Garden rden of the Week
A straightforward approach and a clever eye have created this wonderful, year-round garden
Theresa-Mary Morton’s garden lies in the leafy suburb of Wimbledon, close to Wimbledon Common. She shares the same band of acidic Bagshot sand as this
green area, so she’s able to grow spring-flowering ericaceous shrubs, such as azaleas and camellias, plants normally denied to most Londoners. The house and garden have been Theresa-Mary’s home since the 1950s. She began gardening as a child and clearly remembers sending off postal orders for plants when she was about 10 years old. “In those days the garden had a large lawn and we used to have family tennis matches on it,” she recalls. “My mother bought part of a neighbour’s garden in the early 1980s, so now the garden’s L-shaped.”
The newly acquired section of garden included an ancient ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ apple tree and Theresa-Mary began to develop woodland borders in the dappled shade underneath this gnarled specimen. “Primarily, it’s a very spring-like garden, and
during the rest of the year its palette is green and white.”
Her garden is carefully laid out. A solid oak pergola, for instance, connects in line with the French windows for a splendid view, and the brick-lined path appears longer than it is because warm-brick squares, laid diagonally and touching tip to tip, lead the eye along the path, creating an optical illusion of greater length.
The pergola is clothed with winter and spring-flowering clematis (unfortunately roses don’t do very well here). They include the somewhat rampant evergreen Clematis armandii, which produces white, scented flowers from March, and clematis ‘Freckles’, which has red-spotted cream bells that can appear before Christmas. In April, ‘Markham’s Pink’ adds to the apple blossom and white colour scheme. Sheets of the tall white allium ‘Mount Everest’ perform in May and then a vine takes over, “although I may get rid of it as it doesn’t produce good autumn colour and is rather rampant,” Theresa-Mary adds.
Woodland borders line both sides of the pergola and the right hand side is full of camellias. A summer house lies to the left and some of the paths are lined with Liriope muscari. The flowing plain-green foliage is topped by blue flowers in autumn. Another grass-like
plant, Ophiopogon latifolius,
is also used as underplanting, with a mixture of spring woodlanders and bulbs.
However, there’s some colour in the flower garden close to the house, on a lower level set down five steps. “I love tulips and If they weren’t so expensive, I’d have thousands more,” she says. Her favourites include ‘Queen of Night’ and the slightly warmer black ‘Paul Scherer Scherer’. . Both flower in late-April and May. ‘Couleur Cardinal’ is a shorter, earlierflowering Triumph tulip, with rich-red flowers, shaded in plum. “I also love growing parrot tulips in pots and, last year, I grew ‘Greenland’, a striking pink and white with a green stripe.”
Other areas are more formal and the box parterre, which
consists of four heart-shaped compartments, is trimmed three times a year by Theresa-Mary, who is a hands-on gardener. “It’s a bit like trimming the dog’s hair! I cut it at the beginning of May, although that does depend on the weather. It gets another trim in August and then a winter tidy-up in late September or October. I have help with the other hedges though,” she says.
The box and her garden plants are fed regularly with commercial fertilisers and blood, fish and bone. “This year, I’ve had eight-ton bags of loamy top soil to top up the flower beds. I also have two leaf mould bins and three are full of kitchen and garden waste.”
Theresa-Mary uses the same green-blue paint on the auricula theatre, trellises, arches and plinths and she describes it as ‘the colour of nature’. There are also lime-green to yellow wooden seats in the depths of the woodland garden. Artefacts are used well here, with yellow glass baubles hanging from trees, a well-hidden white goose and some straw chickens bringing quirky, but restrained, touches that add a sense of fun.