Private Residence, Family Garden
Location: Ireland
Landscape Architect | Garden Design: Peter Donegan MSGLD | Peter Donegan Garden Design
Design Assistant: Elif Öztürk
Detail – Planting plan:
– The piece that makes all the pieces appear as one and quite simply click. It decides what one sees from the outside to want to be on the inside (the secret behind London’s private squares historically being opened to the public) without, the design appearing, like “privacy” was a design request/ intent.
- Here the avenue is just that and the rules not overtly complex, never competing with, yet compliment and woo one further towards home – for which it should also compliment. Here using Tilia cordata Greenspire and Fagus sylvatica.
- Of previous Victorian build architecture I’ve designed the gardens for, I have specified Taxus baccata alongside mature Betula jacquemontii; again never to complete with front of house yet compliment. Here, albeit that would have a vast cost implication, it would have been very much the incorrect choice, not in keeping and out of sync with the area and buildings.
- To the main planting areas of this rural country estate, boundaries and backdrops now formed (ref backdrop colours, see the last 2 show gardens I designed; the latter also with Elif) the mixed informal planting style allows for pops in height and colour, eliminating using the beech and Tilia to pop or sudden further, coming in and drawing the eye further back and forth throughout the seasons, at times dappling the structures.
- The trick in here is also that the hard surfaces albeit different in parts are dumbed down intentionally, yet natural (always en vogue/ timeless) and the steel glass structures, not red (Japanese garden-esque because the planting is not all all green) but matt black.
- It looks simple, when 4 plus acres is scaled into one photo, but this is one I know we all got excited about – if planting design plans can be that.
