Garden of the Week
This beautiful garden caters for the owner’s love of traditional borders, but was designed with her children very much in mind
Dawn Isaac knows a thing or two about gardens and making them family friendly – and that’s an understatement! As well as loving gardens and gardening, she is a Chelsea Flower Show medal-winning garden designer, with a speciality in creating outdoor spaces for families and schools. She also writes on garden design and children’s gardening topics, has a blog on the garden adventures of her own children, and has written three books on these subjects.
“Our garden has always been, first and foremost, a family garden, but one that also caters for my love of traditional full and fabulous garden borders,” Dawn says. Her three children, Ava, Oscar and Archie, have their own little gardens, and the whole family gets involved in planting and growing.
“Although my husband Reuben’s role is definitely limited to enjoying the garden – and lighting the firepit!”
As for her own personal planting style, Dawn says: “With children rampaging through
your borders, you need to be relatively relaxed about plants and possible accide accidental damage. Choo Choosing ‘polite’ self-sow self-sowers and reasonable spreaders ensures
that any gaps that do appear are soon filled up.” But getting the children involved with the garden engenders a strong sense of responsibility towards plants.
Dawn is blessed with remarkably good soil, so plants grow luxuriantly.
“The site was once used to house horses, so it has had years of manure. This is now followed by my own ‘mulching mania’ each spring, using lots of organic compost. So we’ve a pretty
nearperfect
loam, with a neutral pH,” she explains.
Dawn’s garden is also a great suntrap. “We’re lucky in not being near any tall buildings, so most of the space is very sunny,” she says. So growing trees and large shrubs provides some essential shade. These include purple-leaved hazels ( Corylus
maxima ‘Purpurea’), apple trees, the gorgeous dark, cut-leaved elder ( Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’), multi-stemmed birch,
Betula utilis jacquemontii, and
cherry Prunus cerasifera ‘Nigra’.
At this time of year, the garden is vibrant and full of colour from a huge number of tulips, including ‘White Triumphator’, ‘Queen of Night’, ‘Maytime’ and ‘Blue Heron’. These colour accents burst through the borders and brighten up pots. Because Dawn’s soil is so good, there’s no need to lift the bulbs each year and she leaves them in the ground, as they don’t rot.
“Sometimes, I can’t resist buying and planting some new ones, but there are so many that I tend to dig up three when attempting to plant one!”
The tulips are complemented
by swathes of alliums, including ‘Purple Sensation’, which are set off by purple-leaved hazels, purple sage ( Salvia officinalis ‘ Purpurascens’), perennial wallf lower erysimum ‘Bowles’s Mauve’ and cut-leaved elder. Soft Alchemilla mollis and lavender tone down the dark planting, and Euphorbia
characias wulfenii, which seeds itself and appears throughout the main borders, adds a zingy, sulphury-green to everything.
The deep borders surround the main lawn area, but the key feature here is the sunken trampoline – probably the garden’s most ‘famous’ hallmark. “The sunken trampoline always gets people excited
– and it’s not only the children! This is their favourite feature,” says Dawn. Most of the spoil from installing the trampoline was used to create the mound around it, which makes it less obtrusive from the rest of the garden.
As well as helping Dawn, the children have their very own personal gardens, built for and by them, where they can grow and do exactly what they want. They also have a children’s play area, located behind yew hedges to create an enclosed, secluded and safe space. These include mini ponds, a sandpit, the mud pie kitchen (a hideaway play area hidden behind the ‘posh shed’),
scented hopscotch, veg gardens with climbing bean wigwams, mini tyre gardens, swings, playhouse and a hammock, which often doubles during their games as a ship capsizing!
As the children grow up, subtle changes in the garden mean that play areas are replaced with ‘teenage hangout areas’, where they can spend time with their friends. “We want them to have an outdoor space they love and where they can create positive associations with outdoors and gardens,” Dawn explains.
Beyond this is a clematis- covered, wrought iron pavilion, underneath which is a seating and dining area where the adults can oversee and check on the children’s play in comfort – but far enough away so as not to be intrusive. “My favourite garden feature is the pavilion here in May, when it’s clothed in Clematis montana ‘Elizabeth’,” says Dawn.
If you want to see Dawn’s garden for yourself, it’s open on May 27 for the NGS – a joint opening with nearby The Old Vicarage. Dawn is busy right now, propagating lots of plants for sale on the day!