Beach Boardwalk Garden, Harpenden
With three young children, two girls and a boy, ranging in age from 6 – 12 years, Beach Boardwalk garden needed to provide an area for games and adventure, hide and seek and cycling, and was inspired by the feel of a sunny Suffolk beach holiday.
The children are keen actors and musicians, and enjoy putting on a show, a stage was required for the children to perform plays and music to family and friends. In addition the garden needed to provide a grown up area for eating al fresco, entertaining and a dip in the plunge pool.
The garden was designed with three key elements an entertaining area, amphitheatre and boardwalk.
Steel gabions filled with smooth pebbles over which water gently tumbled, provided the focal point to the garden in front of which a dark hardwood timber deck provided the space for a large dining area.
To one side a sunken, plunge pool provided the perfect location to relax in the sun from which, tiered, seating steps led down to a small stage area for open air performances and improvised shows.
Linking the design together the boardwalk allows you to either, cycle, run, rollerskate or walk around the entire garden as if on a jetty or a bridge.
Below the boardwalk grasses, such as stipa tennussima and giant oat grasses sway their golden bronze straw like colours echoing the colours and movements of grassy sand dunes.
Perennial drifts of marmalade orange Helleniums, purple floating Verbena bonariensis and terracotta Achilleas spring up colourfully from shingle a beach of smooth pebbles.
In Construction
