The 2010 Great Garden Trail

I was in London yesterday at the garden I designed in Bow http://www.amandapatton.co.uk/portfolio/bow/ which was open to the public under the Great London Garden Trail.  This was rather an unusual garden opening, in that the Trail featured just 10 gardens, each of which had been professionally designed by a Registered Member of the Society of Garden Designers.  As well as mine at Bow, the Trail included gardens by both John Brookes OBE (a founder member of the Society) and Andy Sturgeon, winner of many gold medals at Chelsea (I’ve lost count, though I’m sure he hasn’t!).

My garden in Bow was very much the smallest of all the gardens in the Trail (at one stage we had people queuing outside the front door, waiting for there to be room to enter!) and we had a lot of comments about how useful people found it in giving them ideas for their own similarly sized plots.

I’m going to include a before shot here, as this shows just how tiny the garden actually is (though you should have seen it before the wall went in – tiny and oppressive!).  You could probably cover the distance from the top of the steps to the back boundary in just two strides – the chairs you can see are piled up against the boundary.

I used a few very simple tricks to make it appear larger than it is.  Firstly, I ‘lost’ the back boundary in a haze of green, allowing you to think it goes back further than it does.  There wasn’t space for a hedge, so I used a product called Mobilane Green Screen  www.mobilane.eu/  This consists of wire mesh panels, 6′ high by 4′ wide, each containing 60 ivy plants in a biodegradable trough.  An immediate inpenetrable green boundary and less than an inch thick – very useful in a small space. 

The garden is south-facing so the light is gorgeous – we were very lucky yesterday that apart from two brief showers it was sunny all day.  It doesn’t photograph well when it’s so bright so you’ll just have to take my word for it that the light through the Anemanthele lessoniana (previously known as Stipa arundinacea) and Nandina domestica (heavenly bamboo, though it’s not a bamboo) was indeed heavenly.

As well as these light-catching plants, the central space is filled with large plants including bamboos (real ones this time) and a Trachycarpus fortunei, allowing you to see that there’s something beyond and enticing you to go and see what it is (and another trick to increase the sense of space).  It’s always sensible to ‘reward’ the effort of walking any path, however short its distance, and so there’s a larger deck circle here with a seat.  Visitors asked my clients if their children hid there but no – “the other way round – we hide from the kids!”

see http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/static/html/features/gardentrail2010/index.html