden. Settling these within a planted area covered in a mix of rocks, shingle and finer gravels would bring the surroundings into the garden. Jarman’s garden is open to the shingle expanse around it: ‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon,’ as he put it. Such an area need not be the whole of your garden design; some parts could still be more sheltered and have a different feel.

Derek Jarman’s clever use of native planting such as gorse (Ulex europaeus) and sea kale (Crambe maritima) makes this garden at Prospect Cottage very much part of the surrounding Coastal Vegetated Shingle.

A shingle planted area that is exposed to salt-laden winds would need a careful choice of plants but inspiration can be taken from the plants typical in this habitat. In the wild, these habitats are sometimes bordered by shrubs, such as gorse (Ulex europaeus) and blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), and stunted trees (seeChapter 5 for some suggested trees for your planting plan). These could be used to frame your view and create other more sheltered areas. Typical plants of the shingle that could be used in your planting scheme include sea kale (Crambe maritima), the yellow horned poppy (Glaucium flavum), sea campion (Silene maritima) and sea beet (Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima).

Insect species that are associated with this habitat include the wall brown butterfly (Lasiommata megera), brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis), the large garden bumblebee (Bombus ruderatus), shrill carder bee (Bombus sylvarum), the cuckoo bee (Nomada ferruginata), the bugs Rhopalus rufus and Monosynamma maritima, the leafhopper Aphrodes duffieldi, the dark guest ant (Anergates atratulus), July belle (Scotopteryx luridata) and the hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum). We have included a planting scheme (Moths and a Shingle Beach) in Chapter 6 which could work very well in a wildlife-friendly garden design inspired by this habitat.

Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

UKHab: t2 Littoral Sediment

This widespread habitat category includes the sandy beach, many people’s first thought when they think of the seaside. Beaches tend to form in more exposed locations, such as open coasts and bays, where the wave action prevents more fertile silts from accumulating. These are somewhat more common in the northern and western parts of the United Kingdom. Mudflats occur in more sheltered areas, such as estuaries and inlets, and can be found all around the British coastline.

These habitats are intertidal or otherwise regularly covered by salt water, so they do not support vegetation other than some microalgae on mudflats and dwarf eelgrass in sheltered areas. However, the sediments that make up mudflats are very fertile and support dense populations of invertebrates such as polychaete worms and bivalves. These invertebrates are an important source of food for wading birds and wildfowl.

Although this mudflat at Keyhaven in Hampshire does not support a varied plant community, it is a fertile, rich food source for wading birds and wildfowl.

Although there are no native plants from this habitat that could be used in a planting design, we could take inspiration from some of the planting that might be found on the fringes of these areas. A scheme based on ornamental grasses would work well to frame a view of a beach or mudflat. A sandy beach could be mirrored in your design with sympathetic hard landscaping materials such as sandstone paving, or timber structures inspired by groynes or driftwood. A sandy path edged with low-growing native coastal planting such as beach aster (Erigeron glaucus) could lead the eye very well to an end-of-the-garden view of this habitat type. Such a path would probably be best achieved using a self-binding gravel such as hoggin, or perhaps crushed shells. Going out with your sketchbook or researching how local artists have interpreted this habitat could be a source of inspiration. The way channels of water meander through mudflats could be the starting point for a curvilinear themed design for planting and paths.

The use of ornamental grasses in this garden, created by Elks-Smith Garden Design, creates a harmonious connection with the view of the natural habitat beyond.

The patterns made by the channels of water that typically run through a saltmarsh could be an inspiration for a serpentine layout in your garden design.

Your planting design could also be influenced by closely related habitats even if they themselves are not present. For instance, planting inspired by the native vegetation of the saltmarsh would work well in a garden overlooking mudflats, and machair or sand dune vegetation could work with a view of a sandy beach.

Saltmarsh

UKHab: t2a Coastal Saltmarsh

When mudflat sediments accumulate sufficiently to rise above regular tidal inundation, salt-tolerant plant species can begin to get established. This stabilises the area and increases the amount of sediment that is retained, raising the ground further and allowing more plant species to colonise. When this happens, a saltmarsh habitat can be created. The plants to be found vary from the low-lying edges of the mudflat, which are often covered by high tidal waters and can only support the most salt tolerant of plants, to higher areas that are only covered by extreme tides and can support a much wider variety of plants. Saltmarshes are to be found all around the coastline of the United Kingdom. Extensive complexes are found around major inlets and estuaries in lowland areas. Smaller, more isolated saltmarshes are associated with smaller estuaries and sheltered positions at the head of sea lochs in more upland areas.

Saltmarshes support many species of invertebrate and are an important source of food and roosting for breeding, wintering, and migrating birds, particularly wildfowl and waders. The plant species present in this habitat vary quite a bit across the country. Scottish saltmarshes for instance tend not to have the abundance of sea purslane (Atriplex portulacoides) and sea lavenders (Limonium spp.) that are characteristic of saltmarshes south of the Solway Firth. So if you are keen to reflect a local saltmarsh habitat in your planting scheme you should investigate which plants are particular to your area. However, some broadly typical saltmarsh plants that could work well in a garden include sea beet (Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima), marsh mallow (Althea officinalis), sea plantain (Plantago maritima), thrift (Armeria maritima), and sea aster (Aster tripolium).

Narrow creeks are a typical feature of saltmarshes, where the tidal waters flow in and out between higher areas of sediment stabilised by plants. These could be an interesting source of inspiration for a design feature consisting perhaps of an actual stream meandering through your planting or a more abstracted representation, such as branching paths or dry ‘streams’ of sandstone pebbles.

Machair

UKHab: 26 Machair

One of the rarest habitats in Europe, this type of low-lying coastal grassland is only found in North and West Scotland and Northern and Western Ireland. Machair is formed by the action of very strong onshore winds blowing across sandy beaches and eroding sand dunes. Calcareous shell sand and seaweed build up over impermeable bedrock creating a flat or gently undulating habitat which is sustained by traditional farming techniques (light grazing, hay cutting and small-scale food production) and is very rich in flowering plant species.

Field scabious (Knautia arvensis) is a prominent feature of this machair in Connemara, Ireland.

A planting scheme inspired by the machair might include bird’s foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum), wild thyme (Thymus praecox), selfheal (Prunella vulgaris), red clover (Trifolium pratense), and common harebell (Campanula rotundifolia). Not all these plants are recommended for a site very exposed to salt winds, so this is an effect that would be better created in a more sheltered part of a coastal garden.

Machair is a flower-rich habitat and so an important source of nectar for bees including the scarce red shanked carder bee (Bombus ruderarius) and moss carder bee (Bombus muscorum) and the very rare great yellow bumblebee (Bombus distinguendus) and northern colletes bee (Colletes floralis).

Sand dune

UKHab: s3a Coastal Sand Dunes

Sand dunes can be found along much of the United Kingdom coastline and support a surprising range of plants and wildlife for such an exposed habitat. They are formed when sand, blown inland from the beach, accumulates because of an obstacle such as a plant, or because of rising ground. The root systems of grasses like sand couch (Elymus farctus) and marram grass (Ammophila arenaria) bind the sand together and stabilise the dune as it develops. These dunes are often part of a successive system from beach edge vegetation, through embryonic and mobile dunes, to fixed dune grassland. Slacks, the low-lying areas between the dunes can resemble dry or wet heathland habitats, but much of the habitat is exposed, dry, unstable, and unfertile. Consequently, the plant life tends to be very adapted to coastal conditions.

Well-established planting on sand dunes at Formby, Lancashire. The pine woodlands beyond are home to one of Great Britain’s few surviving colonies of red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris).

A garden set among or adjoining a system of sand dunes is a challenge but an exciting one, and one that would respond very well to planting that looked to the native planting surrounding it. Closer to the property you might use shelter belt planting or hard landscaping to create more sheltered planting areas. These could then be reduced towards the boundaries of the garden, where the planting would more and more mimic the surrounding natural planting. If the situation allows one or the more of the boundaries to be very open, perhaps just using some simple chestnut pale fencing, then the garden can really become part of the landscape in a very pleasing way. The hard landscaping could reflect structures found amongst the dunes or on the beach. Boardwalk paths would certainly work, and perhaps low retaining walls of timber, reminiscent of piers or groynes, to provide sheltered areas and to stabilise some dune-like sloping planting areas.

Plants you might use include sea holly (Eryngium maritimum), hound’s tongue (Cynoglossum officinale), biting stonecrop (Sedum acre), and sea beet (Beta maritima). Dune-dwelling invertebrates that you might attract include the grayling butterfly (Hipparchia semele), the sand wasp (Ammophila sabulosa), the rare dune tiger beetle (Cicindela maritima) and the sandbowl snail (Catinella arenaria).

Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes

UKHab: t1 Littoral Rock

UKHab: s2a6 Soft Rock Sea Cliffs

UKHab: s2a5 Vegetated Sea Cliffs

These habitats, produced by shoreline wind or water erosion, vary greatly in the vegetation they support depending on how exposed they are to wind, salt spray, and tides. Steep slopes or vertical hard cliffs are widely present around the coastline of Britain and Ireland, particularly in more exposed areas. They tend to be formed from rocks that are more resistant to erosion such as granite, sandstone and limestone but can also form from softer rocks such as chalk. A large proportion of Europe’s chalk cliffs are to be found in England. Rocky shores are often formed at the base of these steep slopes or cliffs and consist of boulders of various sizes and shapes, and rocky ledges. Soft cliffs, formed from the erosion of less resistant material such as shales or boulder clay, are not as widespread as hard cliffs, occurring mainly along the east and central south coast of England, in Cardigan Bay and along the coast of North Wales. The softer nature of these cliffs forms less-steep slopes and a more complex habitat supporting a wider variety of plant and invertebrate species.

These soft cliffs at Barton-on-Sea in Hampshire are typically less steep and support a wide variety of plants.

Widely varying though these habitats are, we have grouped them together here as they suggest some very similar design ideas. Incorporating influences from these landscapes into your garden design is likely to involve using rocks and slopes – either naturally occurring or created during the landscaping. This could be a quite modest rock wall feature, a coastal garden version of the traditional rockery, or something involving greater changes of level and larger rocks. A garden that slopes away down to cliffs or a rocky shore might be designed to start nearer the house with gabion walls as a more formal echo of the habitat, creating some sheltered spots for a wider range of planting. Then, towards the end of the garden, a more natural effect could dominate the design with boulders, natural rock walls, and native planting.

The plants associated with these habitats vary very widely depending on the amount of exposure. The exposure will be greatest on features such as headlands and along the southwest and northern coasts of the United Kingdom where high waves and strong winds mean that salt spray is delivered higher up the cliffs and slopes. Rocky shores are primarily an intertidal habitat with few plants of use to us in our planting schemes. But plants such as sea lavender (Limonium corniculatus and Limonium binervosum are useful species for planting schemes) and thrift (Armeria maritima) can be found along the upper edge of the splash zone. These species will also be found on the more sheltered ledges of hard cliffs, the slopes of soft cliffs and on clifftop grassland along with sea beet (Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima), sea plantain (Plantago maritima), buck’s horn plantain (Plantago coronopus), ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata), wild carrot (Daucus carota), bird’s foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and restharrow (Ononis repens). Invertebrates in these habitats that might be attracted to your garden if they are local to you include moths such as thrift clearwing (Pyropteron muscaeformis) and Barrett’s marbled coronet (Hadena luteago), and the snail Ponentina subvirescens. The microhabitats of soft cliffs are particularly rich in rare invertebrates including the ground beetle Cicindela germanica and the rare Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia).

COASTAL AREAS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM

The coastline of the United Kingdom consists of a remarkable variety of landscapes, habitats, and designated areas of natural beauty. It measures about 12,429 kilometres (7,723 miles) of which about 60 per cent is in Scotland and the offshore islands. Counter-intuitively though, this measurement, as of all coastlines, cannot be well defined. This ‘coastline paradox’ means that the length of a coastline depends on the method of measurement and the amount of detail included. The fractal nature of the shape of the coastline means that any increase in the accuracy of the measurement just measures smaller and smaller features and does not increase the certainty of the measurement.

Map of the United Kingdom showing the coastal regions.

TABLE 1.1  COASTAL AREAS OF THE UK AND THEIR HABITATS

Area

Habitats

West Coast of Scotland

• Coastal vegetated shingle (south-west)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Machair

• Sand dune

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (particularly hard cliffs, with soft cliffs present in Skye)

East Coast of Scotland

• Coastal vegetated shingle (north-east)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh (isolated and small scale)

• Machair (Northern Isles)

• Sand dune (excellent examples of which can be found in the Forvie National Nature Reserve, Aberdeenshire)

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (soft cliffs are particularly to be found on the coast of Fife)

Northern Ireland

• Coastal vegetated shingle (a few sites such as Ballyquintin in County Down)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh (a few small sites)

• Machair

• Sand dune (for example Portstewart Strand)

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (particularly hard cliffs with some soft cliffs along the coast of Antrim)

North East

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Sand dune

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes

North West

• Coastal vegetated shingle

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh (Liverpool Bay and Solway Firth)

• Sand dune

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (particularly hard cliffs)

Yorkshire and Humberside

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh

• Sand dune

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes

Wales

• Coastal vegetated shingle (some small sites)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh

• Sand dune (for example Kenfig Reserve, Glamorgan)

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (particularly hard cliffs in the south-west and soft cliffs in Cardigan Bay and the north-west)

East of England

• Coastal vegetated shingle (East Anglia)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh (The Wash)

• Sand dune (for example Holkham Reserve, Norfolk)

Thames Estuary

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh

South East

• Coastal vegetated shingle (Dungeness is by far the biggest in the United Kingdom)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh

• Sand dune (for example Sandwich and Pegwell Bay, Kent)

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (soft cliffs and hard chalk cliffs)

South Coast

• Coastal vegetated shingle (for example Lepe, Hampshire)

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh (excellent examples are to be found around The Solent)

• Sand dune (for example East Head, Sussex)

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (soft cliffs and hard chalk cliffs)

South West

• Beaches, sandbanks and mudflats

• Saltmarsh (Severn Estuary)

• Sand dune (for example Braunton Barrows, North Devon)

• Rocky shore, cliffs and steep slopes (particularly hard cliffs)

Chapter 2

The Design Process

WHY DESIGN?

The vast majority of beautiful, practical and successful gardens did not start with a drawing. They have been the work of amateur gardeners who, over many years, experimented, tweaked and dreamt up new ideas whilst idling in the garden on a sunny afternoon. Gardening is the long art. It requires time and patience. It is like the creation of a sculpture that is never quite finished and is made from ever-changing materials. If you have the time and patience, it is the best way to make a garden and this book will help you develop the knowledge and skills to make it happen.

Garden designers will usually use a step-by-step process to take them from initial ideas as sketches and mood boards, to detailed scale drawings that are used to build and plant the finished garden.

But there is another approach. As professional garden designers we work with clients who want a beautiful and practical outdoor space but don’t have the time or expertise to let it slowly evolve over many years of work. They may be happy to spend some of their leisure time working on the garden but still want to be sure that they start with something that has the best chance of success. Design drawings are the way we communicate with these clients, checking that we have understood their needs, tastes and budget. This chapter will teach you how to produce those drawings and how to create the best starting point possible for a coastal garden. Most courses in professional garden design will teach a process very similar to the one laid out here. If you are taking one of these courses or are now working in the profession this chapter will help you apply that process to coastal gardens in particular.

Whilst this process is more typical of a professional approach, these drawings are also a good first step for the amateur gardener who has perhaps just acquired a garden by the sea and is wondering where to start. If you work through this design process, it will help you understand what you want from your garden and what is possible. It will help you to come up with exciting ideas that you might not otherwise have considered. It will help you avoid wasting money on plants or features that don’t work. And, if you need to employ landscapers at any stage, it will help you communicate your requirements to them.

COASTAL DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

If you want to improve or create a new garden exposed to coastal conditions, there is perhaps an even greater argument for starting with a design drawing. It will help you plan how to deal with your greatest challenge, the salt wind. Even with careful planning you will lose more plants than if your garden was further inland. If you don’t plan at least to some extent how you are going to deal with the wind you will lose many more and waste a good deal of money and effort.

With a plan you have the opportunity to think about how you will deal with the salt wind. You can decide where and how you will create shelter, either with carefully placed plantings of tough shrubs, hedging or trees that will filter and deflect the wind, or with built elements such as walls, fences, toughened glass screens, or sunken seating areas. Where these measures are not possible or desirable, you can make sure that your planned planting will be adapted to deal with the full force of unsheltered coastal conditions. Other chapters in this book will cover in detail how you can use hard landscaping features and planting in a coastal garden. This chapter will cover how to get those ideas and solutions onto a plan that can be used to build and plant the garden.

Protected by its terraced lower position, walls and fencing, this garden by Sue Townsend Garden Design achieves fantastically colourful and varied planting whilst maintaining its sea view.