Case Studies

The Crescent Donaldsons

Have you ever lived in a property with a courtyard garden and tried to make the space bright and colourful?   If so, you’ll know just how difficult that is because of the lack of light, water and nutrients.  So what do you do?

Many people have found success by using living walls, plant pots and containers.   But there are a few things you should know before you buy and implement a living wall to ensure you can give it the right amount of light, nutrients and water.   This post will tell you what you will need to know to make sure you select a product that will let you successfully increase the light and colour of the area.

So you’re looking for light and colour in a dark courtyard, what are your options?   The best method of ensuring you end up with something aesthetically beautiful as well as practical is by looking at these things:

• If you are in an area that has poor light this will be difficult to brighten up without being clever,   Try introducing some mirrors and lighting into the scheme.   This will reflect any natural light as well as accentuate some particular features within your space.
• Ensure you don’t over do it with to many colours, textures and forms.   Try to stick to complimentary colours where possible but do introduce some splashes of colour throughout for added interest.   But remember too much of a good thing is bad.   So use colour sparingly and rely on your faithful hardy plants to do a lot of the design work.
• Some areas may just be to problematic to keep watered so why not consider artificial plants,   the quality of artificial plants are tremendous these days and are difficult to detect with the untrained eye.   Using these cleverly can save a lot of expense on maintenance and irrigation throughout the life span.

So this is what we had to do for our client,   the area was built on a granite base so there was no way to get any nutrients from the soil and we wanted it to be a flexible area as well so why not use modular planters that can be arranged to your heart’s desire???   The planting in this scheme is all artificial… what did I tell you right?? You would never have known until I told you.   Now the benefits of this were;

• No messy soil or compost through the completed high specification city centre flat.
• Being able to select any variety of plant we wanted to suit the design.
• Low maintenance for the client.

So now you know, artificial can be just as if not sometimes more beautiful than natural but if you ask me I’d always use natural where I could.   Go on call me old fashioned if you want…