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An ultra-simple design puts the plants at centre stage in Nicola Lesbirel’s narrow London garden, writes James Alexander-Sinclair. Photographs Rachel Warne.
The time has come for a sweeping statement: every good garden is based on the premise that simplicity is the best policy.
No folderols and no superfluous flourishes. If they indulge themselves at all, this will be in the plants rather than the infrastructure. Garden designer Nicola lesbirel puts it more succinctly: “Strong bones, well constructed; but the flair should be in the planting.”
She’s right, of course, and proceeds to put her money where her mouth is in her own small London garden.
This narrow plot is divided into three sections leading away from a slickly modern, glass-doored extension. Next to the house is a terrace of cleanly cut York stone. Chunky steps lead up to a timber boardwalk that streaks, straight as an arrow, up the centre of the garden. It stops at a decked island enclosed by hornbeam hedges and multi-stemmed Amelanchier lamarckii.
Finally there’s a shed and working area. There is really not much else to say: the structure is really that basic and perfectly uncomplicated. It’s a Spartan layout, but it has soul – thanks to the planting.
“I like my gardens to be relaxed; for the plants to slouch across the path and for there to be no rigid pattern to anything,” says Nicola. Neither are there any prissy rules about colour – hence the unabashed trumpeting of Hemerocallis ‘Stafford’, yellow Coreopsis verticillata ‘Moonbeam’ and magenta Geranium Patricia (=‘Brempat’).
“I’m not that keen on soft pastels and I’m a bit wary of white but I think all colours go well together, as long as there’s enough of each.” The closest this garden gets to framework in its planting are the three box shapes that sit on either side of the path – Nicola’s ‘shaggy hippos’.
When Nicola moved here it was a conventional garden shadowed by a large birch tree. The lawn did not last long but the tree was a great favourite, giving shelter to the centre of the garden and shade for a prized collection of shuttlecock ferns (Matteuccia struthiopteris) and other woodland plants. However, a couple of years ago the tree fell victim to honey fungus. Besides, Nicola decided that the time had come to extend the house, poaching about three and a half metres of garden.
Nicola is a gardener who is not easily fazed, and regards such disruptions as an entertaining challenge rather than an inconvenience. “I tend to change around half of all my plants every year anyway,” she says. All these culled plants are then redistributed to fortunate friends and relations; “I spend most of my weekends humping bags of plants across London.”
Obviously, though, certain things are sacrosanct: she says she always has some Nicotiana alata, whose sweet scent wafts across the garden, “and I couldn’t live without hellebores, snowdrops and penstemons. But everything else is up for grabs.”
Editing is obviously the secret to happiness in any small garden: that and efficiency. The borders are irrigated from the water butt and everything is well mulched every year – “which is probably the job I hate most, but from which I gain the most satisfaction.”
Nicola has a sensible system of reward: successful mulching earns her a congratulatory facial. Surviving the disruption of building work equals a new border by the shed – albeit one mostly made of leftovers.
She also has a remarkably keen sense of scent: very important in a small garden. She kept an inherited Rosa Blue Moon (=‘Tannacht’; hideous in colour but divinely scented) so that she could have the flowers in a vase by herb bed. The tulip ‘Ballerina’, which occupies pots on the terrace, smells of “orange boiled sweets” and the spreading carpet of sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) of “creamed coconut”. In the fearless pursuit of journalistic integrity, I lay by the flower bed and sniffed – and she is absolutely right.
There are many, many gardens in London: to do them justice you need a designer with taste, with vision, with sensitivity and with a sense of occasion.
I would trust mine to Nicola without a second’s hesitation.
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