Exploring London Gardens

London gardens have intrigued me since childhood when a train journey from our home in the south east into the city meant the chance to spy into otherwise hidden spaces.

Generally quite small and often surrounded by buildings, they are vitally important green refuges from city life – something I appreciated on my postgrad year in London.

A trip with the Garden Media Guild to see two London gardens showed just how varied these spaces are and what surprises can be hidden from the street.

Corten steel makes a great backdrop to some of Mona’s plants.

Our first stop was Mona’s Garden between Highgate and Muswell Hill in North London, although you would be forgiven for thinking you were in New Zealand.

Created by Mona Abboud over the past 22 years, it’s home to the National Collection of Corokia, which come from New Zealand. These small-leaved evergreens are, she told us, the perfect alternative to box and she has used them to replace plants that were ravaged by box caterpillar moth.

“They are much better than box. They flower and some turn bronze in the winter. Corokia glows in the light, which box doesn’t do.”

There are only three species of corokia but many hybrids and her collection numbers 40, including ‘Mona’s Magic’, a seedling found in her garden.

Orginally, the garden had a Mediterranean style but today it’s filled with more exotic things, many of them from New Zealand, including Dacrydium cupressinum, a conifer commonly known as rimu, phormium, pseudopanax, Leptospermum scoparium, and Coprosma virescens. There are also several restio from South Africa and plants that many of us had never encountered before.

Mona's Garden proving London gardens can be exotic. — The long, narrow garden has been cleverly divided.

Clever use of shrubs and trees to block the view and a winding path mean that despite it being a long, narrow plot, like many London gardens, not everything can be seen at once and you are tempted to explore.

Water adds another dimension to the garden.

Canopies have also been lifted, creating planting spaces underneath and allowing stems and branches to be appreciated.

“I lift the crown of everything so you have a three dimensional effect,” Mona explained. “In a long and narrow garden, if you plant things in blocks, you have blocks of everything.”

Chaenomeles and camellia add a splash of colour.

The main colour was green with tinges of bronze as the corokia were still sporting their winter shades and flowers were limited to occasional flashes of colour.

More important is the contrast of foliage shapes and textures, what Mona, a professional singer, describes as rhythm.

“You want rhythm in a garden. If the rhythm is the same, you lose interest.”

She has just bought a piece of land from her neighbour and work has started on landscaping it. More room for the corokia and a greenhouse for propagating are planned.

Mona is going to leave the house and garden to horticulture charity Perennial to use as one of their public gardens. More information about Mona’s Garden can be found here.

Southwood Lodge one of the London gardens that opens for the National Garden Scheme. — The terrace is sheltered by a mature hedge.

The second of our London gardens was just as surprising, not for the plants, which were more the sort of thing I regularly see in gardens, but for the site.

From the street, there’s no indication of the size or steep slope that Southwood Lodge in Highgate occupies. In fact, owner Sue Whittington told us that at 400ft it was the highest point until you got to the Urals.

The sloping plot has a series of linked pools.

The garden was laid out by a former architect owner and the basic design of winding paths around three linked pools and sloping beds remains the same, although the original grass paths have been replaced by granite setts.