This newly built farmhouse has a large front garden with sweeping views of the countryside beyond. The owners wished to keep a large area of lawn surrounded by mixed borders.

The front garden of this modern town house has been given a contemporary feel with a naturalistic planting of ornamental grasses and perennials. A slate mulch not only completes the look but also helps to make this a very low maintenance garden.

The owners of this garden wished to remove the lawn to reduce maintenance as they have a sizeable area of grass to mow in the back garden as well. A gravel surface was chosen, with railway sleepers used as steps across the gentle slope. A narrow bed of rockery plants at the top of the garden was replaced with a border of grasses and perennials that create more impact both on entering the garden and when viewed from the bungalow.

This croft behind a house in a Dales village was sown with a native wildflower mix in October 2007. The perennial wildflowers will take a couple of years to start flowering, so annual wildflowers were added to the mix to give colour in the first year after sowing. These annual flowers of field poppy, cornflowers, corn marigold, corn camomile and corn cockle will appear in much fewer numbers in future years and eventually disappear, but by then the perennial wildflowers should be well established.

The hard landscaping had already been carried out in this sloping garden in the heart of limestone country in the Yorkshire Dales, when I was asked to create a planting scheme that would attract birds, bees, butterflies and other wildlife. I used predominantly native plants to create different habitats in different parts of the garden - rockery and pond with bog garden; raised beds; wildflower meadows and woodland areas.

This is very much an on-going project that will evolve over the years, but the initial plantings have been very successful.