Garden of the Week
This sheltered, secluded space near Hampton Court Palace offers a palette of muted pastel colour with hot splashes everywhere!
People with an artistic eye have an advantage over the rest of us when it comes to garden layout, design and plant combinations. Armi Maddison is among those lucky people, being a practising artist and art educator with over 25 years’ experience. “Colour and texture are very important to me, so my art influences the garden, and vice versa,” she says.
This walled courtyard garden is surrounded on all sides, creating a sheltered and secluded space. The house makes up two sides and a third is home to Armi’s art studio, where she hosts art workshops. This, being an integral part of the garden, helps with her use of plants within her work.
“I use a lot of plants and flowers as inspiration and as sources for my botanical print and artwork. I forage for plant material from the garden for my mixed media textile work and for my print workshops.
These three sides all have large sliding glass doors, so we can also enjoy it from indoors. When the doors are open, it becomes an outdoor room, with lots of seating areas, a dining area and a fire pit.”
A large, central, mature maple tree is the main focal point, the only thing that remains from when they moved in, and it casts dappled light onto raised beds below.
“The garden was very overgrown when we moved in and we actually thought the maple marked the end of the garden. We had to keep it because it’s such a feature and provides amazing structure, which really comes into its own in the winter months, especially when it's lit at night.”
Planted gravel pathways, raised beds and drought-tolerant plants form the main structural basis of the garden. “We’d had 30 years of heavy clay soils in our previous home, a lawn, or muddy grass, which needed lots of constant maintenance and even then never looked great! It was overly wet in winter and baked in
summer, so we decided to make the garden low maintenance and life easier for ourselves.
"Gravel is underfoot, an important consideration as we’re constantly moving from the house to the studio, and I really like the look of plants growing through it. I took inspiration from Beth Chatto's dry garden near Colchester and Derek Jarman’s coastal garden on the shingle shore near Dungeness.”
The raised beds, made from oak railway sleepers, help to add height and provide extra places to sit, and Armi likes the clean lines they create. “They also differentiate the beds from the pathways and keep the soil contained, rather than it constantly spilling onto the paths.”
As well as the palette of more muted, pastel colours of the main plantings, including Gaura lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’, which Armi fell in love with when she saw it when on holiday, she adds splashes of strong, bright, hot colours everywhere.
“I love marigolds, hot pink pelargoniums, poppies and geums, especially orange varieties, for bright summer highlight colour. They help ‘perk up’ the garden. But I stay away from yellows.”
The gravel is more-or-less weed free, thanks to an underlying planting membrane, but not totally free of plants. “Lots of our plants self-seed in it, especially the grasses, fennel and, for the first time last year, agapanthus. I then decide whether to keep them, if they’re in a good place, and which ones to remove. I’m a big believer in giving away what I don’t need.”
An old animal water trough not only provides a home for bulrushes and water lilies, but also the sound of gently bubbling and circulating water, thanks to an integral pump. This and many other ornaments and decorations in the garden come from antique markets and fairs.
“We’re trying not to do this so much, as it’s beginning to look like Steptoe’s yard out there!” Much of the other paraphernalia that's used to decorate the garden came from previous houses, including when they used to live in California, as well as some of Armi’s framed artwork. “Lots of the items are very personal and help to add personality to the garden and evoke memories – including childhood ones. They help add individuality.”
Armi is the main gardener, and designed the garden, but husband Ian is roped in whenever his heavy-duty digging and building skills are needed. She admits she’s a fair-weather gardener, so not much happens in February, apart from planning for what needs doing in March and beyond. This includes looking at what plants need moving or taking out, and which need trimming or cutting back.