Beyond the shadow OF A DROUGHT
Alex Mitchell loves anything that is “spiky, glaucous and would thrive on a dusty French hillside”. Take inspiration from her drought-tolerant Mediterranean garden in Kent
For garden writer and author Alex Mitchell, making a garden at The Granary, near Sevenoaks in Kent, was like coming home in more ways than one. For a start, she was literally coming home – to the fruit farm where she grew up and where her mother still lives in the house next door. And secondly, the garden she has created has its roots in childhood summers, spent with her grandparents by the coast in Chile. “I love foreign climes and I wanted it to feel sun-baked,” Alex says. “Almost without realising it, I’ve created a space that captures that sense of happiness and escapism you get when you are on holiday.”
It sprang, eight years ago, from a concrete yard in front of the ragstone farm building that she and her wife Donna have converted into their home. Alex has capitalised on the site’s assets and turned any of its downsides to her advantage. Enclosed on three sides by buildings, the garden feels naturally sheltered and the views to the east are of uninterrupted farmland. “The builders took off the top layer of concrete and we found dry impoverished soil underneath,” Alex says. “There wasn’t enough budget to buy in topsoil and I wanted the garden to be of this place anyway, so I decided to work with what we’ve got.”
She and Donna have two boys, Theo and Arthur, and Alex wanted almost a yard feel, with space for them to ride their bikes around, so she sketched out a series of softly curving beds with winding sandy paths in between, suggesting the natural flow of a river: “I marked the areas with spray paint and asked the builders to dump spare soil from the adjoining field onto the beds.” It is still very poor but Alex’s point is that if you go with it, you gradually find things that thrive and will fend for themselves.
Drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants love it here, particularly rosemary and Euphorbia characias subsp.
wulfenii – both in flower in spring. Alex took inspiration from Beth Chatto’s dry garden in Essex, which had similarly low-grade soil, and she repeats certain plants, including the rosemary and various euphorbias, as well as santolinas, cistus and grey-green Melianthus major to give it a cohesive design. At the edges are velvety lamb’s ears Stachys byzantina ‘Silver Carpet’, mat-forming silver-leaved snow-in-summer Cerastium tomentosum and masses of oregano: “The oregano threatens to take over but I keep it in check by breaking bits off.”
At first, Alex didn’t put in enough structural plants: “I sowed lots of seeds and put in grasses but everything was tiny and it looked awful in winter.” One bed now mimics a dinosaur’s back – all part of the natural rise and fall of the planting, echoing the undulating forms of the farmland beyond the garden. Pittosporums, including ‘Oliver Twist’ with black stems, neat, mounded ‘Golf Ball’ and
blue-green ‘Wrinkled Blue’, are loosely clipped to give rounded shapes without looking too formal.
Fastigiate Irish yews provide strong verticals, as do giant fennels (Ferula gigantea), with acid-yellow flowers in spring. As a nod to Alex’s grandparents’ garden in Cachagua, Chile, there are Chilean plants including a maiten tree (Maytenus boaria) – like a small evergreen weeping willow – and an unusual prostrate evergreen Baccharis patagonica, which she describes as “hardy as hell, doesn’t get diseases and has lovely white flowers in summer”. Both came from Architectural Plants (architecturalplants.com).
Alex loves to experiment. “Anything that is spiky, glaucous and would thrive on a dusty French hillside and I’m in! Things should be resilient and look as though they don’t even need you,” she says. Her approach to gardening oscillates between benign neglect and obsessive interest. “I’m good at blocking out the things I don’t like – and yet I can also zone right in and precision-weed a tiny area for hours,” she says. “Working in a garden is mindful and creative. That allows you to be reactive and make changes as you go along.”
She has struggled with weeds, particularly in the compacted Breedon gravel paths. After rejecting glyphosate and trying a flamegun so fierce that it threatened to burn their house down, she has finally settled on a kind of soft shoe shuffle. “I scuff the weeds out with the toe of my boot,”
Alex says. “Do it enough and they give up. I can even bribe Theo to do it for me with the promise of a ten pound note.”
The family most often likes to hang out in the sunniest area, which is shaded by overhanging ivy and graced with a scarlet-flowering Mediterranean mastic tree Pistacia
lentiscus. As the land drops gently away beyond its boundary, it feels rather like an infinity garden and it’s a good place for Alex to keep an eye on her much-loved sheep and hens: “This was a playground for my brothers and me when I was little and it’s still a playground – an escapist’s garden with a sense of peace.”