When the trees are already there

Most new plots come with nothing on them but the house and the leftover soil. Sometimes a family gets the opposite: a piece of old wood with the house set down in it. Birches, pines, decades of shade — and the question of what to do with all of it.

We take the trees as the starting point. Everything a garden planted from scratch spends a decade growing into — shade at midday, a screen from the road, the feeling that the place has been there for a while — is already standing. The two gardens in Akmanai have been growing into their drawings for nine and ten years. A wooded plot gives you that on the first day; the task is not to lose it while making the place liveable.

What the ground asks for first

Among the Birches, in the Southern Urals, was rough when we came: virgin soil, stumps of old scrub, the remains of a foundation, heavy clay, a sheet-metal fence. Its one asset was the mature birches, and the brief was short: don't flatten them into a standard lawn.

On a plot like this the trees decide the order of the work. A mature tree's roots run at least as wide as its crown, so before anyone talks about a terrace, we know where trenches, paving and machinery may go and where they may not. The clay decides the rest: at Shmidtovo, a 700 m² garden under old pines, the first thing built was drainage and a better soil — on that ground nothing else would have held.

Then come the things nobody will ever see. At Among the Birches the first stage was services and hidden utilities, including a winter water line to the sauna, then the levels regraded, then the paths. Only after that does the place start looking like a garden.

Fitting a life between the trunks

The owners of the birch plot wanted a place they would step out into at any hour: morning coffee on the veranda, the sauna in the evening, friends around a fire, a walk among the trees. Not a plot to work on every weekend.

So every function was fitted between the existing trees rather than the trees fitted around a plan: a timber terrace off the house, the sauna with its own sitting area, a fire bowl, a compact kitchen garden with a greenhouse, a pool. The parking is screened from the private garden by a mass of ornamental grasses. The paths and steps were cast in concrete in place, from the terrace outward; their curves run between the trunks and already set the frame of the garden while the planting, the decks and the evening lighting are still to come.

At Shmidtovo the frame is simpler and the trees do the same job. A lawn under the old pines, paths from the porch and the terrace, a brick barbecue pavilion, a small kitchen garden along the fence, a hedge that screens the neighbours. The owners are busy, sociable people who wanted the opposite at home — a quiet place to come back to — and the pines give that before a single shrub is planted.

What this means if your plot has trees

The first conversation is not about the terrace or the pool. It is about which trees stay, what the ground is made of, where the water goes and how the family wants to spend an evening there. Those four things are usually settled in a visit and a short note — that is what a consultation is for — and from them the design follows: the routes, the levels, the places to sit, then the drawings a builder can price and build from.

A wooded plot takes more care in the first stage and gives more back in every one after it. The trees were there first; the garden is built around that fact, not in spite of it.