Get your garden summer-ready

The garden is set to be the number one entertaining space at home this summer with research by Grant’s Whisky showing a 115% increase in the amount of social gatherings that homeowners are planning to hold in their gardens this year – and with the hottest summer of the decade predicted, it’s worth ensuring that your garden is somewhere your friends would want to relax. Better still, it needn’t cost a fortune.

As the Spring Bank Holiday approaches, almost half of us Brits are planning to entertain outside or be entertained that weekend. For many of us, this could be the first time this year that we’ve used our outdoor space to socialise.

TV presenter and award-winning gardener Chris Beardshaw who has created blueprints for the perfect ‘Credit Crunch Garden’, has the following tips for preparing your garden for entertaining:

- Position a dining or entertaining space close to the kitchen. It has been reported that the closer the entertaining space is to the house the more likely we are to step outside into our gardens and really make use of what space we have, be that for quick drink in the open air or a long and lazy lunch.

- Decorate your table, as you would your indoor table. Vases of cut flowers from the garden or pots of plants grouped on the table make the space more inviting and if you use scented plants such as herbs or fragrant flowers they can help keep midges away as well as scenting the air with sweet fragrance.

- Use candles in jars or glass containers to create ambience and soft lighting along pathways, steps, tables and walls. They look beautiful viewed from indoors and the gentle light is relaxing for you and your guests.

- Don't be afraid to personalise your space with homemade artworks, collections of special mementoes collected on visits to beaches, woodlands and parks, and even cushions and rugs - these all help to define the space as yours and make it feel like an outdoor room.

- Use the full spectrum of plants and utilising every spare inch of space for plants as they are the most inviting reason to spend time in the garden. They are so versatile, you can get trees for every size garden, hedges can be planted as small plants and over time they can create pockets of shelter and privacy, climbers hardly need any space and are happy winding through trees, shrubs, up and over walls and fences and even along the ground.

Ian Murray, Grant’s Whisky connoisseur comments, “It seems a shame so many of us are putting celebrations on hold because of the credit crunch. Just because you can’t afford an extravagant shindig this year doesn’t mean you can’t have a great time in your own garden at a fraction of the cost. We need to learn to experience our gardens from a different angle and let them become the focal point for ‘at home’ entertaining in 09”.

For more information visit Grantswhisky.com/gardenafterhours.