I’ve just visited a garden with a superb sense of place.
But what is ‘sense of place’ in a garden? And how can it direct the design of your garden?
The garden belongs to Mark Walker. It was designed by Simon Phillips of Mambo Garden Design – although he would consider it as a garden that is evolving rather than one which is formally designed. ‘It’s not a garden where you go in for a week and change everything and then leave,’ he says.
Mark and Simon have taken great care to keep as many of the historic elements of the garden as they can.
And it’s in Margate, a once-fashionable seaside town that fell on hard times and is now being regenerated.
A sense of place starts with the environment
Obviously, the starting point for any garden is the climate and the weather. As a seaside town, Margate has mild winters and it’s also quite sunny. But, near the seafront it can also be windy, so if you’re near the sea, you would need to consider windy garden tips.
Mark’s house is one street back from the sea, however. It’s in one of Margate’s formerly grand Victorian streets, with high buildings and ornate period detail. The garden is therefore sheltered but shady. It’s surrounded by tall buildings, which gives it a ‘secret garden’ feel.
Mark had heard about the regeneration of Margate and how artists were discovering the town. There are some wonderful houses, because it was so fashionable in Georgian and Victorian times. But many of the houses have now been turned into boarding houses, hostels and flats. Some were even left derelict.
This house had belonged to a family who had run it as a bed-and-breakfast hotel in the summer. ‘The garden was very small but the lady who lived here was a passionate gardener, so it had several mature trees and shrubs,’ says Mark. He and Simon have kept as many of these as they can, which contributes to the ‘texture’ of the garden and the sense of place.
A sense of a secret garden – of stepping into another world
The small, but lush space has the feel of a secret garden. A mature cordyline reaches up to the sky, creating a tropical feel. And a Portuguese laurel almost obscures the view of two old sheds. ‘When the house was a b&b, the children used to sleep in the sheds in the gardening during the summer months,’ says Mark. ‘So their rooms could be rented out.’
The sheds were dilapidated but Mark and Simon decided to keep them. They’re part of the history of the house. For the time being, they’re not even painting them or putting new glass in the windows, although they have added a new roof. ‘It’s a corrugated iron roof,’ says Simon,’ because that gives a tropical feel and it sounds good when it rains.’
But even corrugated iron roofs reflect the town around them. I saw several corrugated iron canopies held up by Georgian or Victorian uprights.
What to keep and what to remove?
This issue of what to keep and what to take out is central to giving your garden a sense of place. The history of the house as a once-fashionable seaside home, then a b&b and now being regenerated, is similar to that of many buildings around it. And regeneration doesn’t have to mean cleaning everything up and whitewashing over the peeling paint.
There was a large, rotting conservatory in the garden. ‘Very little of the original fabric remained,’ says Mark. ‘So we took the decision to take it out. It also restores the balance between the house and garden, because the garden is so small compared to the house.’
When they took the conservatory down, they discovered that it wasn’t the original conservatory after all. They found traces of a much smaller, original conservatory underneath it. By coincidence, this was almost exactly the area that Mark had planned to cover with a modern glass extension. So by taking the conservatory down, they’ve restored the house to its original footprint.
‘When we took it down, we then had a great debate about what to do with the walls. Should we paint them or strip them?’ he says. In the end, they decided to leave the paint of previous generations on the walls. ‘It adds a sense of texture to the garden,’ says Mark.