Garden of the Week
A unique opportunity to buy some land allowed Clive Pankhurst to realise his dream to create a lush tropical garden in Camberwell
Living in a Victorian mansion that has been divided into five flats, with a communal lawn and small individual gardens, didn’t provide Clive Pankhurst with much chance to experiment. However, when two of his neighbours were willing to sell their own gardens in 2011, five years after he moved in, he found himself with the opportunity to cultivate his own 30 x 37m (100 x 120ft) plot and realise his tropical planting dream. “I’d travelled a lot in south-east Asia and loved the exotic plants, with their bold colours and dramatic leaf shapes,” Clive says. “I’d always wanted to create my own lush, naturalistic jungle and here was my chance.”
However, it wasn’t all plain sailing. The plots of land were severely overgrown and clearing the hops and brambles turned into an “epic project”. “Once we’d got rid of the weeds and started digging it over, we found beneath the top foot of normal soil was a layer of rubble, rubbish and oyster shells and beneath that was London clay.”
Clive ended up unearthing
five skip-loads of rubble and broke around 20 garden forks and spades during the process. He has since turned the broken tools into an ‘objets trouvés’ mobile, complete with all sorts of random objects that came out of the soil.
Once the soil was ready, he put membrane down over half of it and grew pumpkins there while he started planning the other half. “The design evolved organically,” Clive says. He knew he didn’t want straight lines or a lawn, but he decided to keep a rectangular Victorian pond that he’d uncovered during the clearance.
He started by constructing the main path around the edge, and gradually the separate areas fell into place. There’s now a kitchen
garden, various hidden seating areas, different vistas, fish and wildlife ponds, beehives and a contemporary sunken terrace. Steps lead up to an enormous Balinese Ganesha statue, which he bought from an auction. Delivering and installing it proved a nightmare, especially when the auction house delivered the wrong statue!
Structural bamboos, boldleaved trachycarpus, tetrapanax and ensete and musa bananas provide bold, statement plants, which, in the first year, were supplemented mainly by annuals because the space then was open and sunny.
Over the years, as his tropical plants have developed and grown, the site has now become predominantly shady and Clive has experimented with different plants to fill the space. “It’s great when you find the right combination that just creates the perfect bit of theatre,” he says.
He uses a lot of hardy plants that complement the jungly ones, adding to the exotic feel. Hardy ferns, paulownia (foxglove tree) and clerodendrum flourish beneath the big-leaved specimens with bold flashes of colour provided by flamboyant dahlias and cannas, orange hedychiums, pink begonias, magenta salvias, lilac shoo-flies, purple solanum and spotted tiger flowers.
The jungle-type planting creates its own microclimate so
most plants remain in situ over winter. “We do bring the Musa
sikkimensis into a covered passageway, while the purpleleaved Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’ is dug up. All its roots and leaves are cut off before we store these leek-like pieces in the meter cupboard, where it’s dry and dark.”
Clive has now opened his garden seven times for the NGS, after helping out a friend with his garden opening, so visitors have been able to see the remarkable transformation as the denselyplanted jungle has evolved from his original open framework of individual specimens. Now Clive is redeveloping some areas that need clearing and thinning over-rampant growth.
“Tending my tropical garden is just great for my sanity, and I love seeing the delight on people’s faces as they start to explore!” he says.