Last summer we had the pleasure of working on a beautiful hotel on the seafront in the picturesque town of Deal. Â The Royal Hotel is an early 18th Century Georgian hotel with gardens looking out over the fantastic views of the sea.

Deal is a town rich in history and the hotel is close to Deal Pier, Deal Castle, Walmer Castle, Dover Castle and Richborough Roman Fort and Ampitheatre!

For the design of the gardens, we choose a simple scheme with randomly sized Indian Sandstone paving, retaining walls and steps built from sleepers and stone-filled gabion baskets. Planting  included mostly drought-tolerant species. For example, some tough grasses, such as Festuca glauca, which was planted along the ramp and retaining walls, Buxus balls in the green oak planters and some summer-flowering, self-seeding Verbena bonariensis for small splashes of purple throughout the mainly green foliages.

The retaining walls made from gabion baskets are filled with locally sourced pebbles and shingle… a few were so local they were from the hotel beach!

The gardens of the hotel are for use by the customers of the hotel bar – ‘The Boathouse Bar and Terrace’. The tables are made bespoke by the team at Millhouse Landscapes, who created them from green oak and saved table-tops. They also hand-made the planters used throughout the scheme, also from green oak.

This was the view from the gardens during the snowy spell last week (January 2013)…

For more images of the pub gardens, as well as lots of our other garden design projects, check out our Millhouse Landscapes Facebook gallery page on https://en-gb.facebook.com/MillhouseLandscapes/photos_albums

For more information about The Royal Hotel and The Boathouse Bar and Terrace, check out their website on www.theroyalhotel.com