It may only be mid August, but spring has sprung and the grass has riz. The tuis are back, attracted by the early flowering campanulata cherries. Many of the daffodils are in flower here already. The snowdrops, sadly, have finished their all too brief season. The early michelias are in full flower, as are most of the camellias and the magnolias are opening. Magnolia Lanarth is a rather large vision in purple in our park where the big leafed rhododendrons are also opening their flowers. Some of the calanthe and cymbidium orchids are open and the early lachenalias are at their peak.

Garden visitors have started to trickle in again and everywhere I look I see work which must be done soon. I just wish that such a lovely time of year did not coincide with that sense of panic of time running out yet again. There are so many tasks I really meant to have done by now.

I had a very interesting conversation this week with a prominent landscaper about spaces in garden design. We were contemplating a reasonably large area which Mark and I are planning for a garden extension (close to the last area we have to move in to, short of expanding into the neighbour’s property). As gardeners who grow plants for a living, we look at a new area and think about achieving the desired effect with plantings and design. As a landscaper who makes his living designing outdoor areas for other people, his approach was to talk about space and flow and focal points and the actual plants are more like the finishing effect of soft furnishings.

What I found really stimulating was his confident and assured assessment of space and its absolute importance to gaining any effect. Spaces in a garden are essentially the open areas, usually paved or in lawn though you can achieve a sense of space in open woodland if there is minimal under planting. If you are lucky enough to have a property with a large expanse of water, that too constitutes open space.

Gardeners by nature tend to fill in spaces, to paint and furnish with plants and said landscaper felt that too often gardens could simply be cluttered by failing to define and retain sufficient open space. I guess it could be argued that the more complex the plantings, the more important that there be corresponding space in the right places to give form and definition.

I was once accused by a very defensive self-proclaimed practitioner of being anti landscapers. In fact that is not a fair comment at all. I part company from many landscapers when it comes to plant selection and plant interest and I was objecting at the time to a trend whereby many landscapers claimed superiority based on job title alone.

But I will always show respect for good design. And a good landscaper, by definition, has high level skills in looking at an area and seeing the potential to define spaces and to make pleasing sense of the area while meeting the daily needs of the occupier.

Mark describes the happy median as a marriage of formality with informality. The easiest way to define space is by formality which tends to mean straight lines, circles and semi circles giving obvious and clear form, often with a repetition of shapes. The skill is in creating the spatial relationships and the right proportions within the design. In a completely formal garden, this geometric design is matched by uniform and geometric plantings which, as gardeners, we personally tend to regard as lacking in plant interest and simply dull. However, it is the easiest option for non gardeners.

Enter the great English practitioners of Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll in the first decades of last century. It has taken us a long time to discover Lutyens and Jekyll here but we are inspired by their work. There is the perfect marriage of top design and creative plantsmanship.

Lutyens was a highly respected architect whose buildings certainly inspire with his gifted use of space, light and the intimacy of the arts and crafts movement. What would I not give to have a Lutyen’s house? And his garden designs are marked by a similarly gifted perception of space, proportion and formal design.

But it was Gertrude Jekyll who furnished those garden designs and she filled in his garden spaces with informal plantings which are soft and flowing by nature. Jekyll was the leading light of the great English herbaceous border and her skills with plant combinations still set the standards others aspire to. Jekyll softened the hard edged formality and gave a depth of plant interest, variety and quality which purely formal gardens lack.

I was interested talking to a keen Italian gardener recently and he much preferred the English style of gardening to the dull, repetitive formality of Italian and French gardening.

In Taranaki where we have luxuriant plant growth, rampant even, that combination of soft English planting of considerable complexity is a more natural style than the strict formality of gardens created in harsher climates with a very limited range of plants. But it does not have to be bereft of good design, formal design even.

And certainly my conversation with the landscaper focussed my thoughts on the importance of open space in a garden and its integral contribution to good design. In the end it is all about making an environment more pleasing to the eye and uplifting to the spirit. Why else would we bother gardening?