Garden Renovation - The Details!

A look into our greek inspired courtyard garden, in our little London home!

Last year we went on holiday to Paxos, Greece (see full holiday guide here!) and we stumbled upon the cutest little greek courtyard that we fell in love with. We decided that one day, we’d love to recreate it at our home in London and I’m so happy to say the garden renovation is complete, so I wanted to document some of it’s progress here!

We were recommended a garden landscaper by a carpenter we’d previously used and we got the initial quote and design almost a year ago now! The cost was set to be a lot… and so after saving for a year, we finally had the money put aside to make our Mediterranean dream a reality!

The courtyard we found in Paxos that we used as inspiration!

The start:

This is the garden before. It’s divided into 2 sections - a concrete patio used for storage and a bbq and then a higher level complete with astro-turf and… well that’s about it - a lot of weeds, a broken fence and a lot of fox visitors. Our garden is also a sun trap with no shade - it gets sun pretty much all day in the summer and we aren’t massive sun babies - we don’t like tanning and we’d much prefer a cosy, shaded spot to sit, drink tea and read our books from… which leads us nicely into the plans:

The plan:

The biggest changes we wanted were: a natural sandstone paving and a pergola for shade. Apart from that, we were pretty undecided on everything else. Taking inspiration from that Paxos garden - we also loved the idea of scattered planters, big beautiful vivid flowers, white rendered planters and perhaps a tree. We sent lots of ideas and mood boards to the landscaper Jon from the The Welcome Gardener who drew up lots of designs (See first image below) and after a couple of conversations he drew up the final plan (2nd image below)!

I should say now, we couldn’t recommend Jon enough! He had so many fantastic ideas which we’d never have thought of beforehand and generally was such a great soul to have here daily over 4 weeks!

Initial sketches and ideas and the final plan from our gardener Jon!