Berkshire mid-century garden design

An elegant rectilinear garden design suited to a mid-century house in West Berkshire. The hard landscaping is mainly vernacular gravel and the planting is perfect for the very free-draining soil. The long pool provides a good view from the secluded seating area outside the garden room.

Clipped box balls and structural hedges give the garden its quiet formality, while the surrounding borders relax into looser, more painterly drifts of allium, ox-eye daisy, gaura and agastache, their pink and purple tones sitting comfortably against warm gravel and pale stone. A pair of bronze swans add a moment of stillness and playfulness in turn. At the pool's edge, water lilies open across the surface, doubling the sky and hedging in calm, still water — a garden generous with texture and restrained with colour, in keeping with both the house and its light Berkshire soil.