For a client who wanted her street frontage turned from a parking lot into a garden, I heaped the soil from a planted gravel edge into a round hill into which I planted trees. The plants in the gravel are either perennials or self-seeding annuals, which will gradually spread. The brick pavers,...

A mixture of annuals and perennials in a bed allows your client to play with the border and adapt as she wishes. Annie Cass

Sometimes a client needs a quick result. This house was being put on the market, and the new driveway had left a fatuous strip of lawn. I removed that, improved the soil, mixed Dietes and gossamer grass along the skinny bit and added a few more things, including a pretty acer for manageable...

Access is a crucial element of garden design. Everybody does concrete paths, as Auckland is boggy in winter, but properly laid gravel is water permeable, and laid with concrete pavers is easy to walk on even in heels. This site had rather a drop from the street level at the bottom of the picture...

I can garden ANYWHERE! Nizwa, Oman, our house had a concrete yard punctuated with holes and daytime temperatures that could top 50 degrees. But there was room for sunflowers. Our Yorkshire-bred ginger cat approved!

Theodore helps tidy the veggie patch at our last house.

And this is the back Under that lump of concrete near the fence is a drainage pipe outlet, so that low area gets very wet. Rain garden! I've already planted a callistemon to catch some of the outflow. Annie Cass

A baby stachys pokes its leaves above a layer of bark chips. As it's winter, I want to protect the soil from rain damage so the new plants can put out new roots undisturbed. This plant came up in the wrong place at a client's garden, and I happily gave it a new home.

The third geum piece carries the orange around the corner by way of the nasturtiums to an Abraham Darby rose, bought and planted very recently, bare-rooted.

When planting a new bed you can go for instant bang or be a bit patient. Little plants grow all the faster if they're not crowded. On the far left of this bed is one of my favourite perennials, tagetes lemmonii, a strongly perfumed (citrussy) Mexican shrub that flowers heavily from spring right...