Here is a really easy way to make a green roof: keep your old branches, arrange them on a frame and place turfs on top. This idea works particularly well if you have a coppice tree in your garden – which is both a traditional and a beautiful idea, as Monet and Van Gogh showed in their paintings.

Here is a good, cheap and sustainable way to make a feature and a divider for gardens: keep your old logs and place them, artistically, in a line. They are great for conservation – the wild life advisory bodies are always telling us to let old timber rot. The dead wood creates ideal living space for insects – and birds love eating insects.

Many gardeners are talking about recycling and sustainability. Not so many are doing anything about it. So were were very pleased to see this shed made out of plastic bottles. Think of all the advantages (1) sustainability (2) insulation (3) permeable to rain (4) gentle ventilation (5) super!

Henchman exhibited their range of stable garden ladders and wheelbarrows at the 2010 Chelsea Flower Show. Stability is a quality we very much admire in garden latters. It is easy enought to fall off a ladder when it is on a paved surface. When the prunner and cutter has the ladder on soft grass and the wind is blowing and he or she is performing contortions with cutters…. then it is a very real risk. We also like wheel barrows which have a large capacity and in which the weight is carried on the wheels instead of by your arms and hands. As they say ‘two wheels are better than one wheel’.
CrinkleCrankle.com can supply many garden products which are not currently listed in our garden product catalogue section.

Tom Stogdon is a London-based sculptor with a special interest in garden design. His initial training and work was in stone carving and letter cutting. This led him to a broader interest in stone, in the way it is washed by water and in the ways in which water-washed stones can be utilized in garden sculpture.
CrinkleCrankle.com can supply many garden products which are not currently listed in our garden product catalogue section.

H Crowther manufacture a wide selection of hand-made lead ornaments. The firm was founded in 1908 and is now in third-generation family ownership. Lead garden ornaments are extremely durable and the older they get the better the patina they develop.

CrinkleCrankle.com can supply many garden products which are not currently listed in our garden product catalogue section

Back by popular demand, we have restocked our Victorian Cast Iron Bootscrapers. These things are 11kg, just the kind of weight you need to save the scraper moving around while cleaning your shoes. The design is taken from an original antique.

Buy a Victorian Cast Iron Bootscraper »

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There are lots of short cuts in the design and construction of green roofs but if you want a 100% professional approach to making a roof which is more water-proof and better-insulated than a normal roof, then you can do a lot worse than use the methods shown on this interview with the manager of the green roof on the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas. For good measure, the planting is of native plants. This shows how to make a real habitat and this is much better for wildlife than a nutrient-free sedum roof established on lightweight aggregate.

This blog and this website are about high quality designer products for gardens. In the long term, high quality provides the best value because it gives the most use and the most pleasure. We are therefore attracted to thrifty garden design, with ‘thrifty’ meaning ‘a reluctance to spend money unnecessarily’. If we have to spend money, we do it. But if we can do things in a thrifty way –  we like it. Thrifty garden design is related to 

• recycle garden design
• green garden design 
• sustainable garden design

But it is not the same as any of them and it has a very distinghished pedigree. Composting is an ancient garden practice and was done for thrifty reasons. Using local materials was often for thrifty reasons. So was using local plants. Though happy to do what what we can to recycle materials, support a green agenda and save  the planet, we are even happier to work as our gardening predecessors have always worked: thriftily, conscientiously and with restrained good taste. So look at the below  photograph. It shows a thrifty use of garden ‘waste’ to make a beautiful pavilion. We like it. The above image is of a garden firebowl, by Ungers, which recycles garden wood.

Crinklecrankle Fibreglass Planters  are elegant, durable, good for water conservation and a thrifty choice in terms of value for money.

Please let us know of any other beautiful and useful items – we would  be pleased to sell them!

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (1895-1983 was one of the earliest and greatest green activists and designers. He is best known for the Geodesic Dome. This is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure. It is based on a network of great circles (geodesics) lying on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that have local triangular rigidity and also distribute the stress across the entire structure. As a garden designer, there is no better way to demonstrate one’s green credentials than to have a geodesic greenhouse in your garden.