Why use a professional garden designer

Whether redesigning a small courtyard, replacing the paving on your well-worn terrace, or creating the expansive garden of your dreams, ensuring that you use the skills and knowledge of a garden designer can be integral to the outcome of the entire project. Karen McClure of Karen McClure Garden Design explains more.

Karen McClure

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Karen McClure is a Pre-Registered Member of the Society of Garden Designers and the APL, respectively. These bodies are the professional associations for garden designers and landscapers in the United Kingdom. Karen has been designing gardens of all shapes and sizes for over a decade, and now manages a team of seven from her studio in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Karen has won a silver medal at the prestigious RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

If you were going to build a house or carry-out work such as an extension or renovations, you would want the work to be carried out by a professional like an architect. As an integral part of your home, your garden should be no different.

A garden designer has been trained to consider composition, scale, planting, textures, tones, as well as the art of good design, and will often come away from an initial meeting with clear ideas and a style direction in place.

Karen McClure

Many of our clients know what they would like, or the style they’d like, but don’t know how to achieve this or how it will harmonise with the interiors or surrounding landscape. A garden designer has been trained to look at composition, scale, planting, textures, tones, as well as the art of good design, and will often come away from an initial meeting with clear ideas and style direction in place.

Garden designers will be aware of trends and requirements within the industry and will have the skill and knowledge to specify the appropriate materials for your landscaping needs; presenting solutions to what you may consider problems.

When selecting materials, we encourage our clients to visit the London Stone showrooms to view the vast selection of hard landscaping materials. This is very helpful in the design process to compare and contrast their large format samples in situ rather than relying on a picture in a brochure. We advise them to consider the suitability to their specific environmental conditions, the quality, texture and finishes available and view materials in all weathers, as they can take on a very different look in dry weather verses rainy days! It is useful to take along the garden design plans, mood boards and samples of the materials being used for the interiors to ensure harmony and cohesion between the exterior and interior scheme.

A garden designer will have the horticultural knowledge to select the right plants, trees and shrubs and they have the right contacts to help make the build cost-effective and ensure a professional finish is executed with advice on the aftercare plans to ensure that your investment has longevity.

Employing a garden designer will inject creativity that you didn’t think possible, ultimately result in full utilisation of your outdoor space whilst adding commercial value to your property.