Inspiration for a small garden space is more likely to be found in the categories of the Fresh Gardens and Artisan Gardens at Chelsea Flower Show. Here will be found a quite different level of creativity with the balancing of plants and hard landscaping elements telling a story. Attention to every small detail is what counts here and Chelsea designers seldom fail to deliver.

My guess is that visitors to Chelsea want to be wowed the large show gardens and wooed by the smaller ones. The mood and feel of these smaller gardens seems to us to be more achievable to take home to our own gardens. A false sense perhaps, but non-the-less we will find inspiration with a more ‘home garden’ scale of planting blocks, climbing structures, hard landscaping and paths.

Inverewe doesn’t fail to deliver in its creativity throughout the whole garden and it too has small garden areas within it. My best in show on my visit back in August 2014 has to be the Small Pond Area near Inverewe House (not open to the public).

Perhaps no surprises I picked a water garden, but it was the surprise ‘deck’ in this woodland setting and the scale of water to planting with rocks in the water that both wowed and wooed me! This was a little show garden you could take home with you 🙂

Okay, this might be a little tricky to build but it does give inspiration for sure.

My approach to the area from a lower path, note plants hide the artistic feature.

The guide book doesn’t say the idea behind this ‘deck’ shape – a snail’s shell?

Tiny frogs swimming in the rock circle (front left) were fun to watch.
The guidebook lists this a spawning pool.

Plants include Iris forrestii, the North American ostrich fern, candelabra primulas from China, skunk cabbage, groundsel (Senecio smithii) from the Falkland Islands.

Very surprisingly there was no mention of the stone circle island with carnivorous plants in the guidebook which I thought was the star planting of this small garden area. I love to see rock islands in a pond and loved the moss covered one in the background. If you read my post yesterday you might guess why – it’s all about the reflections in water for me 🙂

It’s back to the walled garden for my people’s choice area of Inverewe next time. I better get my vote in for my Chelsea pick before midnight first! I do hope you’re enjoying the snippets from this garden so far. I do think this small garden area would get a medal at Chelsea – Silver perhaps as the judges wouldn’t be happy with the brown edges on the hosta 😉

This post was published by Shirley for shirls gardenwatch in May 2015.