HOW do you create a garden where you can enjoy adult time without tripping over sandpits, swings and paddling pools, while protecting beautiful borders from the dreaded football?

Award-winning garden designer and mother-of-two Bunny Guinness knows only too well that children need to play, but can wreak havoc among borders. "We seem to veer between extremes," she observes.

"Either the whole garden becomes merely an area to contain plastic climbing frames and the like, or any hint of family fun is banished, sacrificed to the cause of a garden that is purely for admiring."

But she insists it is possible to create a garden for both adults and children, if you follow some basic design principles. "If you can honeypot an area and give them their space so they have privacy from you and you from them, that always helps. Then, if they make a mess then so be it.

"Their area may have a lot of tough planting, maybe ivy as ground cover so they can play among it, big bamboos or shrubby willows that you can coppice down. Don't spend a fortune on fulfilling the needs of one age because they will get bored with it quite quickly."

Take children to other gardens to see what they like and see if you can adapt their ideas to their own space. Trampolines are popular, but if you don't want it to be a predominant feature, sink it into the ground. You'll need a mini-digger to dig out the earth - and could then use that to create a mound around the trampoline hole and plant hedging around it.

"In specifications, I've always allowed for a sump for drainage, but I've never had to put one in," says Guinness, a regular on BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time and author of the best-selling Family Gardens. "A sunken trampoline is not just visual, it's also safer because the children don't have as far to fall."

Sandpits are easy to make by digging a hole, laying a permeable lining that allows water to drain (provided you have free-draining soil), and filling it with playpit sand. It will be bigger and better than any portable sandpit and you can cover it with camouflage nets from army surplus stores when not in use. Put a drainable paddling pool next to the sand so the children can play with sand and water together.

For keeping an adult area, there will need to be rules in place, she says. "There needs to be no-go zones. In my front courtyard where I have box-edged beds, the children knew if the ball went into the beds that was it, it stayed there.

"If you have certain ground rules they will understand the reason why. A friend of mine lets her children play football only in the winter, because she has a lot of herbaceous plants that are below ground then. Balls can cause a problem, but if you have room for a piece of grass to accommodate, say, French cricket, that's great.

"You just need to design the layout so you haven't got your delphiniums on top of your French cricket. If you haven't got room then take the ball to the park."

When planning a family-friendly garden, remember that children are going to have different needs from one year to the next. "Keep the garden dynamic," she advises.

"Don't think that once you've designed it, that's it. They will move on and will probably be wanting something new each year."

Family Gardens, by Bunny Guinness, is published by David & Charles, £12.99.

Jobs this week

❃ Sow winter cabbage, sprouting broccoli and leek in a seedbed.

❃ Lift, divide and replant chives and sorrel.

❃ Replace rockery plants.

❃ Rake the lawn.