Top tips for instant garden lifestyle cool

You could just stick it any-old-where, taking a random approach to setting up an irresistible garden lifestyle setting in the garden. Or you can carefully plan exactly where to put the garden furniture and accessories to make the best of the space and create something special to enhance your garden lifestyle. For instant room-like style and a setting that invites people in, it’s hard to beat plants.

Most of us have a square or rectangular garden, and many town and city gardens are fairly small. A suburban semi hundred-footer takes things to another level and rural living often means a much bigger area to play with. Either way you’ll want to arrange the furniture, BBQ, chiminea, lounge set and garden storage so you’re not right in the teeth of the prevailing wind, and ideally in a spot offering some privacy where you’re not completely overlooked. Because they’re portable, plants in pots and planters give you an instant way to make an intimate place to socialise in, a defined destination people will naturally drift towards and love relaxing in.

It’s easy to lose confidence trying to ‘design’ a garden entertainment space. Instead, think of it like a room indoors, something that takes the fear out of it! Recreate a living room layout in the garden, replacing the TV with a BBQ, chiminea, smoker or fire pit as the focus of the lounging space, and you know for sure it’ll be sociable and comfortable to spend time in. Do the same for dining outdoors. If you have space for separate lounging and dining areas, make each one a different ‘room’ like indoors.

Faced with a flat lawn and beds around the edge, often with limited space, how do you make an outdoor room to entertain in? Plants are the answer for an instant effect. There’s no hard landscaping, just the joy of choosing hardy, attractive plants that like living in pots and planters, easy to keep happy and lush with watering and plant food. And because the plants are potted, everything is reasonably easy to move around, from experimenting with where the pots need to go in the first place to changing the room’s layout in future.

If you already have a patio or deck, capitalise on it by planting around the edges and dotting planters around the fringe to make lush green walls.

Add trellis to large planters to grow a gorgeous wall of foliage. Scented climbing jasmines, chocolate vine, clematis or passionflower will smell like heaven as well as giving you privacy and demarking the edges of your ‘room’. A fragrant curry plant, which smells exactly like curry powder, makes a fun addition. Tall bamboos in pots make fabulous living walls and they’re evergreen. There’s a shiny-leafed evergreen clematis that smells like apples. And super-hardy, cheap climbing nasturtiums will clamber up a planter trellis is record time, then keep flowering until the first frost.

For those of us who like to re-use, recycle and repurpose, all sorts of unwanted objects make splendid planters for a quirky contemporary eco-look, many of which you can tart up using matching or contrasting house paint. How about an old wheelbarrow painted pale grey and filled with tall hardy grasses, or a couple of used tyres painted a rich aubergine purple, filled with compost and planted with tall plants like verbenas, delphiniums and lupins to help you define the space and stay private.

If you already have walls or fencing, make the most of it by using a corner or a wall to anchor your room, leaving you with fewer green walls to ‘build’.

A wooden expandable instant fence could be the perfect solution. They’re brilliant, basically an expanding wooden trellis with a post and feet at each end for stability, something you just stand on the lawn or patio with no digging. Very cool. Erect them around your chosen entertainment area and either paint them, let potted climbers grow all over them or both for a precise, well-defined outdoor room with actual walls.

If you get bored with the room and want to move it around, potted pants and instant fencing make it easy to dismantle and remake as your garden lifestyle evolves and changes.