SPRING DRAMA
We all need a bit of a lift after winter and few gardens flingthemselves into spring quite like this one. Created over the course of 30 years, it welcomes the season with scented flowering shrubsand a spectacularly colourful sea of tulips
When Charles Rutherfoord and his partner Rupert Tyler moved into their large Victorian house off Clapham Common in south London, it was split into six flats with a spacious garden – by London standards – that was full of brambles. ‘We filled 10 skips with rubbish, from cookers to corrugated iron and bicycles,’ says Charles, an architectural consultant. Clearly keen to go for impact, the couple first tried turning the garden into a wheat field. ‘It was coming on quite well until a storm flattened it,’ Charles recalls. The next year, they planted it with sunflowers. ‘That worked until the squirrels cut them off at the bottom.’ But the following spring at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Charles fell in love with tulips, and the rest is history.
Every spring since then, Charles heads to the Bloms Bulbs stand at Chelsea, looks at the tulips in flower and gets out his notebook. ‘It’s a fantastic way to choose because inevitably a printed photograph is not as good as real life. We’re all tremendous friends now. I spend an hour at the stand imagining what colours would look good together and then order there and then so the best varieties don’t sell out,’ he says. Each autumn, Charles and Rupert sow a staggering 2,500 tulip bulbs and visitors throng to gasp at the show when the garden opens for the National Garden Scheme.
With an instinctive eye for bold colour combinations, Charles is unafraid of being clashy and the result is joyous. In the shady front garden, pale lemon tulip ‘Moonlight Girl’ makes a fresh and fizzy pairing with the pure white narcissus ‘Bridal Crown’, standing out luminously against the dark copper beech hedge. On the narrow first-floor balcony, apple-fresh ‘Suncatcher’ throng in troughs underplanted with winter violas. But it’s out the back that they really let
‘The fantastic and freeing thing about gardens is that it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake’
themselves off the leash with a sea of red, pink, orange and dark purple tulips stretching up to the greenhouse.
Hot pink ‘Mariette’, ‘Red Proud’ and a volcanic red and yellow striped tulip mix with deep purple ‘Queen of Night’. Meanwhile, Orange and lemon ‘Muscadet’ and ‘Ballerina’ – the only tulip Charles grows that comes back reliably every year – make a citrussy cocktail. Is there any colour combination he would avoid? Not really. ‘The fantastic and freeing thing about a garden is that it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. Apart from trees, plants aren’t expensive, so just try things out,’ he says.
FOCAL POINTS AND JOURNEYS
Hard landscaping is minimal in this garden, consisting of a couple of narrow cobbled paths and a seating area in one corner. The loose, exuberant planting is set off by the fantastic eyecatching giant steel bull sculpture and a futuristic glass dome from Solardome, which houses their tender plants.
NOT JUST TULIPS
The spectacle of Charles and Rupert’s garden isn’t just down to the tulips. It’s the other spring-flowering shrubs, trees, perennials and climbers that add to the scent and throng of colour. Tree peonies ‘Rimpo’ and ‘Cardinal Vaughan’ almost steal the show with impossibly large diva-ish flowers in deep reds and pinks, while a stepover apple tree is laden with fresh pink blossom. And at the feet of the tulips, a froth of blue forget-me-nots seeds itself everywhere. He can’t remember planting it; it just appeared, as forget-me-nots tend to. Pale yellow is a fresh theme throughout from the fountains of flowering shrub Coronilla valentina subsp glauca (glaucous scorpion-vetch) to Acacia pravissima with its triangular armour-plated leaves and tiny baubles of airy yellow flowers.
NOW, FOLLOW THAT
Once the tulips have died down, dahlias take up the baton in the main part of the garden. ‘For quite a long time, I was focused on tulips,’ says Charles, ‘but for the past nine years I’ve been working harder on things in flower all through the year.’ Autumn-flowering camellias, hydrangeas, roses, delphiniums and Echium pininana ensure the spectacle doesn’t end when spring is over. This garden will continue to evolve and change, but whatever Charles and Rupert decide to do next, you know it will be quite a show.
The Chase will be open in 2020 as part of the National Garden Scheme on Tuesday 28 April 5.30-8pm; Sunday 3 May 12-5 pm; Sunday 5 July 12-5 pm; Sunday 25 October 12-4pm. See ngs.org.uk for further details