Page 204 - home and garden

to make it relaxed. My life is anything but relaxed, and I’m not a
relaxed sort of person, so I like to make my environment as calm
as possible.’ Structure, colour and water are equally important,
and the simple body of water that stretches from one side of
the garden to the other, reflecting the sky and foliage, is another
inny Blom’s garden in south London is device to make the garden feel more expansive. The brick
in its fifth incarnation. When she bought walls plunge right down into the water, so that the pool feels
the house nearly 30 years ago, it was a seamlessly connected to the whole structure, and three lead
standard London garden with a lawn, a path pipes create water jets that Jinny says – with typical humour –
and a few apple trees, plus an Anderson commemorate a history of leaky pipes in the house.
shelter. Now, since a redesign last year, it The strict, geometric layout is reinforced by a backbone of
has
J become a stylish urban retreat with structural planting: great big squares of box – ‘I’ve always loved
sleek new walls, raised beds and not a blade of grass in sight. box in squares, long before Christopher Bradley-Hole did it
When Jinny moved here, she co-owned a delicatessen; the idea at Chelsea,’ she says with a twinkle in her eye – and a bold
of a career in garden design hadn’t even crossed her mind. A peppering of big-leaved, exotic plants that give the garden a
few years later, she trained as a transpersonal psychologist and distinctly contemporary feel.
psychotherapist, concurrently working for a residential charity Three lush tree ferns, deliberately planted to lean drunkenly
caring for men with schizophrenia. Horticultural therapy was rather than stand correct, dominate the bed nearest the house,
very beneficial for them. ‘They would grow brilliant things for while a huge Echium candicans forms a rounded dome next to the
our gardens,’ she remembers. ‘Plants, landscapes, architecture pond. But labelling her planting style as ‘exotic’ would be a mis-
and people have always interested me, but until much later I take, not just because she would hate to be labelled in this way, but
didn’t put two and two together and realise that these were the because weaving in and out of the bold-leafed Tetrapanax papyri-
perfect qualities for garden design.’ fer and spiky-leaved Echium pininana are English cottage-garden
Having always gardened herself, she had also helped friends flowers in shades of plummy pink, dusky orange and deep purple
restore the Menagerie garden in Northamptonshire, and they – Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’, Dianthus carthusianorum, Cirsium
persuaded her to redirect her career and try her hand at garden rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’ and silky black Iris ‘Dusky Challenger’.
design. In 1996, she went to work with Dan Pearson, before The one plant that unites the whole garden is Geranium ‘Patricia’,
starting her own business in 2000. Jinny’s star plant of the moment. ‘I just can’t get enough of it,
Fifteen years on, Jinny is one of the highest profile garden everywhere I go I plant more. It’s a better behaved version of
designers in the country. Her gardens are beautifully put together, Geranium psilostemon but with the same intense pink flowers.’
structured spaces with elegant planting and detailed craftsman- So where another designer may have mixed grasses with these
ship, each one intelligently tailored to its own environment. Her herbaceous favourites – very much the idiom of the day – Jinny
own small back garden is a microcosm of her art. Modest and has played the wild card by creating a kind of fusion planting that
down to earth, she has never had any desire to move from her really works. She laughs at this suggestion. ‘To me, garden design
south London base, although she dreams of having a garden big is getting the shapes and structure right, and then filling it with
enough for a studio as well as space for vegetables and chickens. plants and living in it. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’
‘I’m hugely busy, so this garden is all I need,’ she says. ‘I don’t There is something slightly non-conformist about Jinny that sets
want to hand it over to a gardener: I enjoy the immediacy of her apart from others. She describes her neatly walled garden as
having somewhere that feels under control. I’m a very private ‘like living in a box’, yet she’d be the last person you’d put in a box
person and would never bring clients here – this garden has in terms of her style and approach to garden design
nothing whatsoever to do with my work. It’s my home, some-
where I can come back to, somewhere I can just be myself.’ Jinny Blom Landscape Design: 020-7253 2100; jinnyblom.com
After a period of enforced non-gardening, the garden in its
previous incarnation had become overgrown. ‘Everything was
collapsing and a tidal wave of bindweed was coming over from all
sides, with self-seeded verbascum everywhere. It was still beauti-
ful in its own way, but I had to do something about it.’ Jinny had
always dreamed of putting walls all around the garden, so the old ‘This garden has
fences came out and a new walled garden was created in the nothing whatsoever to
autumn of 2014, with a lower wall at the far end to draw the eye
and create the sense of a bigger space. A ‘gate to nowhere’ fools you do with my work. It’s
into thinking the garden goes on beyond the back wall, but in fact
it screens a tiny space just big enough for storing unsightly things. my home, somewhere
In addition to the walls, Jinny created new raised beds with the I can come back
same brick, a long rectangular pool divided by a central path, and
further areas of reclaimed decking and terracing using narrow to, somewhere
Belgian bricks. ‘I wanted to impose a much more manageable
structure so it’s easy to look after,’ she says. ‘The whole premise is I can just be myself’

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Iris ‘Dusky Challenger’ at the far end of the garden. Lobelia tupa. The bottom right corner of the garden is planted with Geranium
‘Patricia’ and a multi-stemmed Catalpa x erubescens ‘Purpurea’, seen on previous pages slightly earlier in the season with purple foliage. Water spouts in the
pond. Geranium ‘Patricia’ in a raised brick bed. Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’. Echium candicans. Clematis ‘Etoile Violette’. Jinny next to one of her tree ferns

202 NOVEMBER 2015 HOUSEANDGARDEN.CO.UK