Knot in my backyard

How do you replace a lawn with a knot garden? David overend answers a reader's question.

A reader has written in wanting to know how to grow a knot garden on their present lawn. It may not fit in with the rest of the gardens nearby, but they have been thinking about it for several years.

A knot garden was a very formal design normally using a variety of aromatic plants and culinary herbs, the whole being edged with clipped Box (Buxus sempervirens).

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The paths between are usually laid with fine gravel but the original designs of knot gardens did not have the low box hedges, and knot gardens with such hedges might, more accurately, be called parterres.

Probably the most perfect example is to be found on the most beautiful of French rivers, the Loire.

The garden at the Chateau de Villandry is nothing if not a monument to the art of creation. True, it is a modern reconstruction of a 16th-century garden, designed by a Spanish artist, but once you're over that obstacle, you can enjoy one of the wonders of the modern horticultural world.

This is where the sun shines on a heady mixture of roses and fruit trees surrounding beds of vegetables, the colours and patterns of which can shame most formal floral arrangements.

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Ornamental cabbages, ruby chards, leeks and lettuces, apples and pears woven into sumptuous shapes.

From the high terraces, the vista is laid out in all its glory. It's a geometric marvel whose lines and angles are formed by living things.

Villandry is the pinnacle of the potager, but it's also a feast of ideas for lesser gardens where keen growers can find inspiration.

You can grow for show, and still eat heartily. Far too big for your average British garden, but it fits perfectly where

it is.

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Smaller, but equally attractive parterres can be found all over old England. Few are the original; most have been resurrected or rebuilt to mimic what may have been in situ several centuries ago. But they, too, tend to blend well with the aged houses they surround.

But there's nothing to stop anyone creating their very own parterre – even if it happens to front a modern semi. If you want a formal, always neat, every pleasing-on-the-eye garden of compartments edged with Box, then go for it.

Map out your design on paper, decide what plants you want to grow in each compartment, do the preparation work on the ground, and create your own knot garden or parterre.

It will mean hard work and require plenty of patience – particularly with the hedge-trimmers – but that's a small price to pay for a growing work of art.