Before choosing plants, colours or deciding what goes where, there’s one thing to understand about this garden.

It has opinions.

The soil is thick clay. Winters are getting wetter, summers are getting hotter and drier, and the garden needs to cope with both without becoming either a swamp or a dust bowl.

So the design isn’t simply about making it look good.

It has to work.

From soggy to scorching

The soil can be heavy and waterlogged through increasingly wet winters.

Then summer arrives and the story changes completely.

Long periods of hot, dry weather can turn that same heavy soil surprisingly hard and unforgiving.

So we’re looking for plants that can handle a bit of a rollercoaster.

Wet feet in winter. Dry feet in summer.

That’s a much harder brief than simply finding plants that like “moist, well-drained soil” — which seems to be the answer to everything in gardening books.

The planting needs to be resilient. It needs to cope with extremes, establish well and, ideally, still look good while doing it.

Making our own shade

There’s another challenge.

As summers get hotter, shade isn’t just a nice feature. It’s becoming an important part of making the garden comfortable.

So the design needs to create natural shade and cooling, rather than relying entirely on umbrellas, buildings or other artificial solutions.

Trees, larger shrubs and layered planting will hopefully create cooler spaces, protect more delicate plants and make the garden somewhere you actually want to sit when the sun is doing its worst.

And, of course, those plants need to earn their keep in every other season too.

A garden for everyone

There’s one final consideration.

This is a garden to be used, not admired from behind a window.

That means it needs to work around children and pets.

No precious planting that can’t survive being brushed past. No garden that requires everyone to tiptoe carefully around it. And a sensible approach to plant selection, avoiding unnecessary risks where possible.

There needs to be space to explore, play, sit, run around and generally behave like people and animals actually behave in gardens.

The brief

So, before we’ve planted a single thing, we already have quite a list:

Heavy clay.
Wet winters.
Hot, dry summers.
More natural shade.
More cooling.
Hard-working plants.
Children and pets.
And, ideally, a garden that looks bloody lovely.

That’s the challenge.

Now we just have to design something that can handle it.

And this is where ChatGPT earns its keep.

Let the planting begin.