Garden Design and Garden Makeovers in Harrogate

Garden design at Hocus Crocus runs from a border rethink to a full makeover, and Harrogate is where most of it happens. The town's gardens set their own brief: long narrow plots behind Victorian and Edwardian properties, high stone or brick boundary walls, and deep shade thrown by mature street and garden trees. Get the structure right in a plot like that and the planting looks after itself. Get it wrong and no plant list will rescue it.

Out of town the brief flips. In Knaresborough the plots are terraced and fall away towards the river, so they need holding before they need flowering. Around Ripon and up into Nidderdale the gardens are bigger, more open and a good deal windier, and shelter becomes the first thing we draw. The ground changes inside a few miles here too, from the free draining, acid-leaning gritstone soils west of Harrogate to the limier ground out towards Knaresborough and Ripon, which is exactly why we test the soil rather than guess at it.

Karen is an award winner in the Best Show Garden category at the Harrogate Flower Show, and the team that draws the garden is the team that plants it. We are gardeners and tree surgeons, so a makeover here means the living parts of the garden: borders, lawns, hedges, structure planting, pots and styling. Karen designs and plants, so where a scheme needs anything built we work alongside your builder and plan the planting round it. We plant up new build homes, and we plant wedding gardens.

A garden that does not work is rarely one bad plant. It is a lawn nobody sits on, a seating area in shade at the hour you would actually use it, a slope with nothing holding it, or borders planted with things that were never going to be happy in this soil. Rearranging it in your head only gets you so far, so we start with the ground and the way you want to live in the space, not with a plant list.

Hocus Crocus Gardens & Trees is rated 4.5 out of 5 from 19 Google reviews.