The gardens, season by season

Every one drawn in Pontcanna and built by our own crew

We go back to these gardens with a camera through the year. A portfolio should show February as honestly as it shows June, because you will be living with both.

Spring gardens

Bulb lawns come up through new turf, blossom carries the first colour, and borders planted the previous autumn start to knit together. Spring is the season that shows whether the plan was any good.

A striped back-garden lawn in April with purple crocus and yellow narcissi naturalised through the turf, bare trees and a clipped beech hedge behind. — Radyr: bulb lawn in its second April, 4,000 crocus and narcissi under new turf

A reclaimed brick path laid in herringbone curving between deep borders of tulips and emerging perennials, damp after rain. — Whitchurch: brick path re-laid through tulip borders

A small riven sandstone terrace behind a Victorian terraced house in early morning sun, with a timber bistro table and pots of tulips. — Roath: morning terrace catching the early sun

Summer gardens

This is when the drifts of salvia, achillea and grasses we planted back in autumn earn their keep. It is also, by some distance, when clients send us the most photographs.

An enclosed courtyard garden paved in pale porcelain, with two weathered corten steel planters full of grasses and salvia, terraced rooftops beyond the wall. — Pontcanna: porcelain courtyard with corten planters, three summers in

A crisply mown striped lawn on the middle terrace of a sloping garden, edged by a low dry stone wall and deep green summer borders. — Cyncoed: the middle terrace lawn, mown twice a week in June

A domestic wildflower meadow of ox-eye daisies, knapweed and fine grasses with a mown path cut through the middle. — Dinas Powys: mini-meadow replacing 90 m² of tired lawn

Autumn gardens

Grasses and seedheads catch the low light, hedges hold their line, and the planting plan shows its bones before winter arrives. Our favourite season to photograph, and the best one to plant into.

Tall miscanthus grasses and rudbeckia seedheads in bronze and straw tones catching low November light, a clipped yew hedge behind. — Cowbridge: miscanthus and rudbeckia holding the border into November

Garden steps built from oak sleepers with gravel treads rising under a copper beech, scattered with damp fallen leaves. — Llandaff: oak-sleeper steps under the copper beech

A freshly striped lawn at the end of October, borders cut back for winter and a scattering of fallen leaves at the edges. — Penarth: last cut of the year, stripes for the season’s end

Winter gardens

Evergreen hedging, pleached limes, corten and stone. A garden should still hold its shape in January, when everything soft has gone to ground and you are looking at it through the kitchen window.

A pale limestone path running between clipped yew domes and low box hedging under hoar frost on a January morning. — Llandaff: yew domes and limestone path on a frosted January morning

The same porcelain courtyard in winter, paving wet with rain and the corten planters holding clipped evergreen structure and cut-back grasses. — Pontcanna: the courtyard resting, planters keeping the composition

An upper terrace paved in riven Welsh slate, wet and dark, with low winter sun raking long shadows across it. — Cyncoed: upper terrace, low winter sun on Welsh slate

The full story behind two of them

Written up with the budget, the programme and the bits that went wrong.

Pontcanna courtyard Cyncoed family garden

There is room in here for yours

An hour on site, free. We measure up, talk through what you want, and follow it with a fixed written quote.

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