8 effective tips for narrow town garden success

June 19th, 2016
Posted In: Garden style & living, Garden trends & design, Town gardens

If you live in a town or village, you probably have a long narrow town garden. It may be shady, over-looked and small.

But whatever your gardening style – classic, wildlife, jungle or romantic – you can still achieve an amazing garden in spite of the problems.

I live in Faversham, a town with a mix of architecture. It’s mainly Georgian and Victorian, with some Medieval streets. The gardens are mostly narrow town gardens, yet there’s a great range of styles. Here are some really effective garden design tips from these real gardens:

This is an exceptionally narrow town garden – effectively a gravel path with deep beds. It belongs to Genevieve in Faversham.

If you prefer to watch a video…

You’ll find these 12 essential narrow garden tips helpful:

You don’t need a lawn

If your garden is long and thin, the path is an important part of the design. It can be a focal point or it can create the shape of the garden.

A ‘no-lawn’ town garden can be really lush and exotic, too.

Many Victorian terraced houses have a ‘side return’. It’s a narrow strip of outside space that runs alongside the back extension. Many people now extend the back of the house from garden wall to garden wall, roofing over the ‘side return’ to create a big room instead of a narrow garden space.

Looking back towards Genevieve’s house from the garden gate at the end.

But the side return is almost the whole of Genevieve’s garden and she has made the most of it.

The space is only around 7ft wide, and is essentially a gravel and stone garden path which runs down the middle and widens out into a circle at regular intervals. There is charming planting on either side, and two places to sit.

2) The path is the key to a narrow town garden

Genevieve’s garden is made by her choice of path. If you have a sprawling country garden, paths are ways of getting from A to B in the most logical way. In a long, thin urban garden, your choice of path will make a big difference to how the space works and what the garden looks like.

This brick path starts on the right of Posy Gentles’ garden (Garden 3), giving her a big border to the left. It then bends to the left and gives her another big border on the right.

The offset path is one of the most successful strategies for a narrow town garden.

Look at the photos above and below. The paths start on one side of the garden and either bend or turn. An offset path gives you the option for deeper beds and lush planting.

See another attractive way of using a curved path in a long thin garden here.

This garden was the smallest garden open for the Whitstable Open Gardens (so not open for Faversham Open Gardens). Probably only about 15ft wide and 60ft long, its winding path creates space for lavish planting, places to sit, and a greenhouse.

4) You can have large plants in a small garden

Mary Mackay’s garden has a tropical atmosphere. Her garden is probably around 25ft wide and 50ft long. She has a giant cordyline, huge bamboos in pots, great silver-leafed cardoons, tetrapanax and more.

Mary Mackay’s garden in Faversham combines cordylines, bamboo and other large plants.

And check out Steve Edney and Lou Rawle’s exotic town garden here

5) Many plants grow well in the shade

If you read a plant catalogue, you may think that full sun is essential for a beautiful garden. Most plants seem to have ‘full sun’ or ‘full sun or partial shade’ as their growing conditions.

‘I think it’s like labels on clothes saying ‘dry clean only’,’ says Posy. ‘Alot of plants do surprisingly well in shady spots.’

‘Right plant, right place’ is a gardening mantra – and it works. But the ‘right place’ doesn’t always have to mean full sun.

Because it is surrounded by walls and is so narrow, Genevieve’s garden is very shady and yet the list of plants growing well is long.

Try a plant out…

Plants include choisya, sarcococca confusa, violets, Japanese anemones and a camellia that flowers for three months a year. There is an azalea in a pot, plus hydrangeas, cyclamen, hosta, hellebore, persicaria, clematis and foxgloves.

The list continues with crocosmia, several different types of roses, daphnes, fuschias, thyme, geraniums, oxalis, trachelospermum and many more.

Genevieve’s garden is very shady as it is bounded by walls and buildings and is very narrow, but the planting is abundant.

You may not realise how sunny your garden actually is. If your main time for sitting outside is in the evening, your garden may be mainly in shadow, but at midday, it may perhaps be almost wholly sunny. Many plants do reasonably well on about 4 hours of direct sunshine a day.

And the bonus is: a shady garden needs less watering!

Trial and error is the only way to find out if plants will be happy in a shady spot. Sun isn’t the only factor in how well a plant will grow.

There are some lovely shady garden tips here in this narrow north facing town garden.

6) You can have privacy even if you are overlooked

The tension between shade and privacy in long thin town gardens is a source of great friction between neighbours. Because one side often wants its privacy and the other feels their garden is compromised by trees or vigorous climbers.

Mary Mackay has created a private area at the bottom of her garden, surrounded by bamboo trellis and reached by an arch.

The key is not to expect privacy in the whole garden – you do live in a town after all, but to establish where you would like to sit and to make a small area private, using trellis, a pergola or a single tree.

And if your neighbour does the same, be tolerant. You can plant shade-loving plants (or use the shady area for storage).

The most private place in a narrow town garden is often close to the house, like in Genevieve’s garden.

A pergola offers privacy at John and Mary Cousins’ house. Pergolas, like sheds, can be up to up to 2.5 metres (8ft 2″) high if they are near or on your garden wall.

Privacy is a major issue in town gardens so there are several posts on it here. Check out the useful tips on three ways of increasing your garden privacy,  8 perfect for privacy garden trees, hedges for privacy and fences for privacy.

7) Blur the edges of a narrow town garden with planting

Town gardens used to have a fairly standard format. They had a lawn or terrace in the middle and planting round the edges.

But that makes them look smaller, because it creates defined boundaries.

However, planting in clumps – having beds across the garden rather than in thin beds down the sides – blurs the edges because your eye doesn’t quite know where the garden ends. Here are two examples where clumps make the garden seem bigger or more luxuriant.

A mixed – mainly evergreen – planting at the end of Julie Holbrook’s garden means you don’t know exactly where the garden ends.

The main planting bed in front of Posy’s house has lots of verticals. You can see that there is garden beyond, but you can’t quite see how far it stretches.

Top professional garden designer, Charlotte Rowe, designs stylish town gardens for the rich. in her own garden (which is tiny) she has created places to sit and lush planting areas. So she has fascinating points to make about how to break up the space in a narrow town garden in 12 Creative Tips for a Stunning Urban Garden.

Charlotte’s tiny urban garden has abundant planting, places to sit and a fireplace/barbecue.

8) You can experiment in a narrow town garden

Julie Holbrook has done most of the hard landscaping in her narrow town garden herself, laying the brick terrace. She even made her own brick barbecue and created a water feature out of Kent peg tiles and roofing lead.

The Kent peg tiles are layered in a ‘waterfall’ around the cordyline. Water flows down from a concealed tap at the top.

Julie used old brick (her house dates back to the 17th century) and pebbles in her terrace.

Finally, you might think that you can’t grow much food in a small urban garden. Think again! Read ‘How much food can you grow in a small urban garden?’

It’s about a garden in the suburbs of Melbourne, which demonstrates that you can use every inch of space to grow fruit, vegetables and even keep bees. And the tips would all work in UK or Northern hemisphere gardens, too.

Faversham Open Gardens and Garden Market Day is held every year on the last Sunday in June. You can also see gardens in Faversham, and the nearby town of Whitstable via open days with the NGS.

One of the gardens open for Whitstable last year has some lovely narrow garden tips. Read about the steps Mel and Emma took to create the long thin garden of their dreams.

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