Garden design and planting
Gardens made to be looked at in ten years, not on the day they are finished
Two of us, a short list of nurseries and a habit of coming back. We plant small, we plant in the right month, and we return for the first three seasons to see what took.
What we do
Design, planting, and the three seasons afterwards
Private gardens, roof terraces and small pieces of public planting. We draw the garden and we plant it ourselves, which is the only way to know whether the drawing was any good.
01
We start with the soil
A spade, a jar of water and a pH test before a single line is drawn. Half of what fails in a garden was decided in the first twenty centimetres.
02
We plant small
Nine-centimetre pots and bare-root whips wherever the plant allows it. A young tree overtakes a semi-mature one in six years and costs a fifth as much.
03
Four nurseries, no more
We buy from four growers we have visited in winter. We know what their stock has been through, and they tell us honestly when something is not ready.
04
We come back
Included in every garden: six visits across the first three seasons, to prune, replace failures at our cost and teach whoever will be looking after it.
A taste of the gardens
Three that have had time to settle
Each of these was photographed the week it was planted and again this year.
The Long Terrace
A south-facing slope of clay and rubble. Planted as three hundred small hornbeam whips and a grass path; now a green corridor you walk into and cannot see out of.
Font Vella Square
Forty square metres of gravel in front of a fountain, planted with things that survive being sat on, kicked and forgotten in August.
The Roof at Carrer Ample
Eighteen centimetres of substrate and a wind that never stops. Five species, chosen for the wind rather than for the client.
The practice
Small, slow, and still here
Vall & Verd is Núria Vall and Andreu Verd. We take on a small number of gardens a year because each one keeps us for three seasons after it is planted, and we would rather that promise stayed true than grow.
Núria Vall and Andreu Verd
- 12years planting together
- 8gardens a year, at most
- 3seasons of return visits, in every quote
- 4nurseries we buy from
One way to begin: walk the ground with us
An hour on the site, in any weather, at no charge. We look at the soil, the wind and what already grows there, and tell you plainly whether we are the right practice for it.