This typical, long and narrow town garden designed for a professional couple faces east. A brick path winds through the exotic scheme, providing a series of seating and dining areas in both shade and sun. The circuitous route of the path increases the sense of space, while the jungle-style planting conceals the adjacent houses with dense tropical plants and trees. The soft landscaping, particularly the areas of drought-tolerant Mediterranean planting, is generally low maintenance.

An overgrown front garden is rejuvenated into a contemporary Italian-style courtyard that provides additional parking and turning space and allows the evening sun to flood into the house. The oak pergolas offer a powerful vertical contrast to the decorative herbaceous beds, and the use of ornamental grasses within the cottage-garden style borders provide winter structural interest, while flowering shrubs screen the piazza from the road. The garden lighting is designed not only to act as a 'welcome home', but also to impress visitors and guests.

A small courtyard, which wraps around the living spaces of a garden apartment, is restructured to provide a clean, contemporary garden design with dining and seating areas surrounded by soft, woodland ferns and grasses. Privacy is provided with a series of pleached trees and tall, black bamboo. The planting palate is kept simple with the mainly foliage planting accented by splashes of dark purples, soft reds and pinks that contrast with the cream walls.

A beautiful garden, however simple, deserves the addition of components other than plants and paving. Garden lighting can brighten the darkest corner, lighting up plants and structures and allowing patio areas to be used at night. Pergolas and other garden structures not only add an instant vertical emphasis and offer more space for plants to grow but they can also provide an extra room outside. In both large and small spaces, pots and sculptures need careful placing to make all-important focal points.