Garden Design
connecting people to nature
With 40 year's experience, I create gardens which are immersive, ecologically driven, climate adapted and rich in diversity and beauty. Gardens are Nature's spring board into the next evolution of our ecosystems, all of which are in rapid flux as climate change becomes a major disruptor. Gardens I create are resilient and adapted to this new future: beautiful, useful, sheltering and peaceful.
I pay attention to your needs as the user of the space, utilising an understanding of design psychology to ensure the garden flows and moves in harmony, and that areas are zoned correctly to avoid conflicts of use. Style is applied once the ground rules are set.
Garden elements and plants must be pieced together with coherence to generate "critical mass.", which gives rise to timeless and intangible qualities. To give a garden good ecological balance, I beleive in never beautifying one environment at the expense of another and where possible, I observe the 80/20 rule: 80% softscape and 20% hardscape.
Design Services
To help you visualise your garden
As a creative, I visualise the transformation of a space through the structure, planting and time. It's not always easy to convey these ideas, so I give a lot of attention to producing graphics which can portray the idea. These are generally created from 3D computer modelling, with hand-drawn elements.
It's important that these images convey emotion and feeling, not just technical detail, yet they must ultimately translate into technical drawings, at least for hard-landscape elements.
I am also quite used to designing and producing documantation required to accompany planning applications.

A stream garden leading to a pond in the lower part of the garden.
A beach-front garden in West Sussex

Garden entrance to a steep terraced area

An outdoor room surrounded by raised beds

A cross-section of a new house showing raised planters etc.
A formal water rill and fall
Naturalistic Planting
Adaptive ecologies for the planet
Natural planting for beauty, resilience and ecological benefit
Natural planting is of huge benefit in creating relaxing, biophilic environments that look good all year round. They are also highly beneficial for wildlife and make use of tough, insect-friendly, climate adapted plants.

Choosing the right plant for the place, in the right combination

Drifts or loose matrices of plants through gravel

Dry coastal planting over an old driveway

Drifts of Camassia on a woodland edge garden
mark laurence design ltd | adaptive landscapes for a changing world
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