‘It's Ideal For Two Amateurs!'

Hampered by a lack of green fingers, Susan and Henry Parker hired a professional to turn their small garden into a low-maintenance outdoor room

When Susan and Henry Parker moved into their house in 1991, the back garden consisted of cracked concrete, dead plants and an outside loo. They put up a shed, laid a small lawn for their children to play on and built raised beds. ‘The lawn was too small and it always seemed to be muddy,’ says Susan. In 2000, they built an extension with bifold doors and paved over the lawn, replacing the beds with potted plants. ‘Neither I nor Henry is a gardener and we thought pots would be easier to look after than beds, but when we went to Devon for two weeks, we returned to dead plants! We wanted a garden we could use more.’