Garden of the Week
Non Morris has created the perfect year-round city garden, but it’s a project that never stops!
As a professional garden designer, Non Morris could be forgiven for viewing her own London plot as something of a busman’s holiday, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, as she says, you only really get to know a garden over a period of years – which plants work where, how they grow in the soil you have, the combinations that best suit the eye. Non and her husband, Nick, have been in their South London home for 22 years and she created the garden completely from scratch – but in her job she doesn’t have the luxury of going back to gardens she’s designed every day for 22 years to see how things are going!
“We live in a terrace of 10 townhouses that date back to 1840, but they had become derelict and were then used as squats,” she recalls. “So when they were renovated there was nothing in the garden at all other than some grass. It was a completely blank canvas.”
At the time, Non was working in film and television, and was also a mother of baby twins – and it was then that she decided her future lay in horticulture. She enrolled at the English Garden School at Chelsea Physic Garden and never looked back. “I think I just knew that was what I wanted to do,” she says. “I started learning about horticulture back then, and you never stop learning. All the time you find out new things.” At home, she set about creating a haven for her family to enjoy, but began by planting a magnolia at the front of the house. “We have this row of cream, stucco, rather severe-looking houses, but my aunt was a nurse who trained at King’s College Hospital, not far from here, and she remembered a time when there were magnolias all the way along Camberwell Drove so we thought it would be nice to recreate that,” says Non. “It’s huge now! But it makes such a difference to the front of the house.”
At the rear, she was acutely aware that the garden had a long, narrow feel to it – 95ft long and 30ft wide – and that, as with so many town houses, one mostly looks down on it. “It’s a tall, thin house and you see the garden as you come down the stairs,” she says. “It’s the classic city garden shape but you need it to look really good from above because that’s how you mostly view it.”
As a low garden, it’s in shade much of the time but Non’s clever planting schemes get around that. Alchemilla mollis and euphorbia pack the borders to give different greens throughout the year.
“I just love euphorbia! It’s so beautifully vibrant, and for such a long period, too. I absolutely love the way it self-seeds around the garden – I have a thing for self-seeders! Erigeron and viola are others that I’m happy to let do their own thing – there’s brick edging around the lawn to give some separation from the borders but as the summer goes on it does all get a little wilder!” says Non.
has three varieties of euphorbia in the garden –
E. mellifera, E. characias and
E. robbiae – all giving different tones. The robbiae, says Non, is a great plant for shade and she plants it under her hydrangeas.
As her children have grown up, a section at the bottom of the garden, which was once a fencedShe off play area, is now her working area and cutting garden – a real hive of activity. There she has plants started that can be switched into pots as others go over the top – so when the tulips are finished, for example, lilies or verbena can take their place and the tulip bulbs revert to the ‘working area’. In that sense this is a perfect non-stop garden, with interest all year round. Rosa mutabilis, for example, has in the past flowered here from April all the way through to Christmas!
One of its most defining features is a magnificent weeping crab apple, just off the patio area near the house. “There are two different levels there so we can actually see its weeping habit to its very best effect,” says Non. “It really is glorious when the blossom is out.”
Non works hard to improve her clay soil with leaf mould and plenty of compost each year – but this is not a garden where there is much soil on view. Layers of planting give it an incredibly lush feeling, and in turn it becomes an urban hotspot for wildlife – pollinators abound here.
“We have a friend in the street who keeps bees and he insists that the honey from city bees is the most delicious because of the variety of plants the bees visit, and there is
probably something in that,” says Non. “We get a lot of bees here but other gardens nearby probably have completely different plants.”
Four ready-trained cordon apples (from www.pennardplants.com) make a delightful feature against one wall. They don’t take up too much space, but give blossom and a little fruit, and a sense of structure. Underplanted with erigeron they are quite the talking point.
“Last year I grew black velvet nasturtiums under them too and that was a great success,” says Non. “The contrast was lovely, plus they’re edible flowers! That’s the key – always going back and trying new things. A garden is never finished, after all.”