Garden of the week
Tested by curious fox cubs, the dry London microclimate and simply having too many plants, Matthew Bradby continues to battle on...
Leafy might not be an adjective you’d immediately associate with Tottenham, but Matthew Bradby’s large plot in the cottage garden suburb of Tower Gardens Estate is both lush and tranquil.
“The council originally planned to have allotments here, but then the land got tacked on to the gardens of these former council houses, so they’re surprisingly large for London,” Matthew says. “Plus they’re divided by low wooden rails, so we all enjoy our neighbours’ light and planting.”
When he moved into the house in 2003 the garden was well stocked, but a little overgrown. “It had a traditional layout of patio, lawn, borders, rockery and shrubbery, but the planting was so dense I had to remove things for several years before I could decide what to put in,” he explains.
Seedling flowering cherries were rampant at the garden’s sunny far end, so Matthew chopped these right back then dug out the roots before clearing the area to create a vegetable patch. He located his greenhouse here and provided a path and box hedging.
He grows different tomato varieties in the outdoor beds, saving seeds of his favourites
each year, with squash and cucumbers in the greenhouse.
However, soft fruit bushes, grown from cuttings, take up most of the space. “I soon found out that my plants have to tolerate long, dry spells here in the south-east, and the gooseberries and redcurrants are coping well with this year’s high June temperatures,” he says.
Ten years ago he added a ‘Chasselas’ grapevine, a white grape commonly grown in France but rarely in the UK. “It fruits so well I’m able to make wine from it,” says Matthew.
Within the rest of the garden, fine trees make striking statements. Matthew inherited the weeping willow, and prunes the lower branches annually to raise the canopy and control its spread. There’s also a 7½m (25ft) tall ash-leaved maple. “It’s put on a lot of growth over the past few years, and it dries out the surrounding soil, but it’s such an attractive tree I don’t mind,” he says.
To give a more Mediterranean feel, Matthew has planted ginkgo, olive and loganberry trees together with a Japanese
banana. “The Musa basjoo is now 10 feet tall and has survived outside, although I did cover the bottom five feet of trunk with old carpet when snow was forecast last winter,” he says. Matthew uses lots of ferns and grasses that thrive in sun or shade to provide a lush backdrop for traditional herbaceous plants, such as penstemons and peonies, while potted petunias and begonias give splashes of seasonal colour. He’s also attached areas of trellis to the boundary rails to enable him to grow climbing roses, honeysuckles, jasmine and clematis.
His neighbour informed him that the strange tiled structure in the garden was the remains of an Anderson shelter, which was installed in each of the gardens in 1938. Matthew dug out the interior and put a liner in it to create a fish pond, complete with frogs, newts and lily pads. He’s also creating a small pond using a fibreglass liner and plans to replace the waterfall by the willow that he removed when he first arrived. “The waterfall was leaking and the pond kept filling up with leaves so I took them out, but that’s one decision I regret now,” he says.
Matthew tries to garden organically and tolerates visits
from foxes and their cubs, ‘which love to jump on new plants’, and uses biological control to deal with slugs and box tree moth caterpillars.
This is only Matthew’s second year of opening for the NGS. Working for the Queen’s Nursing Institute charity, which the NGS supports, he was approached at a gardens and health initiative to open for the scheme.
“My work on the family garden I inherited has been a process of evolution rather than revolution,” Matthew says. “I just keep tweaking it little by little to bring out more of its potential.”