“Please don’t judge it today.”
That’s probably the sentence I hear most. Sometimes it’s the weeds. Sometimes it’s the lawn. Quite often it’s an overgrown border that someone has been meaning to tackle for months, but life has got in the way. I usually smile because, honestly, it makes no difference.
If you’ve invited a garden designer round, I’m not expecting perfection. Gardens aren’t show homes. They have good weeks and untidy weeks. A windy weekend can leave leaves everywhere, a fortnight of hot weather can make the grass look tired and a wet spring will send everything growing faster than anyone can keep up with. That’s just gardening.
The interesting part isn’t how the garden looks that day. It’s understanding why it isn’t working for you. More often than not, we begin in the kitchen rather than outside. Not because there’s anything technical to discuss, but because that’s where people naturally start talking. I’ll usually ask what prompted the phone call. The answers are rarely about plants.
“We’ve finally finished renovating the house.”
“We never seem to use the garden.”
“The children have grown up and it’s time to do something different.”
“We know it could be better, but we don’t know where to start.”
By the time we’ve finished that conversation, I’ve learnt far more than I would from a list of favourite plants. This is where a thoughtful garden design process begins: not with a ready-made idea, but with understanding how the space needs to work for the people who live there.
The First Walk Around The Garden
Then we head outside. The first walk around is surprisingly slow. There isn’t much pointing or sketching. It’s simply about taking everything in. One of the first things I tend to notice is what people do without thinking. Some families always leave the house through the utility room instead of the patio doors. Others instinctively walk across the lawn rather than use the path because it’s quicker. Those little habits aren’t right or wrong, but they tell you how the garden is already being used.
It’s also the point where people begin telling me stories. “This tree was here when we moved in.” “We’ve never known what to do with that corner.” “We thought about putting a patio there once.” Those comments might seem throwaway, but they often explain why a garden feels the way it does today.
Homeowners become incredibly good at editing their surroundings. If you’ve looked out of the same kitchen window every morning for fifteen years, your brain quietly stops paying attention to certain things. A shrub has grown taller than the window sill. The fence next door leans slightly. The evening sun only reaches the patio for half an hour. None of those changes happen overnight, so they’re easy to miss. They creep up gradually until one day the garden doesn’t feel quite as enjoyable as it used to, even if nobody can put their finger on why.
That’s often why fresh eyes help. Not because a designer sees something magical, but because they haven’t become used to the view. One visit sticks in my mind. The owners were convinced they needed to make their terrace much bigger because they loved having friends over. We spent a while outside, watched where the sun moved and talked about how they actually used the space. It turned out everyone abandoned the terrace after dinner because it dropped into shade much earlier than they realised. The answer wasn’t a larger terrace at all. It was moving the seating area a little further into the garden where the evening light lingered for another couple of hours.
It’s funny how often that happens. People are usually very good at spotting that something isn’t quite right. The difficult part is working out what’s causing it. That’s really what a first visit is about. Not arriving with all the answers, but asking enough of the right questions that the answers start appearing naturally.
The Things That Usually Surprise People
There’s nearly always a moment during that first visit when somebody stops, looks across the garden and says, “I’ve never noticed that before.” It’s rarely anything dramatic. Quite often it’s because we’ve simply stopped in a place they’ve never stood before.
I’ve asked people to turn round and look back towards the house rather than out at the garden. It sounds like a small thing, but that’s the view they’ll see every morning with the kettle on, every evening while cooking dinner and every wet Sunday when nobody fancies going outside. If that view feels disconnected or uninspiring, it affects the way the whole garden is experienced, even if nobody has ever consciously thought about it.
Light catches people out as well. Someone will tell me, quite confidently, that the garden is south facing. Then we’ll stand there for ten minutes and watch the shadow from a neighbouring oak creep across the terrace. Or we’ll discover that the sun lingers much longer in a corner of the garden that nobody ever uses. It’s one of the reasons I never assume anything before spending time outside. A compass point doesn’t tell you where people will actually enjoy sitting with a glass of wine on a summer evening.
Privacy is another interesting one. The first suggestion is often a taller fence. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. More often it isn’t. Moving a seating area a few metres, turning it to face a different direction or introducing a small group of trees can completely change how a space feels. You’re not shutting the garden in; you’re simply changing what your eye lands on.
Those sorts of conversations are impossible to have from photographs or measurements alone. They happen because we’re standing in the garden together, noticing things that only become obvious when you’re actually there. That’s probably the biggest surprise for most people. The first visit isn’t really about designing anything. It’s about understanding the place well enough that, when the design work begins later, it starts from the right place.
Every Garden Ends Up Asking A Different Question
By the end of that first visit, the conversation has usually changed. People often begin by asking practical questions. “Would you move that tree?” “Could we fit a bigger terrace in here?” “Do you think an outdoor kitchen would work?” They’re sensible questions, but they’re rarely the ones that shape the design.
What usually happens is that we spend an hour walking, talking and looking around, and by the end of it we’re discussing something completely different. Not what to build. How the garden needs to feel. That’s a much better place to start.
I’ve visited gardens where clients arrived convinced they needed more paving because they enjoyed entertaining. After spending time there together, it became obvious that entertaining wasn’t the issue at all. Everyone naturally drifted towards one quiet corner of the garden because it caught the last of the evening sunshine. The existing terrace was perfectly large enough; it just wasn’t in the place people wanted to be.
That’s something no Pinterest board will ever tell you. Beautiful photographs are useful. They help explain the sort of atmosphere you like and the materials you’re naturally drawn towards. But they can’t tell you whether your favourite place to sit is outside with the morning sun or whether you’ll always choose somewhere cooler on a hot afternoon. They certainly can’t tell you how your family uses the space.
That’s why I never worry if someone turns up with hundreds of saved ideas or none at all. Both are perfectly normal. The important part is working out how you want your own garden to fit into your everyday life. Once that’s clear, the design starts making decisions for us. Features stop being things we simply like the look of and begin to have a purpose.
That’s usually the point where clients stop asking, “Could we fit a pergola here?” Instead, they start saying things like, “I’d never thought about using that part of the garden,” or, “I can actually picture us sitting there.” Those moments are always satisfying because that’s when the garden starts feeling personal rather than aspirational.
The Best Designs Rarely Begin With A Drawing
People sometimes imagine that the creative part of a garden design project begins when the first sketch appears on paper. In reality, by that point, a lot of the important thinking has already happened. The conversations we’ve had while wandering around the garden. The places we’ve stopped without really meaning to. The view from the kitchen that suddenly seems worth framing. The realisation that you’d much rather watch the evening sun from a different part of the garden. None of those moments appear on a drawing, yet they’re often the reason a design feels right once it’s built.
The plans come afterwards. So do the planting schemes, the material samples and all the technical details needed to bring everything together. Those parts matter, of course, but they’re much easier to get right once the garden has been properly understood. If you’d like to understand what is usually included later in the process, this article on what a garden design plan includes explains the practical side in more detail.
Planting also comes into its own once the structure of the garden has been resolved. A good planting design doesn’t simply fill empty spaces. It helps shape how the garden feels through the year, softening edges, creating movement, adding scent and bringing the whole design to life. For more on that, you can also read about how planting shapes a garden through the season.
People usually invite a garden designer because they think they need answers. Quite often they already have some of them without realising it. They’ve been living with the garden for years. They know where the grandchildren disappear to when they visit. They know which chair everyone fights over on a warm evening. They know the view that still makes them smile every spring when the blossom appears.
My job isn’t to replace those instincts. It’s to notice the things that have quietly slipped into the background, ask the odd awkward question now and again, and help bring everything together into a garden that feels as though it has always belonged there.
That’s why the first visit matters so much. Not because decisions are made that day. Very few are. It’s because that’s where understanding begins, and without that, even the most beautiful drawings are just lines on paper.
If you’re thinking about redesigning your garden, don’t worry about having all the answers before making that first phone call. You don’t need a finished vision or a folder full of ideas. More often than not, the best place to start is simply by walking around the garden together and talking about how you’d like it to feel in the years ahead.
You can learn more about Julia’s garden design service, view recent work in the portfolio, or get in touch to arrange a consultation.
