Challenge Of A Tiny Plot

Inspirational design and plant-packed borders for year-round interest make this Edinburgh garden shine

- Val Bourne

Dug McLeod has been designing gardens in the Edinburgh area for over 20 years. He trained under two landscape architects, one a plantsman and one a designer. “I carried on when they retired,” he says, “but I’ve always been interested in gardening because my mum used to open her garden when I was a child.”

Larkfield was a modern house, designed to merge in with Edinburgh’s Georgian architecture, and the owners, who’d had a much larger garden in Dorset, asked Dug to redesign their garden after admiring his work in a neighbour’s plot.

The small, city space was uninspiring, with a straight concrete path, a lawn and some decking close to the house. “Although the garden was a blank canvas, it was a real challenge,” Dug explains. “I had to rework the ground and add extra topsoil because the ground was full of builders’ rubble. The concrete path was in completely the wrong place, so it had to be broken up and I used it for hardcore.”