A GARDEN FOR EVERY MOOD

Alison Green has transformed rough lawn into a series of romantic Arts & Crafts-style garden rooms at her home, Theobalds Farmhouse

- JACKY HOBBS

The unlikely setting of this impressive garden only heightens its impact. Hemmed inside the M25, and within the London Borough of Enfield, Theobalds Farmhouse Garden defies suburban expectation. Garden designer Alison Green, who trained at Capel Manor College and The London School of Gardening, bought the Grade II listed 17th-century farmhouse in 1999.

‘My instinct was to create four small gardens around the house,’ Alison says. Typical of the Arts & Crafts style and inspired by garden rooms at Hidcote, Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, each garden was to be unique and gardened organically.

In front of the farmhouse house lies a neatly tied Knot Garden, ‘reflective of the period’, with two mirror-image Celtic knot designs traced and then crafted in box, Buxus sempervirens, either side of the house’s entrance. Enclosed in yew (Taxus baccata), evergreen walls contain the space decorated with corresponding symmetrical planting of the ornamental wedding cake tree, Cornus contraversa ‘Variegata’, which is silver in spring and caramelising in autumn. Ruddy-hued peony foliage brings warmth beyond the perimeter of the knots, which are left unplanted to reduce the risk of box blight. The equivalent fully enclosed space to the rear of the house has limited sunlight. The Courtyard Garden is paved with York stone and is set with a stone fountain on a circular, sun-design pebble mosaic.