The Case for Sense of Place in British Garden Design

There is a quality shared by the gardens that endure — that accumulate meaning and attachment over time, that visitors return to across seasons and decades, that communities rally to protect when they are threatened. It is not simply beauty, though beautiful gardens may possess it. It is not rarity of planting, or historical significance, or design pedigree, though any of these may contribute. It is something harder to name and harder to manufacture, but immediately recognisable when encountered.

Landscape architects call it Genius loci — the spirit of place. Garden designers speak of sense of place. Gardeners who have worked in great gardens for long enough simply call it character. Whatever the terminology, it describes the same quality: the sense that a garden belongs precisely where it is, that it could not exist in quite this form anywhere else, and that experiencing it connects you to something larger than the immediate moment — to the landscape, the climate, the history, and the human intentions that shaped it.

This quality is under pressure. Not dramatically, not all at once, but through the accumulation of small decisions made without sufficient reference to the specific character of specific places. Generic planting schemes applied without regard for local conditions. Structural plants chosen for availability and ease rather than fitness for the landscape they inhabit. The gradual homogenisation of garden character that follows when the same limited palette of reliable, well-marketed species appears in gardens from Cornwall to Caithness regardless of the radically different conditions they will encounter.

Climate change is intensifying this pressure. As familiar plants struggle and managers reach for climate-adapted alternatives, the choices made now will either reinforce the distinctiveness of individual places or dilute it. The moment calls for a more conscious, more demanding engagement with what sense of place actually means — and a clearer argument for why it should sit at the heart of every significant garden decision in Britain.

What sense of place actually means

Sense of place is more precisely described than it is often given credit for. It is not merely the feeling that a garden is attractive or well-managed. It is the complex web of connections and attachments — sensory, emotional, cultural, and ecological — that people develop with the environments they experience over time. It has both objective and subjective dimensions: the physical characteristics of a place that give it its particular qualities, and the meanings and memories that accumulate around those qualities through repeated human encounter.

Research by environmental psychologists and landscape scholars has consistently shown that sense of place is one of the most powerful determinants of the value people derive from gardens and green spaces. Spaces with strong place identity — those that feel authentically rooted in their location and history — generate deeper attachment, more sustained engagement, and stronger community support than those that feel generic or interchangeable. They are also more resilient, in the practical sense that communities are more likely to invest in their preservation and more likely to resist changes that threaten their essential character.

For garden managers and designers, this has direct practical implications. A garden with a strong, clearly understood sense of place is not merely more satisfying to experience — it is more sustainable. It has a deeper reserve of community goodwill to draw on when difficult decisions need to be made, a clearer framework for evaluating proposed changes, and a more compelling story to tell about why it matters and what would be lost if it were allowed to deteriorate or to change without care.

How sense of place is created

Sense of place in gardens is created by the interaction of several layers, each of which deserves conscious attention from anyone involved in designing or managing a significant outdoor space.

The most immediate layer is the physical and ecological character of the site — its topography, its soil, its microclimate, its relationship to the surrounding landscape. A garden on a windswept coastal headland has a fundamentally different character from one in a sheltered valley, and that difference should be expressed in and through the garden rather than corrected or concealed. Working with prevailing conditions rather than against them — choosing plants and structures that respond to the specific qualities of the site rather than imposing a predetermined aesthetic upon it — is the most reliable foundation for genuine place character.

The second layer is the plant palette. Certain plants become so associated with specific landscapes and climates that they carry place meaning independently of their individual aesthetic qualities. The Cordyline australis rising above a garden wall in a Cornish coastal town. The ancient yew hedges of a Wealden country garden. The birch and heather of a Scottish hillside planting. These plants say something about where they are — they locate the garden in a specific regional and ecological context in ways that generic planting cannot. Choosing plants that deepen rather than dilute this place-specific character is one of the most important decisions a garden designer or manager can make.

The third layer is history and cultural memory. Gardens that have accumulated history — that bear the marks of generations of human care, that contain plants of known provenance and documented significance, that are associated with specific individuals or events — have a depth of place meaning that newer gardens must work harder to achieve. Managing that history well, which sometimes means accepting constraints that purely aesthetic or horticultural judgement might not impose, is part of what it means to take sense of place seriously as a design and management principle.

The fourth layer is community relationship. A garden that is genuinely embedded in the life of the community around it — that is visited across generations, that forms part of the shared cultural landscape of a place, that people feel ownership of and responsibility for — has a place identity that extends beyond its physical boundaries. This social dimension of sense of place is the most fragile and the most easily damaged by decisions made without sufficient regard for the attachments and expectations that communities have developed over time.

Sense of place and climate adaptation

The most challenging question that climate change poses for sense of place is this: what happens when the plants that define a garden's character can no longer thrive in the conditions that garden now experiences?

This is not a theoretical question. It is already being confronted by the managers of gardens across Britain, from the great valley gardens of Cornwall — where drought stress is affecting species that have defined these landscapes for generations — to the historic estate gardens of southern England, where the combination of drier summers and more intense winters is putting pressure on plant collections that took centuries to establish.

The wrong answer is to prioritise preservation of existing planting above all else, accepting the gradual decline of plants that are no longer suited to their conditions rather than acknowledging that adaptation is necessary. This approach leads, slowly but inevitably, to the loss of exactly what it was trying to protect — as declining plants are eventually replaced in emergency rather than in a planned and considered way, without the time or the framework to make choices that genuinely serve the garden's character.

The equally wrong answer is to embrace climate adaptation with such enthusiasm that the specific character of individual places is sacrificed to generic notions of resilience or sustainability. A garden replanted entirely with climate-adapted species without regard for the aesthetic and cultural continuity of what existed before is a garden that has lost its sense of place even if it has gained in ecological robustness.

The right answer lies in a more demanding middle path — one that begins by understanding clearly what gives each garden its particular character and meaning, and that uses that understanding as the primary framework for all adaptation decisions. Which plants are so central to the garden's identity that every reasonable effort should be made to maintain them? Which can be transitioned more readily because their role is functional rather than defining? When replacement becomes necessary, what species can carry forward the essential aesthetic and ecological qualities of what is being lost?

These are questions that require deep knowledge of both the garden and the available plant palette. They require the kind of sustained, informed engagement with a specific place over time that is the defining characteristic of good long-term garden management. And they require a genuine commitment to place — a belief that the specific character of specific gardens matters, and that preserving it through a period of significant change is worth the effort that it demands.

The homogenisation risk

One of the less-discussed but genuinely significant risks that climate change poses for British garden culture is the risk of homogenisation — the gradual convergence of garden character as managers across the country reach for the same limited pool of climate-adapted species to replace what is struggling.

The horticultural industry is not well set up to prevent this. Nursery production is dominated by a relatively small number of species that are commercially viable at scale. The plants most widely available as climate-adapted alternatives are precisely the ones most likely to appear in gardens from one end of the country to the other, regardless of whether they are appropriate to the specific conditions and character of the places they are being planted in.

Resisting this homogenisation requires conscious effort. It requires garden managers and designers to think beyond the obvious choices — to engage seriously with the full range of species that might suit both future climate conditions and the specific character of individual places. It requires nurseries and plant suppliers to develop and stock a wider range of provenance-appropriate, climate-adapted species. And it requires a broader cultural commitment to the value of distinctiveness in garden character — a recognition that the diversity of Britain's garden landscapes is itself a kind of heritage worth protecting.

A principle for practice

The practical implications of taking sense of place seriously as a design and management principle are not as complex as they might appear. They reduce, in essence, to a single prior question that should precede all other design and management decisions: what makes this garden feel like itself, and how can every choice I make serve rather than diminish that quality?

This question does not have simple or universal answers. It requires sustained attention to specific places, genuine knowledge of plants and their ecological and aesthetic qualities, and a willingness to resist the pressures — commercial, fashionable, and practical — that push towards generic solutions. But it is the right question, and the discipline of asking it consistently is the foundation of garden design and management that genuinely serves the places it inhabits.

Britain's garden landscape is one of the most varied and distinctive in the world — shaped by a remarkable diversity of climates, soils, histories, and cultural traditions. That diversity is expressed, garden by garden, in the specific character of specific places. Protecting it through a period of significant change is not a conservative impulse. It is a recognition that the particularity of places — their irreducible specificity, the qualities that make them unlike anywhere else — is one of the most important things that gardens have to offer, and one of the most worth defending.

Jodi Dickinson MHort(RHS) is a professional horticulturist and head gardener at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives. His RHS Master of Horticulture dissertation examined climate change adaptation strategies for public gardens in Cornwall. Juniper Gardens provides specialist garden maintenance, garden design and ecological garden care across mid and west Cornwall. View Jodi's full profile here.