DESIGNER STYLE ON A BUDGET

Charlotte Harris reveals the inside tricks designers use to keep costs down and get a stylish garden on a shoestring

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In this city garden - which we dubbed the Bricolage Garden - we tried wherever possible to reimagine what was already on site, introducing new elements only where needed.

Gravel is a budget-friendly option for surfaces. It's permeable and looks good. Here, we used a 6-10mm Thames Valley flint chipping, nicely angular so it locks together well underfoot. Any larger and it becomes tricky to walk on or to set furniture.

Gravel migrates even on the flat. Here a simple upstand of a raised treated timber edge keeps things in place (brick or old roof tiles on edge also work well). You could also embrace the movement, letting gravel blur into planting and double it up as mulch.

Existing concrete slabs can be put to many different uses. For the productive area of this garden we stacked and fixed some of the slabs and topped them with sanded scaffold planks to create a simple bench - part seat, part work surface.

As a rule of thumb, a vegetable bed should be no wider than an arm's reach from either side; double that if you can access it from both. Here, a couple of beds use sleepers set on their short edge in two courses, with overlapping joints at the corners and vertical supports fixed inside for stability. The deeper you make them, the more it will cost to fill them, but consider base-filling deeper raised beds using other methods, such as hügelkultur. Joe from our studio (who creates these lovely visuals), says he made his too deep, so he filled them with straw bales with topsoil on top. “The straw has rotted down over time and I've gradually topped up with homemade compost,” he says.

We kept an existing chain-link fence and planted a woven mix of evergreen and deciduous climbers. It's also robust enough for edibles such as squash to ramble along.