A friend has moved into a house with a tiny back garden. "Any ideas?" he asked me. "Well, what do you want from your garden?" I inquired. He replied that he wanted a good show of plants all year round, a pond, a barbecue area, some seating, a clothes line, a mini-greenhouse, a garden shed, a lawn and somewhere to grow a few veggies. He also wanted to make the garden look larger than it is, he didn't want to block any light coming into it (although he wished for privacy), and he wanted it to look especially nice from his living room.
As an afterthought, he wanted his improvements to add to the value of the house, and he wanted his garden to be different from the others in the estate. I told him to contact a garden designer. He needed professional help to wean him away from his unfeasible dream. I didn't have the skill, or heart, to tell him he couldn't have everything - although his garden, embellished with such a clatter of features, would certainly have stood out from all the other 18-by-25-foot plots on the estate.
It's a shame that owners of tiny gardens can't have it all, but that is the harsh truth. Having a small patch demands that you make hard choices: reconciling fantasies with workable reality is not easy.
Focus your attention on your raw material - and away from those impracticable reveries - by measuring up and sketching the existing garden on a sheet of paper. Look critically to see if there is anything interesting or appealing that you might keep, or could exploit. A warm brick wall? A well-placed apple tree? It doesn't even need to be in your garden. You can "borrow" a tree in a neighbouring garden, or (if you're lucky) the spire of a church, or a glimpse of distant mountains or sea.
But perhaps you've got a regulation-issue new garden with absolutely nothing fancy to work with: just grey-block walls, brown fence-panels, five potentially-curious sets of neighbours - and manhole covers in all the wrong places.
In this case, the garden needs to be so captivating that the viewer's senses stray no further than its intriguing interior. Distract the eye with strategically-placed sculpture, with groupings of impressive plants or with an inviting arbour. Capture the nose with fragrance the minute it exits the back door. Mesmerise the ears with the gentle sound of water or the swish of bamboos. Put in furry plants to feel and edible ones (if only herbs) to browse on.
Before planting a single thing, however, you need to assess your little domain's growing conditions. What direction does it face? Where do the sun and shade fall? Is it exposed to wind? Is the soil acid, limey or neutral? Is the soil dry or damp? Heavy or light? Or is it that builder's speciality: a skim of nice topsoil on top of a load of old rubble? Whatever its condition, your garden will certainly benefit if you thoroughly dig it over, and incorporate some good old-fashioned manure into the bottom layer (try an hour's double-digging and you'll be relieved to have a tiny territory).
Find out what plants suit your conditions, and don't stray from these. Nothing looks worse than a sickly plant with nowhere to hide. If your garden is hot and sunny, grow Mediterranean-type plants: herbs (especially lavender), grey-leaved plants (such as lambs-ears and towering verbascum), fleshy plants (sedum, stonecrop, agave) and heat-tolerant shrubs such as helianthemum, cistus and the honey-scented Euphorbia mellifera. Paper the walls with passion flower, white-flowered potato vine (Solanum jasminoides `Album') or Chilean glory flower (Eccremocarpus scaber). Cast dappled shade with a pealeaved robinia or strike a strong note with the huge-leaved foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa).
If yours is a shady spot, then clothe it with elegant hosta, hardy geranium, starry-flowered periwinkle, leathery bergenia, feathery ferns. Plant the dark-green Persian ivy (Hedera colchica `Dentata') or the Irish ivy (Hedera hibernica) to creep up the walls and across the soil. Grow architectural shrubs like Fatsia japonica and Aralia elata: both have remarkable leaves. Brighten the gloom with white flowers: snowdrops in spring, busy lizzy in summer and Japanese anemone `Honorine Jobert' later on.
Whatever your garden's environment, keep your palette of colours - both of flower and foliage - restrained: don't range across the rainbow in search of cheerfulness. You will only end up feeling giddy and unsettled. By all means, go for brazen, hot colours, but temper them with lots of calming green. And don't forget that while your ground-space may be restrained, you can always go up - with trellis, obelisk (of metal or timber), upright conifer, bamboo, or topiarised evergreens.
Most of all, the petite garden must be kept scrupulously tidy, with its plants in the pink of health. Every single plant, structure and feature must be carefully considered and earn its keep. A useful guiding principle can be found in this adaptation of the words of Henry David Thoreau (where I've impertinently substituted "garden" for "life"): "Our garden is frittered away by detail . . . Simplify, simplify."
Further reading: Really Small Gardens by Jill Billington (paperback, £12.99 in U.K.), published by Quadrille in association with the Royal Horticultural Society.
Great Little Gardens by Anthony Noel (hardback, £20 in U.K.), published by Frances Lincoln.
Small Gardens by John Moreland (paperback, £4.99 in U.K.), a Royal Horticultural Society Practical Guide, published by Dorling Kindersley.