Garden designer and landscaper recommendation

[madhvi mellish]

Barbara Samitier has created a delightful urban oasis for us, which has met every single point on our brief, not just adequately but with excellence. We have a long narrow garden in zone 2 in London, which had uneven ground levels, dangerous structures and varying light throughout the day due to surrounding tall buildings and a tall tree scape. In addition to this we have a heavy clay soil, which has areas of intense dryness too. The garden needed to be contemporary but sympathetic to the Victorian town house it is part of.

Our needs included potting areas, vegetable beds, adaptable play and climbing areas, wildflower meadows, storage, lighting, grown up zones and of course beautiful planting. All of this also needed to work long term for a busy working family.

She took our brief and provided a design that we didn?t feel the need to change at all, as all elements had been considered. We used her suggested landscapers ( Tobyn Burnett Gardens) who have also been professional, worked to an incredibly high standard and for whom nothing was impossible or too difficult to do. They were polite and clean and were a delight to have around. The plants she chose from the nursery were of a very good quality and delivered in good condition.

Barbara has considered our planting tastes with the complexities of our garden needs and come up with a perfect scheme of beauty, durability, manageable maintenance and seasonal interest. Her site visits and monitoring of the project were appropriately frequent and her exacting standards reassuring. She also demonstrated flexibility when the project required, but due to her thorough planning, the need for this was rare.

I?m pleased to say that Barbara has delivered all of this and more and the garden despite being in its early stages is clearly full of promise and will delight all for us for many years to come. One would think a new garden would look bare, but this one doesn?t but we know there is more around the corner- we just can?t wait for the seasons to turn. We feel we have a whole new area of our home and life to enjoy.

I couldn't recommend her highly enough. (Search for her at her website)