A DIFFERENT LEVEL

Over 20 years, Emily Erlam has nurtured and edited the plants in her sloping city garden to create an intriguing, immersive space

- PHOTOGRAPHS ÉVA NÉMETH

Nearly 20 years ago, we bought a house in north London, not just for the building itself, but because hidden behind the terraced row was a secluded garden a delightful surprise in this central London location, just a stone's throw from King's Cross.

The garden was extremely long and narrow, and sloped gently upwards towards the back, with a central concrete-paver pathway one municipal tile wide, running the length of the garden. At its culmination was a handmade shed spanning the width of the garden, propped up by (or to a certain extent, propping up) the beautiful double-height blackened Georgian wall behind. The garden had long been neglected, and the wildness of self-seeded trees and weeds was particularly alluring, and enabled me to think of it as a blank canvas.

Despite its dishevelled condition, there was a grapevine that had matured against the south-facing aspect of the shed, which in turn was full of dusty old bottles of homemade wine, tracing fingerprints of its previous owner. That first summer was hot, and we spent many memorable days digging and tugging at brambles to clear the decks and begin again. In the evenings we would light a small fire to burn the days arisings and cook supper on the embers.

Back then, I worked in television and had no formal training in garden design. I certainly didn't have a clear vision of what the garden should look like. We found a local landscape contractor to reinstate the garden walls. For practical reasons, we terraced the space into four levels, beginning at the lower ground floor and rising toward the back wall, with each retained by a reclaimed London stock brick wall. This maximised our access to the sun as it passed over the houses, and created a layered view from inside the house.