Garden Design in Cambridge
From RHS Award-Winning Garden Designer Tim Jennings
Gardens with structure, atmosphere and a sense of place
Tim Jennings Design is an RHS award-winning garden and landscape design practice creating distinctive gardens in Cambridge, across East Anglia, Hertfordshire and London.
Our gardens combine architectural clarity with naturalistic planting, bringing together the house, garden and wider landscape to create places that feel settled, generous and entirely at home in their surroundings.
From large country gardens and contemporary landscapes to more intimate spaces, every project is individually designed around its setting and the people who will live there.
RHS Award-Winning Garden & Landscape Design
A Garden Should Feel Like It Belongs
The best gardens have a sense of inevitability about them. They feel as though they belong to the house and have grown naturally from their surroundings. That begins with understanding the site.
The architecture of the house, existing trees, views, boundaries, changes in level, light and the wider landscape all help shape the design. Just as importantly, we consider how the garden will actually be lived in: where you might sit on a summer evening, how you move from the house into the landscape, what you see from a favourite window and how the garden changes through the seasons.
Structure brings calm and order. Trees provide scale and permanence. Planting introduces movement, softness and seasonal change. The result is a garden that feels considered without feeling over-designed.
Naturalistic planting held within strong architectural structure
Designing the Whole Landscape
Larger gardens need to be considered as complete landscapes.
The relationship between the house and garden, terraces and lawns, swimming pools and entertaining areas, trees, planting, boundaries and views should feel coherent rather than like a collection of individual features.
We begin by establishing the underlying structure of the garden: its proportions, routes, vistas and relationship with the architecture. From there, materials, planting and detail are developed as part of one overall composition.
For substantial or complex projects, three-dimensional visualisation allows us to explore scale, views and spatial relationships before construction begins. Detailed drawings can then develop the landscape through hard materials, levels, planting, lighting and irrigation.
It is a rigorous process, but one that ultimately serves a simple purpose:
to make the finished garden feel effortless.
Rooted in Nature
Planting is at the heart of Tim Jennings Design.
Tim’s RHS Hampton Court garden, A Four Season Sanctuary, explored an idea that runs through much of the practice’s work: contemporary design and nature do not have to be opposites.
Trees and shrubs create the permanent framework. Perennials, grasses and bulbs are layered through it to bring changing colour, texture, movement and moments of surprise throughout the year.
More formal elements can sit alongside looser, more naturalistic planting. One gives definition to the other.
The aim is not to create something that looks finished on the day it is planted. It is to establish the framework for a garden that will settle, mature and become richer with time.
RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024
Silver-Gilt Medal
From First Ideas to a Garden You Can Live In
Every project starts with a conversation.
You may be building or renovating a house and want the landscape considered alongside the architecture. You may have inherited an established garden that no longer works for you. Or you may simply know that the space outside your home could become somewhere very different.
The first task is to understand what is possible.
From the initial consultation and concept design, we can develop the project through detailed landscape and planting design, material specification, lighting and irrigation strategies, three-dimensional visualisation and the information required for construction.
Where appropriate, Tim can also remain involved during the build, working alongside experienced landscape contractors and specialist suppliers to help protect the integrity of the design as it moves from drawing to finished garden.
Throughout the process, the ambition remains the same: to create something individual to the property rather than impose a recognisable formula upon it.
Because the best garden should feel like your garden, not ours.
Garden Design in Cambridge & Cambridgeshire
Based near Cambridge, with studios in Ely and Lode beside Anglesey Abbey, Tim Jennings Design creates gardens throughout Cambridge and Cambridgeshire, as well as across Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertfordshire and London.
Cambridgeshire has a landscape and architectural character of its own. Historic villages and period houses sit alongside contemporary architecture and substantial new country homes, all beneath the openness and big skies of the East Anglian landscape.
A successful garden needs to respond to that context.
That might mean giving a contemporary house the maturity and softness it lacks, finding a new structure within an established country garden, or creating stronger connections between a house and the landscape beyond it.
There is no standard Tim Jennings garden.
What connects the work is an approach: clear structure, thoughtful use of materials, beautiful planting and a belief that a garden should become increasingly at home in its surroundings as it matures.
Designed for the Long Term
A newly completed garden is only the beginning.
Trees establish. Hedges develop their architecture. Planting spreads and begins to weave through the spaces between them. Materials weather and settle into their surroundings. The garden starts to acquire a character that cannot be created instantly.
We design with that future garden in mind.
It means thinking about proportion and succession, how planting will develop, what will provide structure in winter and how the garden will feel not simply next summer, but in five, ten or twenty years.
The ambition is not just to create a beautiful garden.
It is to create a landscape with the structure and character to become more beautiful with time.
Begin Your Garden
If you are considering creating or reimagining a garden in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire or further afield, the first stage is a consultation with Tim.
It is an opportunity to walk through the garden together, talk about the property and how you want to live in it, identify opportunities and constraints, and begin exploring what the landscape could become.
For larger projects, that first conversation can become the beginning of a complete design journey from the earliest ideas through to planting and construction.
Garden Design Expertise in Cambridge
Tim Jennings is an RHS award winning garden designer and member of the Society of Garden Designers, working across Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, East Anglia, Hertfordshire and London.
He offers both garden design and design and build services and also private consultations.
A recent design project can be see here: Contemporary Riverside Garden, Cambridge.
CONTACT DETAILS
T: 07931 278692
E: tim@timjenningsdesign.co.uk
The Coach House,
Fen Road, Lode,
Cambridge, CB25 9HD
