How to create a calming and tranquil space in your garden by David Domoney
18 January 2024
create a calming and tranquil space in your garden
Creating a focal point in a paved area may be your goal when designing your garden and outdoor spaces. You can do this in many ways, and Pavestone has a vast array of paving and cladding products to make this process seamless and appear completely effortless. By carefully curating your garden with neutral tones and bright planting, and by utilising the shape of your garden space, you can fashion tranquil and relaxing zones with ease.
Using Colour
Neutral tones are an ideal choice for ensuring your garden planting stands out to the best effect. Cooling greys are a particularly ideal choice for this, as they are highly successful at allowing bright green shades to pop, as is shown to great effect in this garden.
Using Texture
The soft, dove-grey of Pavestone’s Discovery in the shade of Origin Grande is perfect for the job. Having large format tiles, the largest porcelain in Pavestone’s range, this virtually seamless paving creates the ideal neutral base from which to create your planting tapestry. The thin streaks of lighter and darker shades of grey veined through it provide delicate and subtle texture, with an appearance that evokes a feel of natural timber.
Discovery Porcelain Paving
In contrast with the Discovery paving, this garden also features a water feature crafted using Pavestone’s Rock Stack Cladding in the shade Blue Black. This much darker shade of grey is in parallel to the Origin Grande of the paving tiles, but this has a clever impact on space in the garden.
Rock Stack Cladding
By using darker shades higher up, and a lighter grey on the ground, light is reflected up onto the planting surrounding this paved area, and the darker shade of the cladding evokes depth. This creates the illusion of a larger garden but also gives this space a cosy atmosphere to enjoy either from a cosy chair with a refreshing drink, or inside from the comfort of your garden retreat.
Warmer tones
You can create a similar effect with other neutral shades, such as tans and browns of Discovery Sun Grande paving and Rock Stack Cladding in Rusty. These contrasting shades also allow for the illusion of depth, whilst offering a warmer temperature for your garden.
Tasteful Tranquility
Making colour choices to create depth aside, these shades of grey in this garden also serve another purpose of aiding with adding to the relaxing atmosphere established by the central water feature. Grey is a calming colour as it has a feeling of stability and solidity, allowing the mind to relax. When paired with revitalising green from nearby foliage, a colour the human eye can see more variant shades of than any other colour, a truly peaceful ambience is created.
Water Features
Adding a water feature to your garden provides more benefits for you than just an aesthetic element for the space. The soothing sounds and sights of falling water are proven to have a calming effect on the brain, thanks to its similarity to white noise, and can help to induce a meditative state. It can aid in reducing stress and anxiety, whilst also offering support in concentration, great for keeping nearby to an outdoor office.
Precision Planting
The bright greens of the foliage found in this garden have an arresting and refreshing quality, plus the different visual textures they offer allow for a great deal of interest in the space.
The smooth and feathery texture of Asplenium scolopendrium captures the attention well in the gravel beds and the potted Buxus sempervirens offers a lovely texture change, standing out bright against the dark grey behind it. Some tall ornamental hedging also goes a long way to create an inviting backdrop to contrast against the neutral grey shades.
A much cooler shade of green can be offered by the foliage of the Pervoskia atriplicifolia, with the dusky lilac of the towering blooms pairing nicely with the charcoal grey of the Rock Stack Cladding. More colours can be injected throughout with the subtle purples of Verbena bonariensis and Agapanthus, the refreshing whites and baby pinks of the ornamental daisies.
Jon Layton, Group CEO of Pavestone:
The landscapers behind this garden are Avery Landscapes. As a preferred Pavestone installer, they are proficient in getting the best out of our Discovery Porcelain Paving and Rock Stack Cladding. As David has described in this blog, ensuring that your paving and walling products work well together is essential for a seamless garden design. This garden was created by Pip Smith and I feel this is a wonderful demonstration of how best our products can be used for a beautiful, finished garden design.
We have hundreds of stunning videos, depicting beautifully landscaped gardens, which have used Pavestone landscaping and building materials to realise our homeowners 'dream gardens'. This Christmas holiday period, set yourself some time to explore our videos.
Maybe make some plans for a garden makeover this Spring?
David Domoney, TV gardener, horticultural expert ,and Pavestone brand ambassador blogs monthly on the Pavestone website on all things landscaping related. We look forward to seeing you back again next month.