My English garden starts sinking some roots

I officially declare my garden OPEN.

We gained a lot by buying a new-built house on a modern estate.  Square footage.  Energy efficiency.  Value for money.  But I gave up the garden.  We'd looked at some beautiful spaces, with plenty of room and established herbaceous borders.  What I got was a blank slate.  A modest-sized, L-shaped garden, with perhaps 100 feet of lawn sloping down a slight hill and a patio onto which the back door and the sitting room opens.  Two sets of steps, with a flower bed between them, head down to the garage, my office door and the path to the drive where we park the cars.  A tremendous advantage:  the whole garden is enclosed by 8-foot brick walls.  The disadvantage:  It's overlooked by neighbours.  That's the inevitable sacrifice of a modern estate.

But the money we saved on a new house gave me budget to devote to garden construction.  And so, perhaps for the only time in my life, I've done things the way you're supposed to.  I started out with a plan.  I hired landscapers.  I had all my hard landscaping done first.  I built everything around an impressive water feature.  Then I had my beds dug with several tonnes of topsoil and manure.  And finally, the plants.  A garden is never finished, but as of this weekend I declare Phase I concluded.  The foundation is established.  Now ... I have 20 or 30 years to potter.

If you came in the back gate ... the way we come in and out of the house every day ... you'd see this.  That first flower bed, between the stairs, will eventually be filled with flowering perennials.  For now, I have to screen it from meddlesome dogs.

The first plants in the bed between the steps offer a clue as to what it may eventually look like.  A gentle pink rose, Geoff Hamilton, anchors the bed.  The magnificent blue anchusa Loddon Royalist is blooming now, while the monkshood behind it, braced by the obelisk, will add blue colour later in the summer.  Behind you get your first glimpse of my pergola, one of the architectural anchors of the garden.  The lurking puppy trying to stick his head into things shows why this bed is screened off.

Look behind you at this point and you'll see a lovely little alcove that's a sun trap in the morning.  That's an espaliered apple, egremont russet, that's going to be growing up the wall.  (A rare and wonderfully tasty apple that's great with cheddar cheese.)  It's behind what will eventually be a little hedge of lavender.  The gate on the right leads to where we keep the cars, and is our main entry in and out of the house.

Walk a little further and you get to the water feature.  It's the centrepiece of the whole garden, with an upper pond cascading into a lower.  Some vivid orange goldfish live there, but wouldn't oblige to be in this afternoon's photos.  The pond gives a lovely soundtrack to the whole garden, and provides me with the opportunity to use water plants within it and alpines in the rocks around the edge.  Pots have their place, too. That's parsley in the foreground, and an oversized bowl of spinach at the back.

Now we've reached the far side of the garden and have turned around to look over the water feature back towards the gate to the drive.  From here you get a sense of the two levels ... the upper patio, lined by herb beds, has doors into our laundry room and sitting room.

This starts to give you an idea of my colour scheme.  Purples, pinks and blues.  That's a beautiful little double geranium in the foreground, and a lovely clump of Siberian iris that should be blooming in the next week.  Bright pink sea thrift, behind the iris, is settling happily into the cracks between the rocks.  Here you can see the one major disadvantage of the garden ... the apartment building across the street that looks over us.  (Fortunately the patio and the French doors to the sitting room aren't overlooked.)  A possibility ... when I have at least £500 spare ... is some large pleached hornbeam planted on the other side of the wall to make those windows less intrusive.

Above the water feature you have the only significant bit of lawn I've left in my design.  Mostly to provide a base for the hammock stand, to the honest.  (This gets afternoon sun, and an ipod set up on a hammock-side table streams baseball games off MLB.com.) You can see a lovely dwarf ornamental cherry in the foreground, just to the left of centre.  This is the anchor for the flower bed at the top of the water feature.  The path to the front gate (this opens onto the main road at the front of the house) is covered by a custom-made pergola that will eventually be draped by a light pink rose called the generous gardener.  At the back is another herbaceous border, and the Tunisian tiles that used to decorate the back wall at Thames Cottage.

Here's that back bed, seen a bit closer.  On the right you have the generous gardener, now just a little starter plant.  Under the obelisk is a bunch of sweet peas, starting slowly because of our cold spring.  One challenge of this bed:  the three feet on the left never get any direct sun.  So I've built it up as a little hillside and have planted foxglove, ferns, heuchera and hosta.

Standing at the end of the pergola with that bed at your back, you look left and see the patio.  The beds are filled with kitchen herbs and greens we cut and use regularly:  rocket, fennel, rosemary, sage, oregano, basil.  I have different kinds of mint in pots on the corners (chocolate, apple and basil), and that's an olive tree in the corner.  The Weber kettle is, of course, just next to the back door.  Over the wall you can see one of the glories of our location ... the wildflower meadow, wetland and trees over which the North side of our house looks.

And if you look down, over the water feature, you see the lower patio.  This gets the afternoon sun so is a great place to sit and enjoy cocktails.  We can set a table here for dining outside ... helped by that thing that looks like a coffee table, but is actually a firepit.  (We cooked dinner on it tonight but, despite the fact it's early June, had to go inside to eat in a comfortable warmth.)  The screen at the back matches the pergola, and separates the formal part of the garden from an area I've set aside for the dogs and the greenhouse.  The two doors you see on the left are part of the garage; the one on the left leads into the garage itself, and on the right leads up to my office.  (From which, on a warm day, I can leave the door open and hear the gurgling of the waterfall from my desk.)

Behind the screen I have a little area of lawn I jokingly call "the paddock".  There you'll find this great lean-to greenhouse, currently housing tomatoes, eggplant (aubergine) and poblano pepper plants bursting to life.  Our carpenter, Andris, custom built the dog house at right to match his pergola and screen.  Sadly, neither dog seems inclined to spend any time it it.  That brick wall is the back of the garage, and the window is the toilet underneath the stairs to my office.

And finally ... my favourite plant so far, the wonderful anchusa Loddon Royalist.  This photo doesn't even begin to capture the intense indigo blue.  It seems happy to be sinking its roots into my (much improved) Hampshire soil.  Hopefully, others will follow with equal zest, and these great garden bones will be softened by clouds of colour.