Garden designers and landscape gardeners often choose plants by thinking about how many seasons of interest they give. As a garden designer and landscape gardener based in Glasgow, I often choose the likes of Malus ‘Evereste’, a crab apple, as it gives three seasons of interest - spring flowers, leaves in the summer, and yellow foliage (and orange fruits!) in the autumn.

Bulbs are key to garden designs, be they for your Glasgow garden or elsewhere. Spring bulbs are really useful for garden designers and landscape gardeners looking for an impactful start of the season. September onwards is bulb planting time, and time to think about what your garden is going to look like through the winter too. With some thought, you can make sure a garden is looking good throughout the year. Some simple measures includes spring bulbs, ornamental grasses, shrubs with architectural frameworks, and herbaceous plants that die back gracefully enough to hold a winter frost in an attractive fashion. Don’t be tempted to cut everything back en bloc at the end of the winter as you can be losing a lot of winter interest that way. The winters can be long and hard in Glasgow, but some careful thought now can ensure you have a nice garden to look out upon through the upcoming months.

For people looking for garden designers in Glasgow or elsewhere, one of the first areas of confusion is the difference between garden designers and landscape architects. As a general rule, landscape architects tend to look after commercial scale projects often in the public realm, whereas garden designers tend to look after residential garden designs.

Autumn is a busy time for gardeners and garden designers, with only a few weeks left of long days our minds are focused on the winter nights ahead. Glasgow has experienced a couple of mild wet autumns and winters of recent, so it will be interesting to see what happens this year. Despite the occasionally inclement weather I have to say that this is my favourite time of the year for working in the garden, and for garden-owners, you can consider autumn to be the best time to set the ball rolling on new garden designs and planting plans.

Has your garden survived the dry spells this summer? And what about the biblical downpours that we have had in Glasgow too?! As with everyone else, garden designers in Glasgow have had a challenging season thanks to lockdown, but the weather has actually done us a few favours. And now is actually a good time to make some strides in your list of garden jobs and to guard against future extreme weather.

The spring flush is behind us now - this combination of warm and damp conditions heralds the start of around six to eight weeks of rapid plant growth, when you should try not to get too downhearted about not keeping up with the weeds or rapidly growing grass! In my own garden, I keep the grass cut and I simply hoe and turn weeds into the soil to keep on top of things, and then before you know it the plants and grass have started slowing down again. It is easy to think that everything grows at the rate of knots from spring to autumn, but they don’t.