Monthly musings: Creating a suburban paradise (July)

Don’t wait till you retire to create your romantic rural idyll; creative planting can transform gardens even in built-up areas. The trick is not to surround the whole plot with high, solid fences that’ll just make it feel hemmed-in, dark and gloomy. Plants make a far softer boundary.

But instead of the usual urban privet or conifer hedge, try a row of bamboo; the exotic foliage adds movement and gentle rustling sounds and gives the garden a sense of being a corner of a Victorian stately home down in Cornwall. Or surround your patch with mixed hedges of flowering shrubs and small ornamental trees (if space is short go for trellis screens with a mixture of climbers growing on them) and front them with roses, dahlias, perennials and bulbs, so your living boundary does double-duty as the back row of a border. If you have a typically long, narrow, town garden grow a hazy screen of plants at the far end to create the illusion of open space beyond. Grow tall, light, airy species to ‘filter out’ nearby rooftops, leaving just the sky on show. Plants such as Verbena bonariensis, purple fennel, Thalictrum ‘Hewitt’s Double’ and Linaria purpurea have filigree foliage and wiry stems topped by flowers that seem to ‘float’. Being semi-see-through they don’t cut out light, but they somehow hold your attention on what’s happening on your side of them. For security purposes you can plant them in front of a fence of wire netting or trellis. Seen from the house, the view down the garden seems far more secluded.

Another good wheeze is to use a trick landscapers know as ‘borrowed landscape’. This just means opening up a distant view - perhaps a church steeple or some good street trees or the park - by carving a gap in your boundary planting scheme, leaving your view cunningly framed by surrounding greenery that conveniently masks anything you don’t want to see, such as adjacent housing estates and car parks. If there’s no landscape worth borrowing, make your own - create a few totally false vistas using perspective trellis or mirrors on walls or a niche in a border with an eye-catching statue or container to act as a focal point. Oh, it’s cheating - but it works.

Trees are essential for creating country-style ambience, but they need clever pruning to let more light into your own garden whilst blocking out nearby eyesores - so consult a qualified tree surgeon. Crown lifting involves taking off the lower branches of trees so you can see underneath yet leaving the bulk of the canopy masking distant rooftops. Thinning dense branches lets more light percolate through and creates a delightful dappled effect. Even if there’s no room for a regular tree, then consider planting a pleached tree – a formal form which looks like a narrow hedge raised up on stilts, letting you see and indeed walk underneath. And plant strategically; a slender, upright, columnar form of conifer, crab apple or flowering cherry variety makes a good way to mask a distant pylon, lamppost or telegraph pole without taking up much space, while a lollipop-trained standard bay close to a front window is brilliant for blanking out the light of an unwanted streetlamp outside your house.

And for a really rural finish, consider joining the latest trend and keeping a couple of hens or a hive of bees - their gentle sounds will add a countryside feel, and as a bonus you’ll enjoy useful a harvest of country produce delivered fresh to your doorstep.