Designing with what's already there
Most sites arrive with materials already on them: an old wall, a broken path, a pile of setts under a hedge, spoil from a previous build, soil that has to go somewhere. The first question on any site is what can stay and what can be used again.
Reusing what is there is not only the cheaper and lower-impact route. It is usually the one that produces a better-looking garden, because the materials already belong to the place.
Survey the materials before drawing anything
Alongside mapping trees, levels and boundaries, it is worth cataloguing the hard materials on site: type, rough quantity, condition and whether they can be lifted cleanly. Reclaimed brick, stone flags, granite setts, cobbles, slate, roof tiles and sound timber are all worth keeping.
Knowing what you have before the design is fixed changes the design. A modest stack of old flags might set the size of a terrace; a run of reclaimed brick might decide how a wall or an edge is built.
Soil and spoil are materials too
Moving soil off site and bringing soil back in is one of the most expensive and least necessary things a garden build can do. Spoil can be used to build up levels, form banks, raise beds or create the low-fertility mounds that suit many of the toughest, most drought-tolerant plants.
Subsoil in particular is an opportunity. Its lower fertility suppresses vigorous weeds and suits the kind of planting that thrives on poor ground, so the material you were going to pay to remove becomes the base of a planting area.
Mixing old and new honestly
There is rarely enough reclaimed material to do everything, and trying to make new material imitate old rarely convinces. It works better to let the two read as different: reclaimed stone where it is seen and walked on, new material where it is structural or hidden, with a clean junction between them.
Old materials also carry their own tolerances. Hand-made brick and worn stone are not uniform, so joints, falls and edges need to be detailed with that in mind rather than fought.
Sourcing the rest nearby
When more material is needed, sourcing it locally keeps the palette coherent. Stone from the same geology as the buildings around a site looks settled in a way that imported stone does not, and shorter journeys mean lower cost and lower carbon.
It is worth asking a supplier where the material actually comes from. Stone sold under a local-sounding name is not always quarried anywhere near the place it is named after.
Written by George Hughes-Stanton of GHS Spaces, a landscape design practice based in Bristol. See the projects or get in touch.