I could barely wait to dig up the lawn. Getting rid of the rectangle of mown grass that passed for a garden was almost the first thing I did when I moved into my new home on a bitterly cold New Year’s Day, 20 years ago. An act of vandalism to some, but to me the patch of brown earth, chips of broken china and old, soil-filled medicine bottles it left behind was just the blank canvas I needed.
The wielding of the spade must have been symbolic, because I did nothing more outside for months. I wanted to create a place to think. A green space in which to clear my head in between recipes, or to untangle a knotted sentence. A lawn has its uses as a safe place for children to play, somewhere to kick a ball around or to sunbathe, but it wasn’t the right garden for me. I don’t find inspiration or peace in a neatly edged rectangle of grass. All I see is a wasted opportunity. I wanted a garden where my imagination could run, where I could make a home for bees, birds and butterflies and where I could escape to when the house was full of people. A place that would act as both inspiration and sanctuary.
It was then that Monty Don, at the time the Observer’s gardening correspondent, came to lunch. Over deep bowls of pumpkin soup and homemade oat bread Monty hatched a plan, drawn in black pen on the back of an envelope. It was a plan that opened my eyes to the possibilities even the smallest urban space held. Monty’s drawing couldn’t have been further removed from a lawn – and I implemented it to the letter.
That brave new garden, with its smart box-edged vegetable beds, rows of peas and beetroot, hazel wigwams of beans and assortment of berry bushes, brought with it a decade of unimaginable joy. Heritage carrots were munched within minutes of being pulled from the soil; hedges that framed rows of cabbages and kale were clipped into soldierly neatness and purple-podded beans wound their way up cane frames. The garden went on to inspire two books (Tender: Volumes I and II), and a television series, and instilled an everlasting connection between growing, cooking and eating.
And then the new neighbours moved in.
At first I welcomed the fresh arrivals to the terrace, with their cute red-haired kids and even tolerated their occasional antisocial behaviour. But then we fell out. I cannot exaggerate the amount of damage a large family of foxes can do to an urban garden if they are so minded. Every morning I woke to a new scene of devastation: rows of parsnips dug up and abandoned, lupins sat upon and pristine hedges crushed where they had been used as trampolines by the cute little cubs. Oh the delight of finding the contents of your neighbours’ bin bags scattered over your pumpkin patch, not to mention pizza boxes, nappies and endless half-chewed trainers. I once found someone’s old pants in the rhubarb and a spooky, dismembered doll in the fennel. And don’t even start me on the subject of fox poo.
Each year the damage got worse, and every early- morning discovery of flattened tomato seedlings and abandoned takeaways was more heartbreaking than the last. To add to the fun, a plague of box blight (Cylindrocladium buxicola) arrived to denude my precious hedges of their leaves, thus destroying the backbone of the garden. What had been a place of inspiration and delight was now one of frustration and heartache.
It was then that I met the garden designer and writer Dan Pearson, who wielded his magic over the long section beyond the vegetable garden, turning what had previously been a wilderness into a magical space of delicate and thoughtful planting.
I inserted yew hedges to turn the long, thin patch from one garden into three very separate but homogenous spaces. In came white Cornus kousa and quivering yellow epimediums; white hydrangeas were underplanted with woodruff; climbing roses tumbled among orange blossom. This meant you walked from the vegetable beds through a yew hedge into a fragrant, almost woodland space. The foxes departed for pastures new and, once again, the veg-growing started in earnest. I had my inspiration, my retreat and sanctuary.
It was then that a relatively new invasion came to visit. Cydalima perspectalis, the box tree moth, had arrived. In the space of a fortnight, the little horrors chomped their way through hundreds, no thousands of pounds’ worth of topiary. Finding this one set-back too many – and, I suppose, listening to reason – I realised that the vegetable garden in its present form had to go.
One afternoon in late spring I asked Katie, who has helped me in the garden for years, to rip up the denuded hedges. Those long lines of crisp-edged Buxus were reduced to a skipload of powdery grey twigs. It felt like a bereavement. The day they went I almost cried. Not for the first time, I was left with a blank canvas.
I learned quite quickly that every disaster in the garden is an opportunity in disguise. Dan’s garden, as we call the woodland-inspired middle garden to this day, continued to establish itself, and left me free to rethink the space that housed the old veg beds. I had always worried that the space was too tightly packed. There was no place to eat or even to sit. It was a garden you walked through rather than lingered in. Putting pen to paper once again, I knew immediately I needed a table at which to eat and work. Somewhere for the neighbours’ cats to curl up and sleep without crushing a courgette, and where you could just sit and breathe. There must also be space for my three great garden loves: topiary (though obviously not of box), ferns and climbing roses.
And so the garden moved into its third and probably final phase. The old vegetable beds took on a new role as a place to eat, surrounded on both sides with borders thick with ferns, waving white Japanese anemones and clipped topiary. The kitchen walls would now spend their summers shrouded in white wisteria and climbing roses. In summer the back of my house could relax into a tangle of carnival-coloured dahlias and trailing jasmine. There would be room for dahlias and dinner.
Of late, the garden has settled into a gentle rhythm. Once a year, on a dry spring day shortly after the Chelsea Flower Show, everything gets a serious trim – the “Chelsea chop” as it is known. Hedges are clipped, topiary is shaped and overhanging branches of the fig and medlar tree are pruned. A tidy-up that might appeal to the sort of gardener who power-washes their flagstones and scrubs the moss from their pots but, to me, it feels as if a much-loved and elegantly ageing friend has gone in for a round of cosmetic surgery. Not unrecognisable, but slightly cold and distant and, to my mind, a little dishonest. For a couple of weeks a year the garden doesn’t quite feel like mine.
As autumn approaches, your way along the neat gravel paths of old is now delightfully hampered by drooping branches and heart-shaped yellow and purple leaves that brush against you as you pass. You push your way through collapsed magenta and orange dahlias and try not to slip on the figs that lie splattered over the terrace. You have to beat a path to get from one end to the other and the three distinct spaces relax into one.
I would like to say that the garden I have now will probably be my last. Twenty years on from digging up the lawn, I have a space that is more inspirational and restful than I could have ever imagined. I feel the garden has come of age.
Yet the space still refuses to stand still. Even now there are changes afoot. This year I reintroduced the vegetables and sweet peas that I missed so much. Tomatoes and calendulas now grow in huge terracotta pots on the kitchen steps and there is an entire table of culinary herbs. There are tubs of marigolds and stands of bronze fennel. Next year there may be more. The garden will never be “finished”. I have no idea of what will happen next. All I know is that there won’t ever be a lawn.
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