The site is in the Leningrad region, around 30 km from St. Petersburg. It’s rectangular in shape and home to two buildings: the main house where the owners live, and a bathhouse with a guest floor.
In a nutshell
We were tasked with creating a bright and unusual decorative garden between the main house and guest house. It should look spectacular all year round, while the remaining space should present a generally calm and minimalist design.
The modern young owners live here year-round and wanted the garden to be ‘something special’. Their wish-list included a small vegetable patch, a fruit garden, a few flowers, sections of intact woodland and a simple children’s playground with a climbing frame.
The concept came from a garden design we saw at the Chelsea Flower Show in London, which served as inspiration. However, the result of our work differs considerably from the original.
The Garden
The main house is fairly substantial in size and stands at the centre of the site. The smaller, lower guest annex is located very close by.
The small, separate garden around the guest house creates a visual contrast between the two buildings and offsets any unevenness in topography.
The garden around the guest annex features several round pools of varying heights and widths, made of Corten steel. The ponds’ circulation system is carefully regulated to prevent the water from stagnating or freezing before winter.
The garden is dominated by the exquisite juneberry trees and spherical thujas of varying sizes, enhanced by the trimmed cotoneasters and spiraea japonica.
Perennials and grasses are the central focus. In the perennial selection, we mostly opted for evergreens (pachysandra and bergenia), ornamental deciduous plants (plantain lily, brunnera) and varieties that remain attractive after flowering (asterworth, geranium, astilbe, iris). Meanwhile, reed was the chosen grass – short and sharp-scaled Karl Foerster and variegated carex morrowii.
The garden is a visual delight all summer long with its lavish blossoms while in autumn it presents unusually bright colours.
The narrow space between the house and the fence features a colourful bed planted with all the owner’s favourite flowers since childhood.
A path runs around the edge of the plot, leading to a small decking area surrounded by decorative grasses – the perfect place to sunbathe in summer – and on towards the guest house. Here, the path is lined with shrubs, including thuja, viburnum, black chokeberry, philadelphus and spirea, all of which thrive in shady conditions and ensure a varied range of beautifully eye-catching foliage and blossoms for the owners.
We’ve tidied a small area of the forested woodland and installed a playhouse while the corner of the plot now features a modestly sized vegetable patch with a greenhouse.