August 8, 2011

The rat that wasn’t there

The glamorous days get increasingly ritzy: the ‘odour’ in the house that has been slaying us for weeks turned out not to be a dead rat but a loose pipe. I write this as the plumber waves a cheery goodbye and I feel all happy and summery: kind of lashings-of-ginger-beerish in a good way. Morning dog walks mean blackberry breakfasts along the way: who’d have thought it would ever happen? And the final proof I may have gone native:

I have chickens. Three of them.

It wasn’t meant to happen. It just did. The little-used ground floor of the treehouse needed to earn its keep, so after staring at it for a while I had one of my lightbulb moments. Actually, I had two, but the first one involved a pizza oven and would have meant a chimney going up through the treehouse itself which felt a little extreme.

So, advised by our latest member of the team, Julie The Poultry Guru, http://jothompson-garden-design.co.uk , we built a little house, and got the girls in.

As yet they are unnamed: they’re a surprise waiting for the children to come back from hols with the grandparents, who are once more horrified by this addition to the mix. “More smells in the garden!” gasped my mother – I’m not quite sure how I should take this.

My unintentionally shabby fence needs a repaint:

The dog needs a bath: this picture does not show adequately the black stockings of stagnant mud he was sporting. And I was running away as this stinking mass bundled towards me. (More smells… there’s a theme somewhere…)

But I have happy clients who indulged my wish to recreate a little bit of Renaissance architecture in a Kentish garden – wot genius loci?

and I’m building a garden on the sand which I do not recommend unless you can sink 20m-long piles into the ground

Newsflash: the chickens have been named. My daughter has selected Mary and Mayai (Swahili for ‘eggs’, inspired by current reading material. Luckily she’d finished Lord of the Rings).

Son’s: Luis, in homage to the great striker. I am informed that this name is selected also as phonetically it is a tribute to Formula 1.

And yes, I have told him it’s a female.

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June 9, 2011

That old bucolic thing

It’s been a while. Annoying pains in my shoulder were put down to RSI through overuse of laptop at a strange angle, normally due to the fact that the signal at home is so appalling that I have to sit on the side of a sofa, directing myself and all technical equipment in whatever direction the wind is blowing from. So ‘frivolous use of keyboards’ (ie fiddling about on Twitter) was banned by the medics, so I have been devoting all working hours to work and all those lovely clients who have entrusted me with their gardens.

At first, the stupidly weak internet connection was yet another reason to bang on about how frustrating I find rural life from time to time. Twelve years ago I sat with some girlfriends in some swish regular London haunt, all of us dressed in our Joseph-Reiss combos – clearly the style forerunners of the Duchess of Cambridge. My announcement that I was moving to the country, to give my as-yet unmade children an Enid Blyton childhood, was met with screams of horror: “But darling, you’ll have to go to coffee mornings and take up gardening”. More screams.

And a dozen Springs later, here I am. One coffee morning was enough: the talk of pureed food and milestones was too much for me and I retreated into my home, took a look round, signed myself up on a course, got out of the home and proceeded to spend the next year in London doing something that was actually rather an appealing part of rural life: studying how to make sense of these great big spaces so many people here are surrounded by. And lo, the garden designer was born.

City clients always look at me as if I’m completely bonkers when I tell them how much I adore their 5-floored houses with one room at each level, and gardens the size of other people’s porches. I love it – the whole feel. I love the smell of pollution in the air and the kamikaze cyclists. I liked the fact that last time I was there, the people on the corner of the street threw their big 1980s telly out of the window just at the right time for me to see it happening but not to be flattened by it. I quite like the lunatics who walk along talking to imaginary people, until they start addressing their ramblings at me: this gets me into all sorts of existential dilemmas – am I imaginary like all the other people they’re talking to?

Three weeks staying in the city whilst at the Chelsea Flower Show, this year making a garden for the sculptor Helen Sinclair,

is my idea of heaven, and there’s a huge dip-downer every year when I return to the beautiful, clean, quiet place In The Middle Of Nowhere, where I live and the place my children call home.

I have a love-hate relationship with the country, or maybe it’s a fair-weather relationship – I like it so much better when the sun’s out. After a couple of days of sulking at the quietness of it all, the quietness of it all starts to become rather attractive again.

It’s very, very dry

and those crop things on the right look very short to me. This pondering makes the countryside with all its farms and fields start to make sense – I’m actually thinking about it and worried about it, not pulling a face at it simply because there isn’t a decent bookshop for miles and trying to forget the fact that the best country pub I know is actually in Pimlico.

We’ve picked elderflowers and made cordial: I felt very “I’m a country-type just like you” when I asked for citric acid at the local chemists. The pharmacist had it under lock and key and told me it was being rationed: “Ah,” I replied, still with that slap-my-thigh-I’m-so-rustic demeanour, ” I bet you know what I’m going to be up to this afternoon?!” She gave me a rather old-fashioned look.

Later when I mentioned on Twitter that there must be an epidemic of elderflower-cordial making, @LickedSpoon pointed out that citric acid is used by junkies to pad out the mix, as it were.

Spot the dog

6am is a good time to go for a walk and appreciate what you have. Coming back home, R. Venusta Pendula had decided to start doing her very beautiful thing, although in reality she is in focus. A few hours later the flower was opened completely, flat and white with the teeniest hint of pink. Almost mother of pearl.

Digitalis Serendipity is frilliness itself

And the best thing? I’ve discovered this morning that there’s a vineyard of Pinot Noir just around the corner. Have a look at Herbert Hall’s website http://www.herberthall.com/: Nick Hall is making sparkling wine in a lane near me. Heaven.

Tags: Garden Design, Garden Design Dorset, Garden design in Kent, Garden design Kent, Garden Design London
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April 8, 2011

Making the most of it

For all sorts of reasons, I’ve been making the most of this week. And I mean REALLY making the most.

Every year we all work out all over again that sunshine makes us feel better. You can almost breathe it in, the warmth and the feely-good vitamin thing/effect. My brand-new garden is patchy and bare, but there are some treats

and of course lots of these

and these

We’d planned to take a few days off this week: the boy is in Normandy for a week learning how to abseil (the school was impressively economic in its description of the whole outward bound experience to 30 eager children – in a nutshell they haven’t told them that The Whole Week is conducted en français. There’s going to be hell to pay when they get back tomorrow.

So quite a lot of mother-daughter bonding. Half an hour at the National Gallery followed by five hours at Peter Jones, with a quick drop into Tiffany on the way (daughter’s idea – uh oh). A Pretty Woman moment when the assistant interrupted our drooling over the platinum and diamond teddy bear charms, to tell us that “the sterling silver is upstairs, Madam”. I could only reply, with a steely glint in my eye ” WE ARE PERFECTLY HAPPY WITH THE PLATINUM, THANK YOU”.

The next night we watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and it reminded me how apt the whole Mean Reds concept really is.

I’m glad I’ve spent this time with my daughter,and I’m going to do more, much more. That’s not a vow, it’s just a realisation that these moments that take us by surprise every time even though we know they are there, like the sunny weather in April and the colours of Spring flowers, are more special than I can actually describe in words. I’m about to lose my greatest and best friend to a horrible disease which has finally made its way into her brain, a friend whose razor-sharp intellect and wit would have applauded that Tiffany moment. She has two small boys who have had a few years of life with their mum, and she made sure that every moment was considered. I sat with her during her last chemo session, laughing at her funny freezer-hat, and saying goodbye as she leapt on the tube to go and do the school run immediately after. A few months later we spent her birthday shopping and eating and drinking. I thought she was better, and so did she, for a while.

So when my daughter cooked me supper this evening, having gone through Jamie and Nigella and settling on naan bread pizza without the naan,(‘trouble is, Mummy, it may have to be the same menu every month”) followed by Rockie Road pudding, I ate every bit.

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March 16, 2011

Born horticulturalist

I’m being very discreet at Chelsea 2011. Well, I thought I was. With plans in hand for 2012, this year was meant to be a break, until I was asked by Helen Sinclair to design a space for her in which to exhibit her sculptures. Never one to do things by halves, I’ve made a little garden. Here’s the proposed planting A teeny tiny garden at Chelsea 2011

I’m supposed to be packing for a trip to Warsaw w the lovely AFT tomorrow to speak at the conference of Landscape Architects, but having just seen the weather forecast (snow), I’ve found a million other things to do. The dog is back at his hotel and the children at theirs (according to them, in comparison to home, school is 5*), there are 14 plant lists sitting here waiting to be ok -ed (how DO you spell that?). One of these is the most terrifying of clients: my mother. The greatest compliment I could have was for my parents to commission me to re-design part of their Dorset garden; they have only just accepted that maybe what I do is real and not a big story I’ve invented to stop them from worrying. They’ve never quite got over the time they left me, aged 18, to house-sit while they went on holiday. Half-listened-to strict verbal instructions to “water the houseplants once a week and outside pots once a day” were easily confused by a student more interested in having a house to herself for three weeks. I thought and thought about it (this was pre-texting days, of course), and came to the conclusion that as it was physically impossible to water 70 containers around the garden, the daily watering must apply to the indoor planting.

Enough said.

Tags: Garden Design, Garden Design Dorset, Garden design Kent
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February 7, 2011

The ulterior motive

In a blog in another place, I outlined my son’s opinions about the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. So imagine my surprise last week when, whilst climbing into the car at school pick-up time, caked in a combination of mud and sweat (always nice) after yet another rugby club in the rain, he asked “Are you doing Chelsea this year?”

Now, a spontaneous question like that from this eleven year-old is unsettling. He doesn’t do conversation starters. Lots of “Get in” and “What a goal” statements, but not interaction-initiation if he can possibly help it: it means people answer you and ask you something and then you are completely trapped when you could be getting on with the Sports section of The Telegraph. (Apart from one time in the Isle of Wight: as I was driving along, I swear I heard the words “What a lovely view” come from the direction of the back seat. Reader, I had to stop the car.)

So, back to the Chelsea question. “But you hated Chelsea,” I reminded him. “You told the man from the BBC that you were so bored that it hurt, you sat in the garden and yawned while all those people were taking photos, then you held your stomach like they do in Casualty and you had to go and sit on a bench with Grandma and a Chelsea Pensioner, and you were wearing Grandma’s big black and gold square-framed Christian Dior sunglasses because your head hurt too – by the way I still cannot believe you actually asked her if you could wear them.”

“But I really loved the show. It was cool”

Another car-stopping moment. Boring, busy, crowded, hot, noisy – these were the words used at the time. ‘Cool’ definitely was not mentioned. Pondering the mysteries and the surprises that our children constantly provide, I started to have a tiny warm glow of pride. My upbringing theory is that you don’t force anything on anyone, you take children along to things that you enjoy: they’ve got to try it twice and if they hate it more than once, then they can take a book or an iPod the next time if I can’t find a babysitter for the day. I think it’s called the “Dragging-Up” or maybe “Ad Hoc” method. So, finally, it had clearly worked, or was beginning to show tiny shoots of working at least. All that insisting that they come, at least for an hour, and see where their mother has been for the last three weeks, as well as simply longing to see them, having missed them after being away for so long, it had all worked. My son, my suddenly and pride-makingly art-appreciative, sensitive son, had finally asked to come and share with me the doing of something that I liked doing.

Deep breath and warm glow of Good-Parentness. “Of course! I’m not building a garden this year, so I’ll be around to travel up with you – we can go first thing so we get there nice and early before the crowds, we can have ice creams for breakfast and maybe we’ll get a chance to go into the the actual gardens – I know your sister was keen on getting into the Australian garden’s pool again.”

“Great. But can you make sure it’s a Friday again? That way I miss double Art but no Games.I know we have to go to the boring old show, but it’s worth it”

Hubris.

No hubris in being asked to take part in this month’s House and Garden feature on ten up-and-coming garden designers. Holding back my first Are-You-Sure reaction (similar to my reaction on passing my driving test even though I’d mounted the kerb successfully on three separate occasions during the half-hour), I met up at the fab Thames Barrier Park with some designers whose work I think of as rather good. It felt jolly special to be included amongst them. What’s more, I got to spend the day in the most wonderful location - the park is all straight lines of trees going off on the diagonal, with the strange Thames Barrier emerging in the distance. Now that’s what I call a vista. If you go, try to be there in the early morning – the light and shadows are breath-taking

Thames Barrier Park

I took this next one without stopping quickly enough, then was rather pleased with myself when I saw it

Wiggling at the Barrier Park

Tags: Garden Design Dorset, Garden design Kent, Garden Design London
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January 22, 2011

You can only have a pergola if it goes somewhere….

This is what I say to any client who includes one of these on their wishlist. I think pergolas are rather lovely, especially when draped with roses doing their English-garden-in-June thing. But I always insist that these walkways have a function. Once we have cleared up the ’stress on the incorrect syllable’ issue of pergOHla (which sends a shiver down my spine in the same way of nails down blackboards and bare feet on sandy tarmac, and scOHnes), I have to assign the structure a function.It CANNOT be purely decorative: it needs to lead, cover or divide.

So last year I found myself designing a purely decorative pergola. With a fake perspective to boot. Inspired by Borromini’s terrifically clever maths I thought I’d try it out in the new walled garden in Kent, and my lovely, indulgent and long-suffering clients said yes. (Although they have re-named it Jo’s Folly).

So here it is, just being finished off. And no, it doesn’t do anything. The idea was to make the distance look longer than 8 metres. I’m planning on placing a tiny, weeny statue at the far end: in theory it should like human-sized. We’ll see.

Pergola in Kent, just being a pergola

Tags: Garden Design, Garden design in Kent, Garden design Kent, Green Places, London
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December 21, 2010

In which I discover the seam of domesticity that runs deep beneath the surface

We have baked a lot of things from Nigella’s Christmas book this week. And a few from Delia, but it seems somehow much more lush and decadent to do it Nigella-style, complete with frosted grapes and hundreds of tealights. Delia somehow seems, well, just a little bit STRAIGHT in comparison. Yule logs, Christmas tree cookies, sickly cupcakes and even sicklier cornflake wreaths for which you need asbestos fingers to deal with moulding burning hot marshmallow into festive shapes.

Baking is normally at the most a once-or-twice-a-month activity at Ashtree Cottage, mainly due to the utter chaos and hectic nature of the lives we lead. I moved to the country from London twelve years ago, leaving behind both The Mothership (Peter Jones) and lots of wonderful friends most of whom were and still are completely bonkers. The countryside offered (so I thought), a slower and less-propelled way of life.

What I hadn’t reckoned on was the walking. Or lack of it. Car to the station, car to school, car to shops, car to friends. It’s great if I want to walk around a field for an hour with no particular destination in mind, trying to train the ‘puppy’ to leave pheasants alone until he’s told he can have a go, but when it comes to needing to DO anything – the motor is the only way. My car operates on such a deep-litter system due to its being used so much that it even shocked the binman, who I did try to bribe to empty it out, but as he pointed out to me, it would’t fit on the tipper. Otherwise, he said, he’d have been pleased to have a go.

Other rural delights: a dead rat outside the backdoor

Bearing in mind that when I first moved here I called the RSPCA to come and deal with a rabbit break-dancing on the lawn (they told me to put a box on it and call them 24 hours later) this was a tough one to deal with. Twelve years later and many decapitated plants later, I’m kind of getting the hang of this pest-thing, and sneer as efficiently as a local whenever some townie mentions ‘Peter Rabbit’ and ‘fluffy’ in the same sentence.

Back to the baking: who are you, enquired The Pirate as he walked in to a particularly flour-filled kitchen, and what have you done with that person I know….

It was all due to….

The Snow

Having spent so many years moaning that I missed the buzz and energy of the town (obviously not that much because I’m still here), the isolation that we can get here is lovely. Snowy woods mean that I can finally see the way ( I have no sense of direction), and crunchy footprints are evocative of…. well, I don’t know what, but something, because it keeps niggling away at me that I know and love that sound. Maybe I was an Eskimo in another life.

So, we tracked. We did birds, horses, fox, and most excitingly, this three-footed thing:

We were so excited; we came rushing back and consulted all sorts of books. Finally, with the help of those Great Twitter-Trackers in the Ether, we established that it was, yes, a rabbit – apparently they bounce with their hind legs together. Well, I never knew that. So not as exotic as the suggested oryx, but still an adventure.

As there’s a lot of dependence on small independent businesses locally, we haven’t had the food shortages reported elsewhere. The farmer can walk to the dairy, and the dairy is only a mile away from the shop. Rosie in the pub makes the most delicious ham, and the newsagent has fresh bread daily from the bakery nearby.

So I’ve stopped grumbling about the ‘bad’ bits, and started to appreciate what we do have. Space, and this week, time.

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November 1, 2010

Mystic Meg at Wisley

When I merrily accepted in September James Rudoni’s invitation to chat for a few minutes at RHS Wisley, November 17th seemed a long, long way away. I’ve just looked at the calender. Ah.

Apparently I’m talking about garden design trends in 2011, so I’m feverishly poring over our most recent designs to see if there’s any common denominator: the list so far is pizza ovens, herbaceous borders, hot tubs, stepped hedges, walled gardens, rose gardens, false perspective walkway, banana-shaped benches, wildflower meadows, rooftop gazebo, outdoor kitchen, rainwater harvesters, pergolas, mirrored trellis, totally new garden on SAND (oh yes) and outdoor game console stations. Hmm but which of these is a trend for 2011? Lots of these are clients’ specifications (though my son is enthralled by the idea of Wii en plein air), but I guess I can still call them design trends.

The great news is that James Rudoni has just been made Director of Gardens for the RHS. He’s certainly worked his magic at Wisley: a fabulous destination which is becoming more and more of a great place to go. (Did they break the conker record I wonder?) I intend to get there first thing and have a good old snoop and a bit of a spend in the gorgeous bookshop.

To-do list today: Green Places article, chase some surveys, finish moving into the new studio built by The Pirate in the garden, and the planting design for a fabulous new walled garden in Kent, followed by another dog walk in which I hope to teach him to find his brakes and to stop using me as a buffer

There are lots of hugely-exciting things afoot, but I can’t say anything about anything at the moment, hence my brief posts – I just don’t trust myself not to spill the beans if I write any more……

Tags: Garden design Kent
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October 21, 2010

Green Places and Mountains

Well, there are number of reasons for my near-silence over the summer. I’ve had the luck to meet lots of lovely clients, which has resulted in projects in Sandbanks Dorset, Cambridge, Essex, London, Switzerland, and a current discussion about a new estate in South Africa. So it’s been kind of busy…….. The chaos that could have been the summer holidays was narrowly avoided with the arrival of two new members of the team: Nigel (aka SuperMan) who is quickly becoming my indispensable right-hand man, and St Melissa, the patron saint of PAs, without whom my novel filing system (aka the floor) would never have gained the seemly order that it now possesses.

Green Places magazine have asked me to write for them each month, essentially discussing design elements in public spaces. Again, I feel really lucky that I can look at parks and gardens open to the public, looking at how some work and some don’t. Green Places

Watch this space on design work with Privett International and lectures at RHS Wisley……

Plus I’ve just taken delivery of my lovely new garden office… so a little bit of a move is taking place…

Tags: Garden Design, Green Places, London, Switzerland
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July 26, 2010

Avoiding filing

The suspicious silence has been due mostly to being snowed under with design work of all types, as well as a week in a caravan in 50mph winds

and the demolishing of my own garden (on purpose). I’m supposed to be writing an article on accessibility/design in gardens, but as I just can’t think of the opening sentence, I thought I’d displace further and update on all.

New puppy: lovely, and better-trained than my children

Garden wishlist: got the shelter from the southwesterlies in the form of The Idler swingseat. It’s become a haven for neighbouring children with dirty feet, and the longing nose of a dog who pretends his head isn’t really resting there at all. The treehouse is habitable and has a goalpost growing out of it, which in theory is going to support climbers and ramblers (hollow laugh as I see yet another football thwacked into it).

As a true Italian with the accompanying streak of idleness that runs through the veins, I’ve managed so far to create 5 seating areas in a 10 by 7m garden (6 if you count the swing under the treehouse, and 7 when the hammock goes up).The thought of painting all the fences is making me displace my displacement activities, but once they’re offwhite, and the heavy trellis panels go up on top of the fence; well, I’ll be halfway there.

Still a mess, and all to be painted..... but we have height

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