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Camford Landscapes, St Neots (2026)

07/04/2026

What do you do if your garden slopes?

On new build developments like the one we live on, very few gardens are actually level.
The first instinct is usually: “How do I flatten it?”

But here’s the thing…

Slopes aren’t a problem — they’re an opportunity.

Trying to level everything can be expensive.
You’re into moving soil, retaining walls, labour… it adds up quickly.

Instead, I always look at how we can work with what’s there.

In our own garden, I actually introduced more variation in levels.

We had heavy clay and drainage issues, so I installed a French drain and built a subtle berm (a raised mound) to improve soil conditions for the plants. It also helps frame the space and lift the planting above the lawn.
You can just about make out the berm. starting on the left of the shed, all the way up to and around the sun bed patio.

Across the garden, each area sits on its own level:
• The sun deck at the back
• A step down onto the lawn in the centre
• The BBQ patio and lounge patio sit at the same level
• A further step down to what we call the utility patio where we access the shed and washing line
• Then a raise back up to the dining patio near the house

The total level change from the house to the back of the garden is only about half a metre — but it creates structure, interest, and purpose.

So if your garden slopes, don’t rush to flatten it.

You might be standing on your best design feature.

03/04/2026

Most new build gardens start the same way…

Hastily laid turf on poor topsoil.
Two years of life if you're lucky!
A garden boxed in by fences and walls.
And no real reason to step outside.

This particular client — a professional couple who frequently commute to London — was no different.

A north-facing property.
Built on a hill with the garden sloping towards the house.
Boxed in by brick on every side, from a 2.5m high boundary wall, to a garage, and a neighbouring property end-on.
And a dark, shaded corner where the L-shaped house makes it feels natural to put the patio in the corner.

But here’s the thing…

A garden shouldn’t start with the space.
It should start with you.
And it should be designed around you.

So instead of forcing a square patio into a gloomy corner, in this design I've pulled the patio out into the garden, and pushed the living space out into the light.

This design includes:
☀️ A sun-soaked deck at the bottom of the garden
🌿 Raised planting to soften the walls and bring the garden up from the floor
🌸 Fragrant climbers like jasmine and honeysuckle to bring it to life
🌾 Low-maintenance planting suited to busy professionals
🧱 Walls rendered to bounce light around the garden
🔥 A pergola and outdoor fireplace to extend use into the evening

No lawn — the client didn't want one.
No artificial grass — I don't do artificial.
And no space wasted.

Just a garden designed to be used.
And planted to evoke emotions and memories of family and childhood.

A place to sit with a coffee before work.
A place to decompress after the commute.
A place that finally feels like part of the home.

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If you’re looking at your garden and thinking “this isn’t working”…

Let’s change that.

Get in touch to start your design

30/03/2026

There are 4 reasons to light your garden:
1. Security and wayfinding
2. To be able to use your garden when it gets dark
3. To create mood and atmosphere
4. To make your garden visible from inside your home

Garden lighting provides the opportunity to transform the use you can get out of your garden.

30/03/2026

Why bother with lighting in your garden?

Here are 4 reasons:

1. Security & wayfinding

As you can see in the pictures here of our own garden. We have security cameras with lights covering the backdoor and side passage. At the very least, it makes selecting the correct wheelie bin possible when it's nighttime.

These lights are also linked so that one triggers the other, along with security recording.
Just importantly, they are sized appropriately. There's no need for the equivalent of a 500W floodlight to cover such small areas.
You don't want to annoy your neighbours with light triggering all throughout the night!

2. To be able to use your garden when it gets dark

I like to barbecue all year round, and it's a lot easier to barbecue when you can see what you're doing!
The barbecues live under the pergola, which has a Phillips Hue strip light along the top so that I can see what I'm doing in the dark. Rather than installing an outdoor light switch, the light can be controlled through the Phillips Hue app or by using a smart speaker.

3. To create mood and atmosphere

When lights are not be using for wayfinding or security, they can be used to create mood.
In a garden, the lighting secret is to focus on lighting things rather than space. The aim is never to light everything. It's to use restraint. Arguably, I've lighted more than I need to in our garden. However, as the trees and plants grow it will begin to make more sense.

Using Phillips Hue lights, I have different light "themes" set for each day of the week to create different experiences.

4. To make your garden visible from inside your home

This is an often overlooked benefit. For most people, as the night draws in their garden disappears. All that effort to make your plants and landscaping interesting gets lost as the dark draws in.

As you can see in the first picture, looking out from the kitchen/family room, there's lots of interest in the garden through the use of coloured lighting.

In the garden design process at Camford Landscapes, I cover lighting design in the second stage once a concept design has been approved.
Only once you have your concept competed do you know what there will be to light.

The decision then is whether you light along something, from above it, below it, or inside it.
In our garden the pergola is lit from above. The trees in the borders from below. And the light in the pergola from within.

27/03/2026

Why do you need a planting plan?
Surely you just buy stuff you like from the garden centre, then stick it in the ground when you get home!

Well, that's actually what most of us do. But the main problem with this approach is that we often come back with just a single species of a plant.

If we were feeling frivolous, we might come back with 3 plants, but they're usually all completely different. There's often been no real thought as to where the plants will go, what conditions they might need, and how they'll fit in with what's already there.

When designing gardens for clients, and being engaged to create a planting plan, I'm thinking about...

- What growing conditions the plant needs — amount of sunlight, soil conditions, watering needs, and physical space.
- What will this plant look like throughout the year? Is it a splash of dazzling colour for 2 months in high summer, or does it have interesting seed heads that will create architectural interest throughout the winter?
- Does it complement the neighbouring plants, or will it clash, or maybe even be lost in the surrounding plants if they're all much bigger? Will they even out compete it?
- And most important of all, how will the plants make the users of the garden feel?

When buying plants, it's usually best to plant in what we call drifts. That simply means groupings of the same plant. That's why the advice is always to buy in odd numbers - 3, 5, 7, etc. This isn't a hard and fast rule, more a guidelines. And it makes a huge difference to what your plants look like once in the ground.

The images here shows a planting design for one of my clients. I've designed two borders on opposite sides of the garden for this typical new build property with a garden of roughly 80sqm.

The rectangular border is a raised bed against a garage wall. Here I wanted to create uniformity with a little bit of a wow factor in summer. As you can see, this border is all about repetition.

The opposite border is designed really quite differently. What you might notice is how the plants are in drifts. Multiple specimens of the same plant put together, then repeated in different areas throughout the border. This gives a more natural feel to the planting.

Now, contrast this to the approach of buying random one-off plants from a garden centre and you can start to see how different the space would make you feel.

The mood board picture helps clients to visualise what this space might become. To see the different colours and structures.

So as you can see, there's quite a lot to designing planting plans. They can easily take longer to create than the primary garden design.

26/03/2026

What's that? Over there in that pot. The plant with the yellow leaves.

I tell you what it likely is — an unhappy plant!

I was in a consultation with a new client this week who has a number of different plants in pots. They would like to keep most of them in their newly designed garden.

As I was making a note of what they are — and just as importantly where they were located — it became obvious that this homeowner had fallen into the same trap nearly everyone else does...

They'd bought a plant form the garden centre.
Brought it home.
Stuck it in a flower pot.
Put it in the garden.
And left it at that.

There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that, but it does mean your plants will often have the same shelf-life as a bouquet of cut flowers. And that's a very expensive way to garden.

The plant with the yellow leaves was a camellia. Beautiful plants, most having dark green glossy leaves, and brilliant flowers at a time when little else is flowering, like now in early spring.

However, camellias like acidic soil. In garden centres and DIY stores it's what's called ericaceous soil.
When a plant is in the wrong soil type it will struggle to absorb the correct nutrients. This is what can cause yellowing of the leaves. It can also cause the plant to develop fewer flowers.

To top it off, the plant was also in the wrong location. Lying in full sun. Camellias, especially when young, grow best in part-shade.

Whilst most plants in garden centres will have a care label attached, they always seem to be written in some form of hieroglyphics. And there never seems to be a consistent approach from one plant supplier to the next.

This is why it's always best to talk to someone at the garden centre before making your purchase. Be sure that you're getting the right plant, for the right location.
Ask about aftercare too. How often should you feed it? With what type of feed?

And before you even head out to the garden centre, go out into your own garden and determine where, or even if, you need new plants right now. If you do, what sort - size, height, colour, season, etc.

26/03/2026

Ever been in a garden centre and had one of those "Ooo, I like that' moments?

It's what most of us tend to do. Without giving much consideration to a plants horticultural needs or the design theme of our gardens, we wander around garden centres putting all kinds of things into the trolley.

Often, we're at the till buying a single specimen of a plant that we know very little about. We might at least have thought about where we're going to plant it. That annoying gap in the border. But even then, our thoughts are more often about filling an empty space rather than putting a plant where it is best located to thrive.

It's a mistake we all happily make, yet it can pose a challenge for the garden designer.

I was in a garden design consultation earlier this week and, like many homeowners, this particular client has a number of plants, shrubs, and trees that they'd like to keep. A result of multiple trips to a garden centre.

There's no specific theme, design, or cohesion between the plants. Plus, as I so often find, these plants are accompanied by other things obtained from garden centres — water features, obelisks, statues, you name it.

So what do you do?

Usually, you just have to get tough on yourself. Rarely can you keep everything as your garden will become the equivalent of a junk drawer. Everything is in there somewhere, but it looks a mess.

You have decide whether you really must keep everything. If there are plants and objects that just don't fit in your new design, consider if you can move to, say, the front garden. Or if they can be gifted to friends, family, and neighbours.

Gardens aren't simply about how they look. They're about how they make you feel. And so far as I know, no one feels great about their junk drawer!

26/03/2026

Is your brickwork spoiling the look of your garden?

I see lots of walls, especially newly built walls and new-build properties with the horrible white staining.

But it's nothing to fear. It's simply salt coming out from the bricks and/or cement. And the good news is that you can clean it off. However, in order for it to be effective you need to do it in the right way, and using the right materials.

This video from the Skill Builder YouTube channel explains what you need to do.

25/03/2026

When designing a garden the first thing I do is to focus on who it is that will be using the garden.

I want to know what the garden's purpose will be.

- Will it be used for outdoor cooking?
- What about outdoor eating? For how many people?
- Do you like to entertain? Again, for how many people?
- Have you got pets?
- What about children - how many and what ages?
- Do you need space for play equipment?
- Do you like to grow vegetables?
- Are you interested in water features or even a pond?
- Do you want to use the garden in the dark?
- What about in the colder months?
- Do you need space to store things, like a shed?
- Do you want to cater for a washing line — what type?

And many more factors.

In my garden designs I aim to create outdoor rooms.
Separate spaces, each with a purpose, and each interconnected.

This is my own garden. You can see the clearly defined outdoor rooms:

- There's what I call the 'utility patio' upon which there's a cupboard style shed and access to the washing line from the utility room door.
- Next to it is the dining patio, which is slightly raised, and sits within easy reach of the kitchen
- There's the 'lounge patio' on the bottom right which has two chairs with footstools. This patio is shaded in the afternoon, giving respite from the midsummer sun
- There the 'Outdoor kitchen patio' under the pergola. This houses the BBQ's away from the house to ensure smoke doesn't drift inside.
- There's the 'sunbed patio' in the top left. This spot gets the most amount of sun for the longest period of the day. It's an ideal spot for a couple of sunbeds. There's a small table in between to rest drinks, mobiles, and books on.
- And finally there's the lawn in the middle. We have a dog so we still wanted space for her to run around. I've trained her not to use the lawn for the toilet, which works maybe 85% of the time. I'd much rather she uses the gravel as it won't die as a consequence, and is easy enough to be top up if needed.

The gravel path is what connects each of these spaces together.

The picture is from late December, only a few months after the garden landscaping was completed. Hence there aren't too many plants to see just yet.

24/03/2026

When I meet clients for the first time they typically fall into one of two camps:

1. People with no idea of what to do with their garden
2. People with lots of ideas but struggling to know which ideas will actually work, or how to make them happen.

That’s where things start to feel risky. People worry...
• Will we spend money in the wrong places?
• Will it end up looking disjointed?
• Will the plants even grow properly?
• Will we wish we’d done it differently a year later?

For many homeowners — especially those with new build gardens — they're staring at a blank canvas. But that doesn't make things any easier.

And once you start with a garden build, it’s very easy to make decisions that are expensive to undo later.

This is why I’ve developed a clear design process.
A way to make sure you don’t get caught out later.

It’s about:
• Defining what your garden should become
• Turning your design into something that can actually be built within your budget
• Ensuring it’s delivered as intended
• And helping it improve over time

In short, it’s about making a relatively small investment upfront so that the much larger investment in your garden is spent well.

Camford Landscapes

07/04/2026

03/04/2026

30/03/2026

30/03/2026

27/03/2026

26/03/2026

26/03/2026

26/03/2026

25/03/2026

24/03/2026

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