How to design a practical garden for older green fingers

For Geoff Stonebanks and Mark Glassman, crunch time came in 2020. Should they stay put at their home, where the garden created by Stonebanks has earned him many national plaudits including a Coronation Champion title for the thousands of pounds he has raised for charity, a guest slot on BBC Gardeners’ World, and praise from the King and Queen?
Or should they move before the garden got too much for Stonebanks to manage? If he became unable to cope, “it would frustrate me. I’m a control freak, it’s my vision and I’m the only person who does the garden”, he says. Glassman, he adds, “sits in the garden and enjoys it”.
The riotous colour of hundreds of plants, including 350 pots of mostly summer annuals packed into seven tiers in the 100ft-long upwardly sloping back garden in Bishopstone, East Sussex, has drawn thousands of visitors. However, by 2020 its attractions had become burdensome. Including the front garden, it took Stonebanks six hours to water with a hose. This was in addition to an automatic watering system that had become unable to cope with the burgeoning array of plants. Summer droughts and hosepipe bans increased the burden.
Now 71, Stonebanks is still sprightly but in 2020 his knees had started to twinge, necessitating daily physio exercises to keep them supple. Features, including many that he had introduced when they moved there from London in 2004, were now hazardous.
“We had a sunken pond completely surrounded by plants. To maintain the area I had to put my wellies on and jump in the pond,” he says. “Then I had get out of it and that was the harder bit. I often had to shout, ‘Mark, I’m stuck, come and pull me out!’.” The ground around the pond was uneven, causing him to trip, and he no longer wanted to climb ladders to cut 8ft-tall boundary hedges.
The couple wanted to stay put so Stonebanks redesigned the garden to cope with advancing age but without sacrificing the wow factor that he and visitors love and that has to date raised £177,000 for charity through the National Garden Scheme.
Stonebanks has drastically reduced the number of pots of high-maintenance annuals that cost him £900 a year in trade prices. “I’ve gone down from 350 to 180 but most have got succulents in them now that don’t need watering. I’ve only got 30 to 40 pots that need watering.” The succulents — including aeoniums, sempervivums, cacti and mangaves — are maintenance-free in the summer but need to overwinter indoors so he invested in a sack barrow.
“A sack barrow is perfect because it’ll negotiate the steps and you can just tip the pot forward. The mangaves go in my back porch and the aeoniums in the front porch so I can appreciate them over the winter,” he says.
To turn the summertime succulents into a spectacle, Stonebanks treated them as if he were dressing a film set.
“I have always loved old railway sleepers. One day out of the blue I got this idea of putting railway sleepers on their end to create a jagged, turreted look. Then putting shelves on them to display my succulents,” he says. “I sketched out the idea, took it to a local landscaper and said, ‘I’ve got this idea, can you create it?’ and he said, ‘If you buy the sleepers, I’ll do it’, and that was the challenge because I needed 50 of them.”
He sourced the sleepers, and a team of four workmen “loved making it because they were creating something they’d never done before”, he says.
The succulents theatre is augmented by a water feature and quirky objets d’art including rusty typewriters and colourful ornaments ranging from “three for ten quid from Morrisons to the other extreme of three glass fish for £100”.
He has seven water features in the garden which he finds soothing and relaxing, though whether all older people would do so “depends on whether you’ve got a waterworks problem”, he says. Switched off in the winter, they are maintenance-free apart from a bit of topping up now and again. As with the garden lighting, they are connected to the mains.
“By introducing objects and sculptures you make a garden easier to maintain the older you get because they don’t need any attention beyond spraying with WD-40 in the spring to protect them. When you’re taking the annuals away, by putting in small touches it’s drawing the eye and helping to create a different wow factor.”
They also make useful perches for birds, he says, and if strategically placed, double up as handrails for going up steps. The sculptures are made of rusty metal “because for me, rusty metal and a seaside garden go hand in glove”.
To match the rusted look, he used Corten steel to create a raised, circular pond to replace the sunken one. The pond is complemented by a curved Corten steel and brick wall, and raised beds. The uneven surface has been levelled with an Indian sandstone patio whose circular design links in with two others in the garden. The seven tiers have been reduced to four, with sitting areas dotted around the garden — which is 40ft at its widest point.
Plantings are tightly packed and soil is topped with gravel or slate chips, which has virtually eliminated weeds, slugs and snails. Evergreens and perennials such as Fatsia japonica, euphorbia, sedum, buddleia, artemisia, sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides), and Bupleurum fruticosum provide colour and foliage interest as well as a hands-free structure over winter.
Some low-maintenance and age-friendly elements such as a gravel garden at the end of the back garden with Trachycarpus fortunei, phormium, jelly palm (Butia capitata) and yucca, along with a seaside-style front garden, were created years ago to cope with sun and salt-laden winds rather than as part of a longer-term plan.
With hindsight, Stonebanks thinks it is a good idea even in your forties “to be prepared to look at ways to change what you do either in terms of the layout or the need to call upon AN Other for support”.
“AN Other” for Stonebanks has mostly been Dan Smith, the owner of Ace of Spades, a local landscaping service, whose help with hard landscaping and hedge cutting has proved invaluable.
For Stonebanks, the anti-ageing redesign has worked because his workload has drastically shrunk — watering is down to 50 minutes — and hazards have disappeared. It has opened up the garden so the lush and varied plantings and theatrical vignettes are easier to appreciate. Worried, however, that visitors would eschew the new-look garden, his litmus test was a couple who regularly visited pre-2020. On their first trip to the new design, “I asked them, ‘Did you feel that the wow factor has gone from the garden now that there aren’t as many summer annuals?’ They looked at each other and in unison said, ‘No, it’s got a completely different wow factor now.’ It was a great relief.”
• Ditch most summer annuals in pots. Choose more drought-tolerant plants such as pelargonium and osteospermum.• Make extensive use of succulents. No watering needed in the summer and use a sack barrow to bring them inside to overwinter.• Plant evergreens and perennials closely and cover soil with shingle or chippings to minimise weeding, slugs and snails.• Reduce tiers and level the plot to minimise trip hazards.• Introduce objets d’art, sculptures and water features to create “wow factor” vignettes, such as unusual shelving for plants or theatrical enclaves for sitting; also useful as informal hand rails near steps.• Use pots mostly just for drought-tolerant, low-maintenance perennials or evergreens.• Accept that you might have to use “AN Other” for help with some tasks.• Create raised beds, ponds and shelving for easier access, and install automatic watering systems on timers to supplement hand watering.• Use dwarf walls to create boundaries and keep plants tidy.