Container Garden Guide

With an increasing tendency for empty nesters, young couples and singles towards higher density inner city living, and the desire to spend minimal time on maintaining gardens or other outdoor spaces, most new apartments, townhouses and condominiums tend to have only pocket sized backyards, courtyards or balconies. So it becomes particularly important to make the most of such limited areas by landscaping and utilizing the space in the best possible way.

But you don’t have to be a professional landscape architect to create an inviting courtyard space – you just have to follow a few basic design principles. Whilst you can’t physically increase the size of a small garden, you can certainly employ a few visual tricks to create the illusion of space.

One of the most important points in any design consideration is to create a thematic link between the indoors and the outdoors. What you want to do is to break down any obvious division between the interior living spaces and the exterior surfaces, which will then make the total area appear considerably larger. And one of the best ways to do this is to use similar flooring materials for both the interior floor and the exterior paint surface.

If your interior floor is solid wood or laminate, possibly one of the easiest solutions for paving the exterior area is to use interlocking decking tiles. These tiles simply snap together over the top of any existing hard surface. With appropriate surface preparation they can also be used over well compacted gravel or sand. One of the big advantages of interlocking deck tiles is that you can move them round and create different designs as you feel like it.

Light colours in the paving and on the courtyard walls will also create an impression of space, so lighter colored tiles would generally be preferable in small spaces.

Where the space is quite small it is best to utilise the area mainly for sitting and walking areas rather than for too many plantings. Any plants can be placed in a wide raised beds. And at ground level, you could use some decking tiles as a form of stepping stones surrounded by attractive river pebbles, with plantings along the borders.

A favourite piece of sculpture can be used a focal point providing it is in keeping with the general theme of the courtyard. But don’t overdo the garden art. One sculpture or water feature is more than enough.

Try to avoid a very busy look in a small area and keep the lines clean and simple. Also, a more formal look is usually better than an informal look in a small area. Similarly a few larger size planters will look better than a larger collection of smaller sized planters.

Avoid using flowers with strong red, yellow or orange colours as they tend to “advance” towards you. Blues, purples and grays are preferable because they are not dominating. And make sure plants are selected for all round appeal and not just for a brief burst of colour for a few weeks, but dull for the rest of the year.

With a bit of planning, even the smallest of areas can be made to look larger than you may think.

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