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At Scampston, Piet Oudolf was working with space, history and a landscape already carrying a sense of significance. The Walled Garden sits within a much larger estate, yet behind its walls there was the opportunity to make something strikingly contemporary: a garden of rooms and contrasts, of clipped structure and loose perennial planting, of great drifts of grasses and repeated plants that accumulate their effect through scale.

It is a destination garden in every sense. We arrive expecting to look.

The question I have kept returning to during my time at Scampston is what happens when we take those ideas somewhere altogether more ordinary.

What survives when the garden is not several acres in North Yorkshire but the rectangle behind a new-build house? When the view beyond the boundary is not parkland but another fence? When the gardener cannot plant hundreds of the same perennial, employ a gardening team or wait patiently for an ambitious composition to mature?

This interests me because the gardens most of us make are constrained places. They are measured in metres rather than acres. They contain washing lines and wheelie bins, sheds and children’s toys. They are overlooked. Their soil may be poor. Their budgets certainly have limits.

Yet I have increasingly come to believe that constraint does not diminish good garden design. Sometimes it clarifies it.

The mistake is to attempt to reproduce the appearance of a great garden rather than understand the thinking behind it.

Scale changes; principles travel

Nobody needs a miniature Scampston.

Trying to squeeze the ingredients of a destination garden into a small domestic plot usually produces something closer to pastiche. A drift that feels generous across twenty metres can become a clump when reduced to twenty centimetres. A sequence of garden rooms that creates discovery across acres can make a six-metre garden feel unnecessarily divided. Too many ideas compete for too little ground.

But principles are different from ingredients.

Repetition works at almost any scale.

So does contrast. So does structure. So does allowing plants to change through the seasons rather than demanding permanent perfection from them.

One of the most powerful characteristics of the Walled Garden is the confidence with which ideas are repeated. Oudolf does not appear anxious that we might become bored by seeing the same plant again. Instead, repetition gives the planting rhythm.

This is particularly useful in a new-build garden.

When I began making my own, I did what many new gardeners do. I wanted one of everything. Nurseries offered an apparently limitless catalogue of possibility and I treated the garden accordingly. One interesting perennial followed another, each chosen because I liked it individually.

The result was variety without coherence.

What gardens such as Scampston teach us is that restraint can produce greater richness than endless choice. Five plants repeated through a border may create more impact than fifteen unrelated ones. One grass returning at intervals can pull an entire planting scheme together.

In a small garden, repetition becomes more important, not less.

Designing with the boundary

Scale is only one constraint.

The new-build garden also arrives with unusually emphatic boundaries. Close-boarded fences frequently surround the plot on three sides, establishing the geometry of the space before a gardener has planted anything.

Our instinct is often to hide them.

We line the perimeter with narrow borders, plant climbers against every panel and hope eventually to make the fences disappear. But visiting Scampston repeatedly has made me think differently about boundaries.

Walls are fundamental to its character. They are not disguised. They provide enclosure, shelter, contrast and the conditions in which the garden can exist.

A timber fence is obviously not an eighteenth-century brick wall, but perhaps we should stop apologising for it.

A boundary can become part of the composition. Climbers can interrupt it rather than smother every centimetre. A tree placed in front of it can create depth. Darker foliage can blur sections while other areas remain visible. Repetition along a fence can transform something utilitarian into a rhythm.

The important shift is from concealment to use.

That applies to other constraints too.

An overlooked garden creates the opportunity to think about canopy and vertical planting. Poor soil forces us to understand what we are gardening with rather than what we wish we had. Limited space makes every plant justify its position.

Constraint can be irritating, but it can also be generative.

The garden after the flowers

Autumn exposes all of this.

Visit many gardens in June and almost any planting can persuade you for a moment. There are flowers everywhere. Foliage is fresh. Gaps have disappeared beneath growth.

By October, the disguises have gone.

At Scampston, this is when the underlying intelligence of the planting becomes particularly visible.

The grasses bleach towards straw and gold. Perennials that once announced themselves through flower are reduced to stems and seedheads. Some plants collapse while others seem almost to strengthen as the season advances.

The garden becomes less colourful but more graphic.

It is tempting to describe this simply as decay, although that word suggests an ending. What is happening is more complicated. The garden is moving material from one state to another.

A seedhead is both the remains of a flower and the beginning of something else. A fallen leaf is no longer functioning as part of a tree, but it has started another job at ground level. Stems that appear dead may contain overwintering insects. Plant material begins returning its nutrients to the soil.

A garden is never static enough for the categories we impose upon it.

This is particularly important when thinking about resilience.

We often discuss resilient gardens through lists of supposedly resilient plants. There is value in that, particularly as our climate changes, but resilience is also about how we manage gardens.

A garden in which every fallen leaf is removed, every perennial cut to the ground and every patch of exposed soil cleared may satisfy our desire for order, but it interrupts many of the processes through which a garden sustains itself.

At Scampston, autumn reminds us that senescence can be beautiful. More importantly, it can be useful.

The domestic version

What does any of this mean when we return home?

Not, I think, that everyone should fill their garden with ornamental grasses.

The more interesting translation is to think about duration.

In a small garden, every square metre matters. That makes plants with several seasons of interest disproportionately valuable.

A perennial that emerges attractively in spring, flowers in summer and holds a strong seedhead into winter earns its ground several times over. A small tree that provides blossom, canopy, autumn colour and winter structure is doing far more than something selected for a single moment.

This changes the way we buy plants.

Rather than asking what something looks like today on a garden-centre bench, we might ask what it will look like in October. What happens to the flower when it fades? Does the foliage colour? Does the plant collapse immediately or remain standing? What happens when frost reaches it?

The same principle applies to the whole garden.

Good domestic design should not depend upon a single peak moment.

Our gardens are not flower shows. We live beside them in February as well as June.

That distinction between the destination garden and the everyday garden matters.

A destination garden can be experienced episodically. We visit, walk through it and leave. Our own gardens become part of the background of our lives. We see them while making breakfast. We cross them carrying bins. We notice them through the window when it rains.

Their success cannot therefore be measured only by spectacle.

They need intimacy, usefulness and familiarity.

Possibility within limits

There is an understandable tendency to think of small gardens in terms of compromise.

We cannot have the avenue, so we plant one tree. We cannot create the great herbaceous drift, so we make a narrow border. We cannot have the view, the meadow or the lake.

Everything becomes a reduced version of something grander.

I think that is the wrong way to understand them.

A small garden offers experiences that large landscapes sometimes struggle to provide. Plants can be encountered at arm's length. A tree can dominate the atmosphere of the entire space. The scent of one rose can fill the garden. A pond no larger than a washing-up bowl can bring dragonflies close enough to watch from a chair.

Scale reduces quantity, but it can increase intensity.

My own garden has taught me this repeatedly.

The wildlife pond is tiny compared with any natural body of water, yet it has changed the ecology of the plot. A single climbing rose can transform the experience of walking beneath an arch. One tree changes the light falling across several metres of garden.

These are not consolation prizes for people without acres.

They are qualities particular to small spaces.

Perhaps this is ultimately what a place such as Scampston can teach us.

Great gardens should not make ordinary gardeners feel inadequate. Their value is not in providing a shopping list of plants or a composition to reproduce at one-tenth of the size.

They give us ideas to test.

We can take Oudolf's repetition and use it across six metres. We can take the relationship between looseness and structure and explore it with a clipped evergreen beside a handful of perennials. We can borrow the acceptance of decay and leave a few more stems standing through winter.

The expression changes because the place has changed.

It has to.

The garden behind a new-build house should never become Scampston in miniature. It carries different demands, different constraints and a different relationship with the people who use it.

But the distance between the two is not as great as their difference in scale might suggest.

Both ask the same fundamental questions.

Where should the eye travel? What should repeat? Where do we need enclosure? How much control should we impose upon plants? What will remain when summer has gone? How can the garden become richer with time rather than simply larger?

Those questions belong equally to an internationally significant garden and a patch of ground behind a newly built house.

This autumn, walking through Scampston, I have found myself paying less attention to individual plants and more to those relationships. Flower has given way to structure. Some things are collapsing; others are only now becoming visible. The garden is moving towards winter without losing its identity.

And perhaps that is the most transferable lesson of all.

Good garden design is not really about size. Nor is it about possessing the right plants, the right soil or the right view.

It is about relationships: between repetition and variation, structure and freedom, growth and decay, the garden we imagine and the ground we actually have.

A destination garden can show us those relationships at their grandest.

The real test is what we do with them when we get home.