Mandy Buckland’s award-winning design for the garden of a new-build home in Kent is a template design for such projects. Arabella St John Parker finds out more

Mandy Buckland MSGLD’s gardens are known for their intelligently zoned layouts, their elegant balance of planting and hardscaping, and the simple palette of materials used to give each garden its own bespoke and harmonious look and feel. 

This thoughtful and transformative approach to design is clearly evident in The Meadows, a 192-square-metre garden that Mandy recently created for a young couple who had bought their newly built home, one of a small development of 20 or so houses near Sittingbourne in Kent, a couple of years earlier. 

The garden has also been singled out by the judges of the SGLD Awards 2026 who, in presenting Mandy with their Significant Impact Award, described the space as ‘a fantastic example of what can be achieved with a new-build home. It celebrates the value a designer can bring, showing how thoughtful design can transform both a home and the lives of those who live in it.’

For Mandy, the prize is an endorsement of work that she feels is particularly important. ‘We all want those projects with a two-acre plot and a limitless budget,’ she says, ‘but making garden design accessible to those with newly built homes, where there’s nothing but a tiny, soulless patch of grass surrounded by stark new fencing and the teeniest of patios that wouldn’t even fit a table and chairs, is so valuable and I love doing those projects because you start with a blank canvas and you can be so creative.’

The owners of The Meadows had never had a garden before, in fact, says Mandy, they had not even gardened before. Watching Helen Elks-Smith FSGLD and other garden designers on BBC Two’s Your Garden Made Perfect, however, had inspired them to look up the Society of Garden + Landscape Designers (SGLD) online and having found Mandy’s name on the SGLD website, to invite her to help them do something with what was effectively a small field of grass outside their back door.

The concept
Their wants were simple: somewhere for their young son to play, and a good space for entertaining and for relaxation, and they needed some kind of screening to give them privacy from the neighbours. They also wanted a place to keep the rubbish bins. 

With no existing planting, distinctive features, or borrowed landscape to dictate a style or narrative, Mandy simply divided the site into three zones: a play area with a little bit of lawn, a dining area, and a social space. And because the house is a modern building with wood cladding that gives it a New England vibe, Mandy felt the garden styling could be similarly modern, with a linear layout and a hard materials palette inspired by the dark grey of the window frames, and with the whole softened by trees and lots of planting, to give the garden volume, height and a sense of enclosure.

‘I always push for more planted space and not too much hard landscaping – give clients the hard areas they need, but immerse them in plants and shrubs,’ says Mandy. 

She also makes a point of talking about the budget as early as possible in the process, ideally before the client buys or even thinks about spending money on garden furniture and lighting, and she encourages them to work along the lines of ten per cent of the value of the house. 

‘In this case they didn’t have that, so you have to be more creative, to make the garden really bespoke without spending too much money, but planting is cheaper than hard landscaping and fortunately the owners understood the importance of the plant and trees budget.

WHO’S WHO

• Contractor, Ben, Hythe Garden Landscapes, hythegarden landscapes.co.uk
• Plants and trees, Palmstead, palmstead.co.uk
• Florence Grey porcelain paving, London Stone, londonstone.co.uk
• Strand Flora patterned outdoor paving, Mandarin Stone, mandarinstone.com
• Fabricator, Mark, Barefoot Welder, thebarefootwelder.com
• Thermo ash for decking and bench, Roundwood, roundwood.com

The design and materials and plants
‘In the play zone, I put in a run of pleached Carpinus betulus to block views from the neighbours, and then, to increase the sense of height, which always helps to make a space feel larger, I designed in a framework made with reasonably cheap mild steel box section,’ Mandy explains. ‘I gave the owners two drawings of this feature – one with the egg seat and the other with a pair of swings but they loved the egg so we kept that.’

The cost savings were also helped to an extent by the natural contouring of the site. The lawn in the middle part of the garden sloped away from the house, creating a 150-millimetre level change, and Mandy decided that instead of building it up, she would emphasise the dip in her design by making it a sunken garden to sit in. 

A patterned tile floor has injected visual interest to the space, rather like a rug. ‘The light bounces off it too,’ says Mandy, ‘far more effectively than it would have if I’d used a plain, darker paving.’ 

It is a nicety that her clients appreciated all the better because of the designer’s careful attention to the materials selection process. ‘I always leave the materials with the clients for quite a while, and I encourage them to look at samples on a grey day, on a wet, on a dry, on a sunny day – keep going out and looking at them because you’ve got to live with these materials for a long time, so we want you to be happy with them.’

She does the same with plants. ‘There are lots of grasses, lots of perennials and lots of shrubs in this garden – I probably put in more shrubs than I would normally because I wanted to make it easy for them to look after, and we pushed them with the multi-stemmed, umbrella-formed osmanthus, which I’ve uplit for interest at night – but they’re all steady, steady plants.’

The owners can simply trim the pittosporums, and the geraniums that plug gaps and cascade over the trough, once or twice a year while the pleached trees need a topping once a year, to keep them on that framework. ‘They’ve nailed that completely,’ says Mandy, ‘and they love the nepeta; they texted me during the first summer after we left to say, “We’ve done our first cut back so it’s going to flower again.” They’re so into it, it’s lovely. They definitely won our award for best client that year.’

Specification and procurement
With the survey sufficiently straightforward that Mandy could do it with her own laser level, and the concept design accepted by the owners with minimal changes requested, she went out to tender. ‘We gave the clients a choice of two landscapers, both of them members of the Association of Professional Landscapers and people I’ve worked with before, and both local to the project – you don’t want a landscaping company that has to travel sixty, seventy miles to the job, especially on a tight budget, because that mileage will be added to the fee, which takes away from your budget for plants and trees.’  

As expected of the former building site, the soil beneath the turf was heavily compacted. ‘In fact, it was more sub soil than soil and there was a lot of rubbish mixed in,’ says Mandy, ‘so in our specification, I requested that the site be dug down to four hundred millimetres, turned over and improved with half and half topsoil and compost. There’s no point in spending the clients’ budget on a lorryload of plants and then putting them into rubbish.’

The steel fabricator and electrician were also local – ‘they’re all good contractors we’ve used many times before and who we keep going back to because they deliver what you’ve asked for‘.

Installation and project management
Years of experience has enabled Mandy to hone her specification process so that she says there are rarely many questions from the contractors. In addition to the setting-out drawing, the lighting plan, the perspective drawings, and a detailed specification, she provides the contractors with a virtual movie for every garden and answers every question. ‘We know from contractors’ feedback that our projects work; they’ve got all the details locked down and they can just get on with it.’

Such detailed efficiency helps to build a team, and that too is vital to Mandy. ‘I never say project management, I describe that process as project monitoring and for a garden the size of The Meadows I tend to do three to five visits overall during the on-site phase. It’s so we can all work together as a triangle – client, landscaper-contractor, and designer – for the best outcome. I always push for everyone to work as a team and if the contractor isn’t a team player, then they don’t get another job, it’s as simple as that. It always needs to be a team effort for the magic to happen.’

After care and final thoughts
Since handing over the finished garden to her clients, Mandy has been delighted to hear how much they are enjoying not just using but caring for it. They have the plant board with photographs of each one, and the plant plan so they know the name of each plant and where it is. They also have an aftercare schedule, again with pictures, so they have a bible of knowledge they can consult, and Mandy is always available to provide extra support.

‘I went to see them two or three times in the first year, to work with them through the gardening process. It went from “Is this a weed or a plant” to “We’ve just pruned this” or “We’ve cut back the grasses” and that’s a good client, where they’re doing all these jobs and are proud of it,’ says Mandy. ‘Apparently, the husband impressed some of their visiting friends by pointing out all the plants using their Latin names, and even the toddler, who’s now at school, goes out and helps – he has his own tools – which is just gorgeous.’

MANDY’S TOP TIPS FOR DESIGNING GARDENS FOR NEW-BUILD HOMES

• The budget ‘I always advise clients to spend at least ten per cent of the value of the property on the garden; good design and a great garden is a sound investment especially if they then sell it – estate agents love to add ‘Designed by award-winning...’ in the property details.
• The design ‘Break the site up into zones and wherever there’s a window, don’t put furniture. People don’t want to look out onto the back side of furniture, especially in winter when they put all those covers on. We look out at the garden probably ninety per cent of the year so lock in those views from those big doors – make it so that you draw the clients outside.’
• Softscaping versus hardscaping ‘Planting is cheaper than hard landscaping and that’s how I work out our budgets. If you think that hard landscaping is £250 to £300 a square metre and lawn or meadow or planting is under £100, that’s a win-win and we get that balance right. I see so many photos of housing developments where people have put paving against a fence – there’s no green, there’s no immersive feeling about the space; people will relax more if you get that balance right.’ 

MANDY BUCKLAND MSGLD
is an IT consultant turned garden designer who completed her Honours degree in garden design at Greenwich University before setting up her studio, Greencube Design, in 2007. Based in Norfolk, and working across the south and east of Britain, Mandy has built more than 300 gardens to date, including Gold medal-winning show gardens at RHS Chelsea and RHS Hampton Court, and won many industry awards from the Society of Garden + Landscape Designers, the Association of Professional Landscapers, and the British Association of Landscape Industries.
greencubedesign.co.uk