Top garden trends for 2020: woven fences, curved paths and painted walls among outdoor style for the new decade

How about making your garden bang on trend for 2020?

The Society of Garden Designers shares its predictions for the year ahead and we explore the best for Londoners.

Let’s hear it for curves, outdoor balance bars and Belgians.

Outdoor play areas for kids will be a big theme this year.

“Parents want to encourage their children outdoors without buying a trampoline or a plastic slide and swing set,” says Mandy Buckland.

“We design play zones so that they are integral to the garden layout. We are adding swings and balance beams constructed of logs and timbers sliced lengthways. A bit of rustic fun tracking through the borders, encouraging the little ones to get outside.”

Hammocks are particularly popular with older kids.

Buckland strings them from sturdy oak posts and surrounds them with meadow planting for the ultimate siesta.

If you want to sound really au courant at dinner parties this year, say your garden is “in the Belgian style”.

All about “luxurious simplicity”, it’s set to be a big thing in our outdoor spaces.

Belgian pot designer Atelier Vierkant has been on London landscape designers’ speed dial for years.

The company’s beautiful textured clay pots, particularly the giant ones planted with cacti, phormiums or olives, are a favourite on high-end rooftops.

“Belgian products are typically high-end and have great form,” says Swedish-born designer Mia Witham.

“Like Scandinavian design, the Belgian look is about simplicity but there is something earthy and textural about it, too, that provides warmth. As well as pots by Atelier Vierkant, I love the garden lights by Wever & Ducré and woven fibre fencing from Forest Avenue.

Made from recycled fibre in muted, earthy tones, they also make great privacy screens between balconies.

London gardens have been all about straight lines for at least a decade.

The familiar style of crisp, linear raised beds set against horizontal slatted trellis has become ubiquitous. But designers are breaking out of the box.

Mark Laurence thinks in 2020 “we’ll turn to something wilder and more curvilinear”.

Paths will be more winding, sweeping around curved, rendered raised beds and paved areas.

It can even work in London’s tight spaces where the — usually rectangular — boundaries dominate.

“With the right flow and function, curves can work in almost any space,” Laurence says.

“Cold minimalism is beginning to look pretty tired,” says Jane Brockbank, who brings pattern and texture into her designs by combining organic-shaped patches of paving with gravel and plants.

The effect is a naturalistic patchwork that is perfect for compact spaces.

“It’s really nice to walk through planting,” says Brockbank.

Get the effect with Petersen bricks or Artorius Faber cobbles and Cotswold chippings with areas of euphorbia, miscanthus grass, Mexican daisies and persicaria for sunny gardens.

Ferns, rodgersias and geraniums would work well in shadier spots.

Another great way to add texture outside is by contrasting different types of decking or using patterned tiles, says Mandy Buckland, often laid as “garden rugs” to define seating areas.

Most of us are keen these days to make our spaces wildlife friendly as well as beautiful.

Urbanites sometimes worry it will look messy — but you can have it all, says designer Libby Russell.

“Our planting is evolving to use many more wild plants that are great for bees, birds, pollinators and invertebrates but without losing glamour or impact.”

In borders she gets the look with selinum wallichianum, a late flowering umbel, echinacea pallida for seed heads and grasses such as low-level sesleria Greenlee’s Hybrid and taller panicum or miscanthus.

Informal and single roses bring both romance and bees. Russell particularly loves Lyda Rose, Felicia and Kew Gardens.

Remember the Nineties when no TV garden makeover show was complete unless a wall was painted bright blue, orange or pink?

Once we’d realised Majorelle Blue didn’t look quite the same on a wet day in suburban Croydon as it did in Morocco, we repainted everything white or pale grey.

But coloured walls are returning to the garden this year says Mark Laurence, who mixes mineral pigments into render with atmospheric effects.

“I think the red or yellow ochre tones work very well in a garden setting,” says Laurence.

Reminiscent of the rammed-earth walls in Sarah Price’s show-winning garden at RHS Chelsea in 2018, they bring a Mediterranean vibe and are warmer and more natural than the cool, crisp white rendered walls we’ve seen a lot of lately.