Elite English Garden Designer David Stevens’ Advice to American Gardeners: Break the Garden into Rooms

"It is important, especially for North Americans with large, open backyards, to break down the garden space into a series of smaller rooms. If you see everything at once, it becomes uninteresting."

February 15, 1992

On this day, The Vancouver Sun shared a story by Steve Whysall called “Break Outdoor Spaces into Series of Small Rooms.”

The article features David Stevens, one of England's leading garden designers and the winner of eight gold medals at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show.

David shared his advice at the 1992 Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle.

In many instances, the city yard can be used as an outside room.

You can extend the space inside the house out into the garden and make the two work as a single unit.

It is important, especially for North Americans with large, open backyards, to break down the garden space into a series of smaller rooms.

One of the great tricks of landscape design is to create a sense of mystery and surprise as you move from one space into another.

If you see everything at once, it becomes uninteresting.

But if you break the space down into individual rooms, it becomes inherently more interesting.

[England has] some remarkable gardens, but the average backyard is much more mundane than most people imagine.

We're a nation of plant lovers, but we're certainly not a nation of garden designers.

A lot of our gardens are too busy and overcomplicated.

Next, David offered the following tips for people thinking of making a garden:

Don't let your garden end up a muddle of hard and soft landscaping. Take time to draw up a plan.

Before planting anything, put in all the hard landscaping, all the decking, walling, paving, bones, and composition of the gardening.

Plants will bring the garden to life, softening the hard surfaces.

Keep the design and planting simple.

Resist the temptation to plant too many different things.

Remember what Gertrude Jekyll, the famous Edwardian garden designer, taught: hot colors (reds, yellows) foreshorten the space through their vibrancy.

If you put a pot of bright red flowers at the bottom of the garden, your eye will go straight to it. Use hot colors close to the viewpoint and cooler colors farther away. It gives a nice feeling of space, and small gardens can be made to feel larger.

Don't bite off more than you can chew in one season. Take a few years to build your garden.