Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
AN OASIS OF CALM IN THE CITY
The garden of designer Cath Kidston is set in one of those extraordinary corners of London where the mood, light, architecture, noise and even smells change abruptly as you turn from one street into another.
She lives near a big roundabout with routes to two motorways and permanent queues of traffic. But for Cath the roundabout is a benefit, offering easy access out of London, while a tall building separating her from the main road provides a noise barrier. Stand in her back garden and all you can hear is birdsong.
The house is late-17th/early-18th century and the design of the outdoor space complements its generous proportions, with the main axis following a line that runs right through the house.
Cath and her husband, the record producer Hugh Padgham, bought the property in 2001, and in 2007 added a new kitchen extension and revamped the garden. The kitchen is modern and glazed on two sides, and Cath wanted the garden to echo this contemporary style. ‘It is a luxury to have open space in London, and I was after something quite simple and airy,’ she says.
She drew a sketch, then commissioned garden designer Brita von Schoenaich to make it a reality. There are actually three separate spaces: a back garden, a front garden and a river garden, which is across the road on the banks of the Thames. The back garden was challenging, because the lawn is not level, but slopes from side to side.
Brita’s solution was to install paving slabs of different lengths extending into the lawn. The terrace and kitchen are laid with the same stone, blurring the line between inside and out. The ‘bar chart’ slabs fool the eye so completely, you’re unaware of the slope until you get to the end of the garden and look back.
Opposite the extension is an enormous London plane ( Platanus x hispanica), with a wooden seat around its trunk. A rectangular canal crosses the entire width of the garden, with a shallow end for paddling and a longer, deeper end.
To see how the axis through the garden works, you have to go upstairs. From here, you can see that the path in the back garden lines up with the path in the front garden, which also lines up with the entrance to the river garden.
‘I like order and symmetry,’ Cath says, which may seem a surprising comment from a woman famous for
florals. Flowers are at the heart of the fashion and textile empire she created, yet the only really flowery bit of the back garden is what she calls a ‘jungly path’. In spring, it is a mass of dark tulips, which give way to a cottage-garden mixture of foxgloves, irises, euphorbia, rock roses and fennel. Honeysuckle and jasmine scramble up the old brick wall and in among the paving are clumps of Alchemilla mollis.
Beyond the canal is an orchard planted with quince, apple and cherry trees, a greenhouse bursting with pelargoniums, a vegetable patch, and a cutting garden full of dahlias that Cath uses to decorate the house. She is too busy to be a hands-on gardener but she has strong ideas about what should be planted, and a clear vision of the effect she wants to achieve.
The front garden is more formal, with climbing roses and neat shrubs, including myrtle, honey spurge ( Euphorbia mellifera), smokewood ( Cotinus ‘Grace’), black-leaved elder ( Sambucus), and box topiary. Cath’s gardener, Toby Davis, is proud that the garden has no box blight, which he puts down to good biosecurity. He disinfects his tools before trimming each of the plants, and keeps a separate set of shears for his individual clients.
One of Toby’s biggest jobs is clipping the privet hedge that screens the river garden from the road and forms an arch around the gate. The river garden floods regularly at high tide – two or three times a month, says Toby – but the hedge doesn’t seem to suffer at all.
Many people hate privet, either because they think it’s boring, or they dislike the smell of the flowers. Others love the scent, saying it reminds them of summertime.
Behind the hedge, the river garden is mainly laid to lawn, with a willow tree that loves the damp conditions, and roses and philadelphus at the drier end. Grass, of course, is tolerant of flooding as long as it does not remain submerged for long periods. The seat hanging from the willow is perfect for watching the river traffic, which here is mainly leisure craft and rowing eights.