A tiny courtyard garden in London’s Primrose Hill is tightly enclosed by tall brick walls that conceal an almost theatrical display of multi-level containers filled with enchantingly unexpected plant combinations
WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS RACHEL WARNE
Although you often hear about a garden that was ‘a blank slate’ and ‘a dream to design’, it’s usually easier to work with one that has a few existing elements to factor in. This was certainly the case for Lucy Conochie and Jane Heather, who helped turn a small North London courtyard into a garden that suited both its location and the needs of their client perfectly.
“It’s tiny but it was such an interesting little space,” recalls Lucy of the courtyard, which is a literal stone’s throw from Primrose Hill. “The lovely thing about the garden is that it has this borrowed landscape from the trees and the hill, which you can see over the wall, and that brings a beautiful light contrast throughout the day,” adds Jane.
The design for owner Lucy Marston, a painter, depended on a number of fixed parameters. Walled on three sides, with large sliding doors opening onto it from the sitting room, it was soon apparent that nothing could be hidden in this garden. In fact, with the doors framing a broad view of the courtyard, the opposite was true: everything would be on show. For Jane, a former theatre designer, the garden presented itself as a private stage. “It really is just like a little proscenium box. Light works in an interesting way here because of how it travels across the garden. The way it falls into the courtyard and into the house was a really important aspect of the design,” she explains. The ground area was also limited with the two perimeter beds having a width of only 40cm and 60cm each, and a basement skylight that obviously couldn’t be covered.
Two other elements to work around were a prunus and a prominent trachycarpus, or Chusan palm. The palm provided a strong starting point for the courtyard garden. “Its shadows reflect off the windows of the house so you get a real layering of light and dark across the day,” explains Lucy. And while prunus and palm aren’t obvious bedfellows, they broke the mould to allow for the garden’s other unusual plant combinations. “You wouldn’t normally put a trachycarpus with cottage planting, that would look strange, so it meant the gloves were off and we c
