Quick facts
A garden feels small when the eye can measure it. Stand at the back door of a typical suburban plot in Dublin or Cork and you often see the whole thing at once: fence, fence, fence, a rectangle of lawn, a shed in the corner. There is nothing left to find out, so the eye files the garden under "small" in half a second. Everything below is an attempt to slow that reading down. The instinct most people follow is the opposite one: keep everything low so nothing is blocked, and run a narrow border around the perimeter so the middle stays open. It backfires every time. A 40cm strip of planting around the edge does not disguise the boundary, it outlines it, like a pencil line drawn around the plot. Low planting leaves the fence exposed at eye level, which is exactly where the eye reads distance. And what is left in the middle is not a garden, it is the leftover shape between four borders. The fix is almost always to take space from the open middle and give it to depth at the edges.
Conceal the ending. The single most effective move is to stop the far boundary being visible in one piece. A group of shrubs set forward of the corner, a multi-stem tree, a panel of trellis with a climber, a tall grass — anything that puts part of the garden behind something else. The eye assumes that what it cannot see continues.
Turn the layout off the square. Lay the main axis on the diagonal, or set the paving and lawn at an angle to the boundaries. That uses the longest dimension available and stops the fence lines being the organising geometry. Off-centre works as well as diagonal. A path straight up the middle divides a small garden into two smaller gardens.
One generous path, not three mean ones. A 1.2m path feels like an invitation. Three 60cm paths feel like a plan of a garden rather than a garden.
Borrow the view. The Japanese call it shakkei — composing your garden so something outside it appears to belong. Frame the neighbour's beech between two shrubs, leave a gap in the hedge exactly where the distant hill sits. Your garden now ends in the middle distance.
Go vertical. Climbers give a great deal of green for almost no ground: Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris on a shaded north wall, Rosa 'Madame Alfred Carrière' where there is more light, Clematis 'Étoile Violette' through a shrub, Trachelospermum jasminoides in a warm corner where its scent is trapped.
One large specimen, not many small ones. Six small shrubs look like six small shrubs. One multi-stem Betula utilis var. jacquemontii or Cornus kousa gives scale, and scale is what makes the space around it read as larger.
Warm colours — scarlet, orange, strong yellow, pure white — advance towards you. Cool colours — blues, violets, grey-greens — recede. So keep the hot planting near the house and let the far end go soft: Nepeta racemosa 'Walker's Low', silver-leaved things, blue-flowered Geranium 'Rozanne'. Leaf size behaves the same way. Bold foliage reads as close, fine foliage as distant, which is why a haze of Stipa tenuissima at the far end does more for depth than another shrub would.
Restrict the palette. Three or four colours repeated through the garden feel larger than twelve used once each, because repetition lets the eye travel without stopping to identify things. Repetition lets the eye rest; variety is what it rests from.
Mirrors work, but carefully. Used badly they are an obvious trick and a hazard to birds. Used well they are partly veiled by planting and angled so you see garden rather than yourself.
Common mistakes
Bring a photograph of the view from your kitchen window and the team here will talk your options through with you.
First and foremost, you will need to consider the quantity of plants required to achieve a full looking hedge. We usually recommend 2.5 plants per linear metre for a fully mature hedge. For a semi mature hedge, you can plant 2 plants per metre.
However, different types of hedging plants have different growth habits, so the quantities of plants you may need could vary. it is always best to check with your local nursery.
