Small Garden?
Daff Odil
Posts: 1
Just seen the 'small' garden on tonight's Gardeners' World shown by Joe Swift. It was stated that it was 21 metres long - that doesn't seem a small garden by the standards of some of the expensive houses that are currently being built in my village whose gardens are approximately 12 metres long. So how 'big' is a small garden?
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Such things are difficult to define really. It is a bit like defining your wealth or poverty when there is no baseline from which to make an assessment. People have their own perceptions of size. Is it perhaps a matter of how much hard work you feel you can put into keeping it respectable?
My garden is getting a bit "too big" for me these days.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'
Mine is 3.6 x 16m. I envied that garden last night, it was gorgeous. Loved the box pyramids.
That's about the length of my garden, narrows to about 3 metres at the far end.
I like gardening and am physically fit so to me it is small but many non gardening visitors have exclaimed how large it is
Subjective isn't it
Last edited: 07 October 2017 09:26:06
The back garden here is about 12m x 12m ... it's by far the largest garden I've had for the past 20 years, but to me it seems small because prior to that I had various gardens from a third of an acre upwards to 9 acres of smallholding ... size is always relative
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
You have started my thinking now... I agree 21M seems very generous. I would suggest that a plot which is smaller than the footprint of the house is small.
My current garden is wide, because the house is wide and narrow. This has the effect of making it look instantly large. A friend's garden, however, is only one 'room' wide but is very long and probably much larger in square footage than either of our houses.
Size goes with house building eras and also location. In London suburbs, as they moved out into Metroland, plots in the 30s were much bigger than those that went with Victorian and Edwardian terraces in places like Ealing. Same in the post war 50s building. By the 60s houses were becoming boxes and so were their gardens and now, with land prices being what they are, gardens are verging on postage stamp dimensions for many new builds. It's all down to economics.
It's also subjective. If you love gardening and have time what is small to you may be medium or large to others and vice versa.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." - George Bernard Shaw
The smallest garden I ever had was 11m x 4.5m . This one is 7.6 acres.
I suppose it's like " affordable housing" ( affordable to whom?)
All things are relative.
I haven't seen the program yet but 21 meters would be classed as big for me. But, like others have said, it's about what you want from the space. I guess programs like this are there to highlight size isn't everything because in truth, they know that more and more of new properties will never give out the space of the past. It's also there to bring in more people to try to think 'green' via the design route. Usually towards the younger generation. They are not likely to relate to gardens that look like they belong to stately homes.
It was the sort of garden you could apply in an average sized plot... it's probably about the size of a typical council house garden, but bigger than a normal Victorian terrace. The issue of designing such a garden being harder than a larger plot is definitely true... every square foot counts!
Not sure it's harder to design, with a large garden it's a matter of getting lost and trying to make something that can be managed without covering the entire thing in gravel or lawn. My first "garden" was the yard my two up two down in Darwin had, so it was perhaps 5m by 5m But my neighbours came round asking to look in it as they could see wonderfull things out their bedroom windows! Now I have a huge garden 1hectare and no one would ask to come look at it, other than maybe a botanist!