Way back in '93 we moved from Hertfordshire to North Yorks with my job. We found a newly converted ex Methodist chapel in a lovely village midway between Harrogate and Ripon. The garden had great open views south but was newly fenced and bare apart from an ancient apple tree. https://goo.gl/maps/r3hKwWyoB742

In those days we had some money and we got a garden designer from York in and he drew us a fantastic design with absolutely fabulous plant associations in terms of colour, shape and texture. We then got a Boroughbridge landscape builder to carry out the plans, leaving us to plant up as per the design. Doing this generated an interest and passion for plants that has continued on to this day. When I took redundancy from NatWest I even attended a garden design course at Askham Bryan agricultural college to broaden my understanding.

Fast forward a decade or so and we moved to North Staffs and a '70's house with a garden only 25ft deep in places but 100ft wide and with a 6ft south facing boundary wall. It wasn't very inspiring as the house had been empty for two years and although the grass had been cut, there were few plants, just an out of control thug of a bamboo running rampant in one corner, a huge golden privet bush and a large lilac in another corner. There were also quite a number of ex railway sleepers used as edging, some in most inappropriate ways.

No longer able to afford designers etc, over time I devised a plan and introduced a long flowing border along the 100ft long boundary. At the same time I didn't want to lose everything in the existing garden, so the privet is still a major feature, the lilac died a couple of years ago and I had a gargantuan tussle with the bamboo, which I won, happily.

The weirdly positioned sleepers were moved to the top of the garden, alongside their brethren to for a slightly raised seating area, snug in a corner of the boundary wall and a suntrap. This left an area at the opposite end of the garden where curved border edges were more appropriate to the planting and atmosphere. The paving slabs of a patio that had been undermined by bamboo roots were saved and eventually reused to create a curved path in the grass to emphasis to the soft curving overall design, in what is an angular space. Gradually things evolved and new ideas were developed and implemented.

One problem that took me ages to get my head round was that the house was surrounded by an imprinted concrete path, which had curved corners as it moved around the angles of the house. These curves were a curse and an opportunity. Taking stark right angles off them just wouldn't look right, so the rest of the garden design had to use curves, so the paving didn't look out of place.

Trouble was that outside our lounge and dining room the paving was only a foot or so wider than the rest and it hardly had room for two chairs and a bistro table, let alone a decent family/barbecue/sitting/eating area. I mulled this problem over for years and inspiration struck about 12 months ago. We didn't want to dig up the existing paving, so I designed an 'almost' circle that abutted the existing path, made a fabulous sitting area, split the garden into three distinct interest areas and looked great from inside the house. In January we got a local landscaper to build the new paving etc and he found a supply of lovely old setts for the surrounding dwarf wall. I specified a particular paving design that we'd used before in North Yorkshire and he did a brilliant job. Since Jan I've been remodelling and planting up the new borders we've created and I hope this summer it will look glorious.

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In all this I owe our original garden designer a heap of gratitude. He is a brilliant plantsman and I freely admit I've used his designs and planting combinations repeatedly. Whilst they do evoke the lovely garden he originally designed for us, they also stand the test of being beautiful wherever you use them and I've gradually learned to adapt and widen their range. When he visited our Yorkshire garden as it was being built in 1994, he met our installer and they struck up a friendship. Since then our installer has built lots of his designs including the garden the designer was asked to make for an RHS show at Hampton Court.

As I said the garden is constantly evolving and we've already developed another design change which we hope will more clearly integrate a particular area into the overall plan, though it means more digging and altering stuff that I only did last year. So next autumn I'll be out with tape, bamboo canes and spade all over again.