Jo Thompson’s clever design for this long, thin London garden maximises the available space by planting upwards to create a summery veil of the owner’s favourite flower – romantic roses
WORDS NATASHA GOODFELLOW PHOTOGRAPHS RACHEL WARNE
Garden designer Jo Thompson is known for her love of roses. She squeezes them in wherever a project permits and, in her show gardens, where she has freest rein, their sumptuous blooms crop up almost without exception. Rosa ‘Night Owl’ flashed its white eye in last year’s Wildlife Garden at RHS Hampton Court, while apricot R. ‘Buff Beauty’ and pink ‘Bonica’ made a picture-perfect combination in her exquisite Wedgwood Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2019. It was burnished, tawny Rosa ‘Hot Chocolate’ that attracted attention in Jo’s earlier gold medal-winning urban garden for Thrive, and, indeed, it was this very garden that brought the owner of this West London plot to Jo’s door with something of a dream brief.
“The client was British, but she’d been living in California, where she hadn’t been able to grow her beloved roses,” says Jo. “Now that she was back, she was determined to create a lovely English garden and fill it with as many roses as she could.” So far, so straightforward, you might think. But things are rarely so, and the thorn in this rosy picture was that the garden was relatively small; long and thin (around 20m x 5m); and hugely overlooked from all angles. The client also had five sons, and she wanted to be able to provide them with space of their own to be with their friends and to relax. And a pizza oven was also on the wish-list, since one of the boys was a very keen cook.
As it happened, the garden’s limitations actually inspired the solution. “Yes it is long and thin, but we had all the sky above it, which people so often forget,” says Jo. “So we decided to go up and focus on volume, which would also provide more privacy for the family.” Roses, particularly ramblers and climbers, are of course the perfect plants for this, but the usual pergolas and arches seemed to Jo “too twiddly”. “We always work with our location,” she says, “and here, in the middle of town, I felt we needed something more contemporary.”
Inspiration came from the bifold doors leading from the kitchen to the terrace. Jo echoed their style with simple steel supports, each slightly different
