As a demonstration of how a landscape designer’s distinctive principles can be translated to a small space, there can be few examples as rich as the gardens of Maria Lemos’s terraced home. The layered, textural greens, the emphasis on the delicate and sense of journey are quintessential elements of a Dan Pearson landscape.
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“I was in love with what Dan was doing,” says Maria, who owns boutique shop Mouki Mou. “I had been walking through his plantings at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross on my way to work, and loved how they were in total harmony with the industrial surroundings: how the spirit of the railway was mirrored in the Corten steel punctuating the pathways, and how the movement of grasses reflected the fluidity of the canal.”
When Maria first approached Dan’s studio, she wasn’t sure he would work at such a small scale, but Dan saw something special in Maria; someone who understood the importance of nuance. “She and her husband Gregoris have exquisite taste,” he says. “And it was clear right from the beginning that they wanted to do something unusual.”
In the south-facing front garden, the Georgian façade is softened by playful exuberance: the arching informality of dieramas and Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’; the free-seeding of toadflax and valerian (Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’). Dan saw in the sunny aspect both an opportunity to reflect Maria and Gregoris’s Greek roots and to incorporate an intentional mix of known and new – “Graceful plants that you might not expect to see in London,” says Dan.
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Entering the property, you’re greeted by the welcoming fruit of medlar and grapevine, then by fragrance of myrtle and jasmine, and the spilling of Euphorbia cyparissias ‘Fens Ruby’ and rarer Oenothera stricta ‘Sulphurea’. At the centre is a simple stone bench fringed by broad Acanthus mollis ‘Rue Ledan’. “I wanted to plant graceful things that you could see through,” Dan explains, “to make a veil of planting that feels deeper and more mysterious. We wanted plants that would seed around a bit, too, like Digitalis lutea, to give it a lived-in feeling.”
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Conversely, the back garden has the repose of a woodland glade, brick-walled, and made yet more intimate by a canopy of neighbouring trees and a spilling Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’. From the kitchen, the garden is naturally framed by large sliding doors. “The kitchen is where our family all live,” says Maria, “so the back garden is what we see every day, at all moments of the year – it really is our backdrop.”
Far from having a limiting effect, such a frame can enhance the sense of scale. “As soon as you frame something, the aperture can make it feel more intense and more limitless,” says Dan. “You start to imagine what’s beyond, so the space becomes bigger in your mind. We’ve done quite a lot of work in Japan where the idea of the picture garden is common; where the composition is considered carefully from the inside – something Maria understood, too, having spent time in Japan.”
The frame very much informed how Dan devised the planting layers. He removed a pre-existing willow but retained a mature evergreen bay as screening. Then, he brought in the airiness of two multi-stemmed Amelanchier x lamarckii, and the structural permanence of evergreens and semi-evergreens such as Mahonia eurybracteata subsp. ganpinensis ‘Soft Caress’, Danae racemosa, elegant Disporum longistylum ‘Night Heron’, and the rust-fronded Dryopteris erythrosora.
“Lots of the plants in the back garden have a kind of sparkly quality – the Fuchsia magellanica var. molinae, for example, with its many bright flowers; the shade-tolerant Melica uniflora f. albida; and autumn-flowering Cyclamen hederifolium. If you scale the flowers down, the space starts to feel bigger, whereas if the flowers are bigger, the space shrinks.”
A key principle of landscape-making is, of course, a sense of journey, and despite its constrained contours, this was something both designer and client were keen to include. A slim path of self-binding hoggin, edged with Corten steel, weaves a loose circle through the space, passing a sky-reflecting water bowl and immersing you in the robust foliage of Aruncus ‘Horatio’, tall Chasmanthium latifolium and Persicaria virginiana var. filiformis, with its fine mist of autumn flowers.
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Eventually, the path yields to an area of fragmented paving. “Maria and Gregoris both knew the work of Dimitris Pikionis, the extraordinary landscape architect who made the walk up to the Acropolis in Athens,” says Dan. “It’s made from the broken pieces of antiquity that were lying on the old roadway – pieces of history embedded in the ground. We made a small area of paving, which referenced that beautiful walk – old bricks and edging, and tiles from the building before.”
Here a lovely log bench is a favourite spot for Maria to enjoy the space. “The garden isn’t big, but when you sit on that beautiful tree trunk, in the shadiest part, you feel you’re inside somewhere,” she says. “I never feel like I need to go to the countryside, I just want to sit in my back garden.”
