Food for thought from Helen Yemm (Sunday Telegraph)

I am always surprised at the numbers of small-space town gardeners who are hell bent on big-garden formal style.  Surely these frustrated gardeners can't all be town planners or maths teachers, although from their single-minded determination to achieve perfect symmetry in their gardens, it is tempting to think so.

No, I feel sure that these hankerings must be fuelled by foreign gardening adventures, or are simply a hangover from a more spacious, rose-tinted childhood.  And I have to say that some elements of the stylised Chelsea show gardens may be in part responsible for misleading inexperienced gardeners up a disappointing garden path.

Whatever the reason for the deep need, town gardeners can get into a serious pickle when trying to satisfy it: frustrated by topiary pairs that quickly stop 'matching', peeved by the moth-eaten look of a garden where little geometric boxy-edgy hedges thrive in the sun but disastrously fade in the shade under dripping sycamore canopies.

What follows is just common gardening sense, too frequently ignored.  Of course you can fuss and fiddle with a tape measure and graph paper and faff around with perspective, you can create limpid pool trompe l'oeils and spend a king's ransom on topiary, fancy seats and any amount of paraphernalia to create little Italy in Clifton or Croydon.  

But never lose sight of the fact that the most important part of your garden - the plants - don't really 'do' symmetry when under pressure.  

The way plants grow is determined by factors that are guaranteed to be totally inconsistent in a small town garden.  Plants are deeply affected by the quality and quantity of light and rain throughout the year, by the texture, fertility and basic moisture-retentiveness of the soil and by the very proximity of the house.


Don't forget boundary walls, the roots and canopies of any existing neighbouring trees and prevailing winds and the niggling draughts that they inevitably create - which can have a devastating effect on growth.  

Ignore all or any of this in your quest for a smart garden, and you will pay for it.  In every sense.

I don't know about a mathematician's garden - but here's a mathematician's clock