How to make the most of a smaller garden before summer

Posted on Friday, September 27th, 2019

If you have green fingers, you do not have to say goodbye to your gardening dream simply because your own outdoor space is pretty small. In fact, this size can work surprisingly well in your favour, given the relative ease of maintenance as well as the large impact that even small additions could make in that garden.

Furthermore, with spring sunrays trickling through the hedges, now is an especially good time to tailor that garden before it fully blooms, if you will excuse the pun, on even brighter summer days.

Be careful what furniture you choose

In a small garden, space for furniture is obviously at a premium – but you can avoid sacrificing too much space if you opt for folding furniture, which can easily be stored away as required, The Telegraph points out. You could be pleasantly surprised by the variety of folding furniture available.

Even just from the French furniture maker Fermob, the folding options include minuscule metal bistro tables and, for those more exuberant get-togethers, larger lunch tables.

Grow your own produce

You probably still have a decent amount of space in your garden for pots, which you can easily arrange and rearrange into different formations to impressive aesthetic effect. Another plus point of pots is that they can be used for growing fruit trees – including apple, cherry, pear and plum trees.

Then there is the option of easily growing lettuces, salad leaves and radishes at ground level. It all adds up to a delightfully eco-friendly way of sourcing healthy food.

The only way is up with climbing greenery

Even before you sink your teeth into any of that home-grown produce, food-producing plants can add wonderfully to your garden’s overall look. However, when short of space on the ground, where should you add extra plants? Simple: the walls and fences.

In allowing climbing plants to make themselves at home on these vertical surfaces, you can make your small garden feel more secure and self-contained. Smallish climbing roses and scented climbers, like honeysuckle and jasmine, would be worthy of your consideration.

Let there be…the right kind of light

Though your garden could often be left unused during darker hours, outdoor lighting can come into its own during those times. Good Housekeeping recommends that you keep such lighting subtle and use it to draw attention to specimen plants.

After being fitted in your garden, solar-powered lights could gather energy when natural light is abundant and then beautifully illuminate that outdoor space after the sun sets.

Magic up some extra space with optical illusions

It might not be discernibly possible to alter physical dimensions outside of a Doctor Who episode, but you could still do the next best thing in your garden: trick the eye into thinking this space is larger than it actually is. You can do this with strategically-placed mirrors.

You can also do it by planting in a way that blurs the boundaries between your space and adjacent gardens, allowing you to effectively “steal” from your neighbours’ rural handiwork.