After the warmest April day in nearly 70 years there’s more sunshine today – that was the message delivered by the BBC Breakfast weather forecast this morning from the beautiful surroundings of Capel Manor College, home of the Secured by Design (SBD) garden.
Capel Manor College’s School of Garden Design and Plantsmanship in Enfield features 30 beautiful acres of themed gardens, including the SBD garden, which aims to showcase the principles of designing out crime and features a mock ‘eco home’ facade, incorporating today’s themes in housebuilding to give the garden context.
In addition, the SBD garden features a wildlife pond to encourage biodiversity, a green roof on the shed, a compost area and points for electric car charging, with a dense surround of thorny hedging that has been planted to make access difficult for intruders.
Two students from Capel Manor College have recently won the opportunity to design and build a ‘crime prevention’ garden for display at this year’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, in a competition sponsored by SBD.
It will be the first time that a garden, which will incorporate proven techniques to deter opportunistic burglars, will have featured at this prestigious annual show, which runs from 2-8 July.
Students Lucy Glover and Jacqueline Poll were declared joint winners and will now work together on their garden for the show. The elements they included to make the garden safe, secure and sustainable included:
- fencing topped with trellis to provide a high boundary
- prickly plants, such as pyracantha or climbing roses, to protect windows, fencing and drainpipes
- fixed concrete benches topped with wood panels so they couldn’t be repositioned to access windows
- dawn-to-dusk low voltage lighting
- solar globe lights in sandstone finish to provide low level illumination at night as well as sculptural interest to borders
- and a pergola with a roof made of round poles with lose fitting wrap-around metal tubes to discourage climbing.
Other measures included gravel paths to hear the crunch of approaching footsteps and a secure shed, topped with a green planting roof, with items inside like bicycles and gardening tools marked with DNA forensic marking liquids to identify them if stolen.