Mediterranean backyard design
The planting wants sharp drainage and full sun. A backyard is usually the flattest, most compacted, lowest-lying ground on the plot, with the house throwing a shadow across part of it until noon. That mismatch is the whole page.
Lift the beds 300 millimetres and this planting works in a backyard; leave it at grade in compacted clay and the lavender is dead in its second winter. AI Landscape Design renders raised terraces, gravel and terracotta onto your own yard, which settles the look but never the levels.
We make this app and say so here because the page is mostly about a problem software cannot see. No render measures a fall, tests a soil, or finds the pan a digger left behind.
Why the back of a plot is the wet part
The ground behind a house is usually the worst on the property, and the reasons come from the build rather than the geology.
Machinery reaches a site from the front but turns and stands at the back, so the subsoil there is compacted into a pan that water sits on top of. Topsoil gets stripped, stockpiled and returned thin, often with mortar and brick rubble through it. The finished floor level sits above the surrounding ground and the site is graded to fall away from the house, which sends whatever lands on the roof, the drive and the patio toward the rear boundary — where a solid fence and compacted ground stop it going anywhere.
Test it rather than assume. Dig a 300 millimetre hole, fill it with water, let it drain and fill again. If the second fill has not gone in four hours, nothing on this plant list survives there.
Lift the root zone above the wet
Everything else follows from getting the crowns clear of standing water.
A bed raised 300 millimetres behind a low dry-stone or block wall does it. The mix inside should be gritty rather than rich — roughly a third sharp grit or 6 millimetre gravel worked through the existing soil, no compost, no manure. Finish with 50 millimetres of gravel so the base of every lavender and santolina stays dry after rain, since that is where rot starts.
One mistake undoes the rest. A raised bed built straight onto an unbroken pan is a planter with no outlet, and water rises into it from below. Break the base up with a fork before filling, and give the lowest corner somewhere to drain to.
The house is standing where the sun should be
The second constraint is light, and it is specific to this space.
Lavender, cistus, rosemary and santolina want six hours or more of direct sun. Below that they stretch, flower thinly and become far more prone to the rot the drainage work was meant to prevent. A house is two storeys of solid shadow, and depending on which way the plot faces it can hold a band four to eight metres deep in shade for most of a winter day — exactly where the patio and the pots usually go.
Track it before designing. Stand in the yard at ten, at one and at four on a clear day and mark the line. The silver planting belongs beyond it, at the far end. The strip against the house is for paving, a table and shade-tolerant pots, which is closer to how these gardens are used anyway.
What a picture settles, and what it does not
The look is genuinely hard to imagine: gravel over most of the ground, silver foliage against a timber fence rather than a lime-washed wall, terracotta at the scale a small yard can carry.
AI Landscape Design from Skyble Lab renders it onto a photo of your own yard, keeping the fence, the house wall and the existing levels, which is the only honest way to judge grey-green planting against your brick. Shoot from the back door, then from the far corner, in flat light.
What it does not do is any of the work described above. It draws a raised bed as a design feature rather than as a drainage remedy, cannot see a puddle, and knows nothing about your soil. Run the percolation test first, read the full style, then download AI Landscape Design.
Frequently asked questions
Will lavender grow in a backyard with clay soil?
Not planted at grade. Lavender dies from winter wet at the crown rather than from cold, and compacted clay behind a house holds water for days. Raise the bed about 300 millimetres, work a third grit through the soil, mulch with gravel and break up the pan underneath so the bed can drain. In that arrangement it is reliable.
How high should a raised bed be for Mediterranean plants?
Around 300 millimetres of free-draining material above the existing ground is enough for lavender, rosemary, santolina and cistus, whose roots are shallow. Deeper helps on heavy clay. What matters more than the height is that the base is broken up and the lowest corner has an outlet — otherwise the bed fills like a tank.
Do Mediterranean plants need full sun?
Effectively yes — six hours or more of direct sun. In part shade the same shrubs grow leggy, flower sparsely and hold moisture in the crown, which brings on the rot that killed them in wet soil. In a backyard the house often takes the morning, so put this planting at the far end and use the shaded strip for paving and pots.
Try it on your own yard
18 landscape styles, about 10 seconds per design, 3 free at full resolution. Your house, fence and driveway stay where they are.
