Spain Garden Tour: A Mediterranean Makeover With Colour & Texture

Garden at a Glance
Who lives here: A married couple who wanted to enjoy the garden all year round with their children
Location: Madrid, Spain
Size: 1,200 square metres
Landscape architect: Fernando Nájera at Aleza Nájera Paisajistas
Project year: 2022

After the owners found and hired Nájera on Houzz, he used features from Houzz Pro to manage the project. It helped him “keep track of customer requests, registrations and calls,” he says.

The owners told Nájera that they wanted to enjoy their garden year-round: from winter to high summer.

He was briefed to include a pool with a small grassy area, a generous space for a vegetable garden and other edible vegetation, a couple of alfresco dining spaces for lunch or dinner, and a quieter place for reading or working. He also needed to connect these spaces with a beautiful yet logical flow, avoiding major changes in elevation, but clearly marking the transition from one area to another.

Nájera believes that some houses need to be enhanced by their outdoor space, while others need to be more subdued. In this case, the new garden surrounds the house and works well in conjunction with it. “A garden with many areas has been designed, but it doesn’t give the impression of being fragmented. It’s a very lively and useful space for its owners,” he says.

Tempted to redesign your outdoor area? Find experienced landscape architects and designers near you, see their projects and read reviews from previous clients

The garden before works.

Redesigning the entire outdoor area created a distinct ‘before and after’ feeling for the entire house and its occupants, Nájera says. “Before, this garden was practically abandoned and detracted from the beauty of the house, which looked as if it was built on an esplanade,” he says.

The bulk of the work took about a month, however additional aspects of this project were completed at a later date.

The garden after works.

The owners now enjoy the new pool area in particular (designed by the landscaper and built by another company). Nájera factored in handy access from the porch, and the space is surrounded by a transitional garden – one of several different zones the professional created through the space.

In any garden planning, it is essential to define how it is going to be used in order to organise the spaces and achieve fluid transitions.

“The larger a garden is, the more difficult it is to harmonise the empty spaces with the planted ones as well as the relationship between footpaths and non-traffic areas,” says Nájera.

Furthermore, a large garden needs a meticulously well-thought-out concept. “From the choice of plant species to irrigation, to its maintenance; all are factors that need to be taken into account when planning a garden of this size,” he says.

Another space that the client enjoys is this transition area to the lawn, which is a naturalised garden with a large variety of plants, from aromatics such as lavender, sage and helicrysum; to others that add volume, such as westringias, phormium and olivilla (of the genus Teucrium). There are also species that bring colour, such as stachys, gaura and kniphofia, a bulbous plant known for its bright colours and rocket shape.

In addition to providing pleasant aromas and some volume, aromatic plants or grasses aim to minimise the need for watering and are easier to maintain. Nájera explains that the garden is maintained and landscaped by the owners, who receive a helping hand from a gardening company that takes care of additional tasks, such as keeping weeds at bay, pruning the ivy and mowing the lawn.

“It’s feasible to take care of about 50 percent of the maintenance for such a garden by dedicating at least a couple of full days a month. The owners could maintain it themselves, but this is not the usual case,” he says.

This is generally a sustainable garden where careful attention has been paid to excessive water usage. “The section of the garden that contains aromatics and shrubs needs very little water; even the vegetable garden doesn’t need much water. It is a sustainable garden, and even this year [2023] we estimate using much less water, given that the plants already have deep roots”, says Nájera.

Pictured above is the fruit orchard. Only the lawns – a small one in the front garden, and another around the swimming pool – need a little more water than the other areas, though the variety of grass used is hardier in order to aid in water reduction.

“Whether for a large or small garden, it’s vital to think about sustainability. However, sustainability is a much-overused word,” says the landscape architect, for whom “watering just enough is sustainability, but so is not overusing waterproof paving, as is promoting tree groves whereas abusing synthetic materials is not.

“It is essential to choose the plant species in accordance with the natural climate of the location and to use locally sourced materials. In other words, water consumption is an important factor, but not the only one to be taken into account,” he says.


Your turn
Which elements of this redesigned garden do you love? Tell us in the Comments, like this story, save the images for inspiration and join the conversation.

More
Want more on gardens? Take this fun quiz: What’s Your Dream Garden Style?