A perfectly crafted London garden with a tiny wildflower meadow and woodland
When the owners of this leafy garden moved with their three children into an uncommonly pretty house in Muswell Hill, they were prepared to give the interior an overhaul. The proportions of the rooms did not match the façade of the house, with its two tiers of floor-to-ceiling windows and white ironwork balconies all beautifully to scale.
The garden, though unusually long and rather dark, surely wouldn’t require the same amount of attention? But once their children had stopped playing football behind the trees at the far end, the couple began to notice a mismatch between inside and out. ‘There wasn’t much of a terrace to sit on,’ says the husband. The rectangle of decaying Astroturf was also not a destination worth the walk. ‘After the renovation, the house felt right – at ease with itself. But now the garden did not.’
Finding the person to transform it took time. ‘We didn’t want it to look too designery,’ he says. The couple’s choice of Taryn Ferris – an Australian-born designer based in London – was in part due to the fact she didn’t at first present them with any ideas at all. ‘She stood in the garden for a long time, listening to the birds and taking in what was already there,’ says his wife.
Mostly, what was there were trees – and therefore lots of shade. A magnificent mature oak halfway down the lawn was met by a dense holm oak looming over the neighbour’s wall. At the back, a eucalyptus leaned in, dropping pale furls of bark. ‘The trees were beautiful and crying out to be noticed,’ Taryn says. ‘I could see the potential for showcasing them.’
For someone who grew up with the strong light of Australia, so much shade might have been bothersome. But dappled light is something she’s come to appreciate. ‘All London gardens are shaded in some way,’ she notes. ‘This kind of light is particularly lovely.’ Taking out only one tree, too close to the oak, she decided the garden would be all about the movement of light and making that walk down the garden worthwhile. The space was already divided roughly into three segments. Taryn began by sculpting these more definitively, adding a multi-stemmed cherry to pinch in the planting a third of the way down. She filled in gaps to conceal what lay behind; a sense of intrigue is essential, she says, to any journey. Near the house – the most formal part of the garden – she created a square of lawn for the husband to mow (a job he likes), softening the geometry with squares of meadow in the corners as a hint of what’s to come. A terrace of tumbled cobbles draws a graceful arc by the house, with the main seating area off to one side, leaving the façade of the house unbroken. A Lutyens-style bench, also curved, is underplanted with Geranium ‘Rozanne’.
Taryn’s masterstroke is the path that begins at the pinch point and invites you to discover what lies beyond. Just four cobbles wide and with grass growing through the gaps, it can take only one person at a time. ‘The usual rule is that paths should be wide enough for two people to walk side by side,’ she says. ‘But this path refuses to comply.’ So, like a child exploring, you arrive in the wildflower meadow alone to find gnarly old fruit trees and occasional roses that have been left to ‘go slightly feral’. In spring, the meadow bursts with bulbs: snowdrops, blue camassias, fritillaries and orange, purple and red tulips. In summer, yellow Welsh poppies, ox-eye daisies and lilac cranesbill geraniums dot the grass.
From here, the garden becomes what it always wanted to be – a woodland, with the light picking out one interesting stem or leaf at a time. As in nature, the woodland floor is relatively sparsely planted, with space around the hellebores, ferns and foxgloves for squirrels, birds and Wolfie the dog to nose around. Now, instead of a football pitch, we arrive at an asymmetrical curved wooden deck with a firepit and a large garden room.
It’s this final area of the garden that has transformed life for the family. The wife comes here with a cup of tea and a book on summer mornings. Her husband uses it to work out. Their children bring friends to sit around the fire in the evenings, as the flames glow through the trees, silhouetting their forms. For the husband, it is ‘a really wonderful sight’. They’re all now eager to take the journey down that narrow path. And, finally, the house has a fittingly proportioned frame in which to sit.
Taryn Ferris: tarynferris.com
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Alister Thorpe2/4Pale Rosa ‘Claire Austin’ and white valerian set off a stone trough.
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