Modern Surrey country garden

At first glance, this looked like an ordinary field ready for a garden. It wasn't. Beneath the thin layer of turf lay the old stock holding yard of what had once been a working dairy — concrete drains and channels that surfaced, unwelcome, as soon as the build got underway, turning straightforward groundwork into extensive excavation before a single plant went in.

It was worth it. Out of that unpromising start came the client's dream of a modern country garden built on sweeping, curvilinear lines, with massed perennials that established quickly into the generous, prairie-inspired drifts of echinacea, rudbeckia and grasses that now define the garden through summer and into autumn.

In the meantime, a line of tall grasses gave the garden privacy from passing dog-walkers while the native hedge along the boundary grew in to take over that job properly — part of a wider principle at work throughout the design: hide the boundaries, and the eye drifts on to the borrowed landscape beyond, making the garden feel considerably larger than its fence lines suggest.