Nature’s way
A wildlife-friendly garden close to London’s Hampstead Heath
Garden designers can be inclined towards an out-with-the-old, in-withthe-new approach to existing plants to gain that tantalising blank canvas. But that’s not London-based garden designer Miria Harris’s way. Hers is a sensitive, low-intervention approach that urges sustainability and biodiversity. Other recurring themes in her work include a desire to play down hard boundaries and to weave edible elements through her planting schemes – tempting humans and wildlife alike.
The clients on this project, a family living in an extended Georgian cottage, a stone’s throw from the urban wilderness of London’s Hampstead Heath, had a tentative brief
that suited Miria’s considered approach. Architects McLaren Excell had just completed an extensive renovation of the house with a thoughtful layering of old and new elements. The garden had inevitably been mangled in the process, but the family wanted to evoke the wild, overgrown atmosphere it had originally possessed. “The idea was to make the most of what was already there and to build on that, but also to leave a shadow of the former garden, a nod to the past,” says Miria.
She drew inspiration from the work of pioneer wild gardener William Robinson, setting out to design a garden that did more than pay lip-service to the heath nearby, to create a wildlife-filled space through an abundance of berries and nectar-rich plants. Today the garden gradually progresses from a more ordered, rectilinear style by the house to a looser, more naturalistic area beyond. The long, rectangular plot is bordered by three neighbouring gardens and slopes gently downwards towards a multi-stemmed hazel and towering Philadelphus that has been carefully pruned to encourage flowering within nose-range.
The lawn was a prerequisite for the family’s football-mad son. Miria opted for a speciesrich lawn mix, which when mowed looks and serves as a conventional lawn, but when allowed to grow tall, as it is around its margins, is studded with salad burnet, clover and lady’s bedstraw. The middle of the garden is anchored by a free-form isthmus of a bed, featuring three, old, bird cherry trees, one of them dead. “Our native bird cherries, with their limited season of visual interest, are not hugely exciting but they do bring height, structure – and birds – to the garden,” says Miria. They make the perfect frame for a clambering ‘Kiftsgate’ rose and Vitis coignetiae, with colourful leaves and beautiful rosehips in the autumn.
Miria also prizes the dead tree’s rusty colour, which echoes the Corten steel of the house, the trellis frames and border edging.
She was keen to bring differing levels to this flat garden and introduced varying height in the borders with Sambucus, Cotinus, ornamental grasses such as Calamagrostis emodensis and large-leaved heucheras, in a palette of rich burgundy, rusty orange, copper and dirty pink. In an impressively bold stroke, Miria planted the rectangular island border in the middle of the poured concrete terrace with bronze fennel that towers head-high from midsummer. “It acts as a veil that filters the view and creates intrigue, to tempt people to come and explore the garden for themselves,” she says.
In this garden, there’s an ongoing attitude of working with nature rather than trying to constrain it. If the lawn isn’t bowling green-perfect over a dry summer, it isn’t watered. And there’s no sense that the garden is ever finished. “Each year there is a new conversation between the different plants,” smiles Miria. “I don’t think I’ll ever be done with this garden.”