Indigoloft

Garden design · Hexbridge

Gardens that are three-quarters planting and one-quarter everything else.

Most garden design starts with the hard landscaping and adds plants at the end, when the budget is gone. We start with what will grow well in your soil, in your light, with the time you actually have — and then work out where the paving needs to be to get you among it.

The studio

Designer
Iris Vane
Working since
2012
Gardens a year
9–11
Typical plot
90–600 m²
Survey to plan
6–8 weeks
Smallest so far
14 m²

A planting plan, read properly

Plan view of a 14 by 9 metre rear garden A stone terrace along the house, a gravel path curving to a seat at the far corner, and six planted drifts numbered in the key below: bluestem grass along the sunny edge, amsonia behind it, geranium and salvia through the middle, hakonechloa in the shade of the boundary, and molinia at the far end. HOUSE — WEST FACING Stone terrace 6.0 × 2.4 m seat 1 2 3 4 5 6 N · 1:100
Rear garden at Wrenfield, 14 × 9 m, west facing, clay over gravel. Hover a drift to pick it out.
  1. 1Sesleria autumnalis — autumn moor grass34 · 7/m²
  2. 2Amsonia hubrichtii — blue star11 · 3/m²
  3. 3Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna'26 · 5/m²
  4. 4Geranium 'Rozanne'14 · 3/m²
  5. 5Hakonechloa macra — in the boundary shade22 · 5/m²
  6. 6Molinia caerulea 'Transparent'9 · 2/m²

Every plan is drawn at 1:50 or 1:100 with a numbered key, quantities, spacings and a setting-out dimension from two fixed points — so a contractor can plant it without ringing me, and so you can replace something in five years' time knowing exactly what it was.

How the studio thinks

Soil before scheme

We dig three holes and look at what comes out before anything is drawn. Clay over gravel, free-draining sand and a wet north-facing corner are three different gardens, and no amount of good design survives planting the wrong thing in them.

Structure that holds in February

A garden is judged on the grey days. Evergreen structure, seed heads left standing and grasses that catch low light carry the eight months when nothing is flowering, and they are what makes a garden feel designed rather than decorated.

Fewer species, more of each

Nine or ten species repeated in drifts read as a garden. Forty species, one of each, read as a collection — which is a perfectly good thing to want, but it is a different thing, and it needs a gardener.

Maintenance is a design decision

We ask how many hours a month you will genuinely give it, and we believe the answer. A scheme needing weekly attention given fortnightly is not a beautiful garden with a few weeds; it is a different and worse garden.

The year in the Wrenfield border

March–May

Bulbs through the emerging grass; amsonia comes up almost black before it greens.

June–August

Salvia and geranium carry it. Cut the salvia back in July and it does it again in September.

September–November

Molinia at its best in low sun; amsonia turns pure gold and is the reason it is there.

December–February

Everything left standing until the first week of March. Frost on seed heads is not a consolation prize.