Exploding Atom Garden Part 1 Designing a concept Garden

The Exploding Atom garden has been my muse since moving house from the non-stop Manchester Cityscape to rural solitude in Lathom, a 6 square mile sleepy historical village. Talk about juxtaposition! The move brought a new perspective on my garden designs. Rather than small awkward city spaces with multi-functions, what would I design for a large open space with minimal function? The questions of what would I design if I had a blank canvas with no defined purpose seemed easy. However, once I started to brainstorm I realised that a blank canvas can actually be a creative curse! It had stopped me in my tracks.

• Exploding Atom Garden layout
• Drawing up the design

I'd ruminated over it for months and months. What about this style, what about that feature, what will be the focal point, what would be its defined purpose? Then I'd look out over the blank field, start to daydream and wonder whether a couple of raised beds and some potatoes would be best for now. ie Kill the creative quagmire I was in and get digging for victory! I had partitioned the space with a Griselina hedge which took away some of the issues around sizes.

I knew I wanted part of it to be left as potential agricultural land or as a wild meadow and decided on the top half. I'd drawn up my scaled survey blueprint of the lower area but this did nothing to inspire my design. Frustrated I got the coffee on and completed some other design work for clients who actually knew what they wanted!

Exploding Atom Garden Layout

I'm not sure when or how the idea started but suddenly, I realised that this garden was my chance to embody something other than function and beauty. I've always been one to throw myself in, feet first. At swimming pools, I never tentatively dipped my toe. I was straight in, breathless and spluttering!

Stop being so prescriptive and start being more spontaneous. Cause a ripple, I thought. Then it came to me, imagine a garden that explodes metaphorically. Where the centre is a hive of activity, these savage shards of planting fire out, mixing some hard textured elements with an array of native and wild planting. A garden that's part delicate, part chaos theory. My mind ran wild in a giddy haze of ideas, plants, colours, textures and the kind of delicious beers I would drink sitting in the garden after its completion.

Running at a million miles an hour, the design had started, and the Exploding Atom Garden was born!

I quickly got to the drawing board and started firing out (excuse the pun) all sorts of items. I can't count the hours I spent digging through books on nuclear reactors, fusion, and physics, and even watching videos of the layout of the earth's crust in cross-section. The outline became immediately clear with a few pencil drawings.

By using the central red-hot core as the focal point, the remaining garden areas would be shards that have been blasted out from this nucleus. The journey to the centre would be through these areas. Accessible from any side and from every angle, the design took on a life of its own. From red-hot lava-like planting to wild native Birch trees inhabiting the calmer, cooler outer rings of the atom as its shards cool down. All these design ideas and concepts swirled around inside my head and again took over my waking and sleeping thoughts.

Drawing up the Design for the exploding atom garden

Once I had the outline concept, I then painstakingly drew out the core of the exploding atom and the shards around it. Being careful and considerate to match the proportions of the house and established trees surrounding it. There were so many walks back and forth with hose pipes to lay out markings and measuring tapes. The act of measuring twice cut once is something I always advocate for any garden design work. Check and check again. It always saves time, tears and tantrums later on!

Checking the viewpoints and establishing that each access point should have its own unique and partially visible view of the red-hot core was a must. Once I was happy with the overview of the design I then started to draw up the design by hand.

So with the design now complete, the next stage is for me to mark out the garden and spray paint at the ready! This will be the next instalment of the Exploding Atom Garden diaries, so check back soon. Why not let me know on social media what you think? I'd love to hear from you.

The Exploding Atom Garden Video Diary will be updated soon with further progress!

Happy Gardening!