Garden of the Week
A compact, plant-packed garden in the heart of the capital blends foliage and texture with carefully chosen flowers
Standing in Mike Jackson’s garden, you would never know that you were in the heart of London’s King’s Cross, just a stone’s throw away from the station and the heavy traffic crawling along the Euston Road.
Blackbirds are singing, sparrows are cheeping and there might even be the colourful flash of a goldfinch in the foliage. At the end of his garden is a 45-degree slope, which is the shoring to the Battlebridge Basin on the Regent’s Canal, where colourful narrowboats are moored on the water.
When Mike moved here 23 years ago, it was the first time he had owned a garden. “I’d shown an interest in gardening from around the age of seven, and I pored over weekly garden magazines as a child to teach myself,” he says.
“I’m from a working class background and gardening wasn’t necessarily something you did. I went on to get a Diploma in Horticulture from Kew, and had various jobs in horticulture, but I’d never had my own space. When I arrived here, I was itching to get started.”
The garden was turfed everywhere, including the steep slope, and contained no plants at all. “It was a blank canvas. I planted a bamboo and a katsura tree ( cercidiphyllum), but I didn’t rush. It’s better to develop a garden slowly if you can. Live with it and get to know its idiosyncrasies!”
Mike soon observed that the slope was the sunniest part of his space, catching the rays from dawn until about 3pm. Three years after he moved in, he terraced the area to make full use of it.
“I couldn’t afford bricks at the time, so I used peat blocks, which I bought from a firm in Somerset. I cut shelves into the slope and put the blocks in. It took about half a day.
“As I hadn’t dug foundations, I was a bit concerned that I might end up with a landslide, but planting the terraced areas with ericaceous plants, such as lewisias, helped to
consolidate the ground and it has lasted. I’ll be looking to replace it soon with a non-peat alternative,” he explains.
The sunny terrace contains the most colourful plants, while the rest of Mike’s garden, which is always in shade, has a more limited palette, and focusses on foliage and texture.
He plants hostas in pots. “The snails would run amok if I didn’t. To keep them out, I put a circle of Vaseline, about an inch wide, towards the bottom of the pot every spring. I also make sure that if I have a number of containers close together that the leaves don’t touch, otherwise they form a bridge for the snails to move across.”
Texture and interest is provided through lots of different ferns, shade-loving
rodgersias with their subtle flowers, Arum italicum
with pretty veined leaves, and hellebores in early spring. Mike also favours grasses in containers and planted in the ground. A favourite is Hakonechloa macra, an ornamental perennial. “It’s broad leaved, short and not invasive. It arches over in the slightest breeze and almost seems to ripple,” he says. With only a small space to indulge his love of plants, Mike has used every available surface. “I probably have more vertical space than horizontal, so I plant climbers. I’m a big fan of star jasmine, because it’s very well behaved, and for deeply shaded areas, I go for Chinese Virginia creeper ( Parthenocissus henryana), which colours in the autumn and has dark velvety leaves tinged with bronze. It’s a self-clinging climber, so to keep it in control I never let it get beyond my reach. I cut it back in winter.”
Despite his excellent gardening knowledge, Mike admits that sometimes the best laid plans can go awry. “I planted some mind-your-own-business in between the crevices in some brick paving and although I knew it was invasive, I had no
idea how it would take over! I had a lot of small alpines and it swamped them all.”
When he’s not working in his own garden, Mike tends the flower beds in the front of his four-storey block of flats. “It’s a sun-baked area, the opposite of my garden. I’ve created four colour-themed flower beds, blues and whites, purples and bronzes, a ‘tutti frutti’ bed and a hot-coloured one with reds, oranges and golds. I’ve also just introduced a rice paper plant to the area, which really looks spectacular.”
At this time of year, Mike can sit out on his small patio and appreciate his green oasis. “This is the month when I can enjoy the fruits of my labours. On a hot summer night, it’s cool in my garden, and you can only hear the faintest sound of traffic. It really is phenomenal.”