Richard Bloom
‘It was the leaning walnut tree in the garden that drew us to this house,’ says Frida Kim. ‘We’d seen quite a few – this one was functional and the garden was messy, but all I could remember was the walnut tree. That was enough.’ Floral designer Frida had commissioned the architect Richard Eden to create a serene extension for her new south London home and was keen to find the right designer for its 46-metre garden. ‘Coming from Seoul, I wanted something natural, slightly different, with elements of both East and West,’ she says. Richard suggested Jane Brockbank, whose fine-art background means she takes a painterly approach to planting.
When Jane first saw the garden, it was a muddle of trees and shrubs but, among the chaos, she found not one but two spreading walnuts. ‘The one at the far end had such a dramatic lean, it needed urgent propping up to prevent disaster,’ she says. Clearing the space and allowing these sculptural trees – the other is nearer the house – to breathe, gave the garden a sense of age and enchantment hard to achieve with totally new planting.
Jane’s brief from Frida was: ‘No lawn, just loads of plants.’ She also wanted the garden to look interesting throughout the year. ‘Frida likes dead plants more than new plants. No one has ever said that to me before,’ recalls Jane. Underpinning everything was the idea that the garden should flow easily from the house and draw you to Frida’s studio at the end of the space.
Jane created a number of deep beds ‘like islands with a path running through’, then planted a series of flowering trees to light up the garden in succession. First to flower, in February to March, is the Japanese apricot Prunus mume, after which the pale pink Yoshino cherry and white Malus ‘Evereste’ explode into clouds of blossom. Then, in early summer, Cornus kousa var. chinensis is smothered in elegant white bracts. By autumn, the crab apple is laden with red-flushed fruit and the cornus foliage is deep claret.
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