Elspeth Thompson

CAMILLA SHIVARG'S GARDEN in Earls Court gives hope to Londoners who are despairing that they'll never get their overgrown plots into shape. Just four years ago this was a jungle of self-sown trees and neglected roses, which grew amid patches of scrappy lawn and crazy paving. But Camilla is now the proud owner of an immaculate garden. Its clever design and ambitious planting won her first prize in the Chelsea Gardens Guild and attracted more than 100 visitors when she opened it to the public for the National Gardens Scheme in July.

Camilla is a sculptor and you can see her bronze and terracotta figures perched among the foliage and reclining on the edge of the pool. When she moved here with her husband, gallery owner Jonathan Ross, they both had strong ideas about how the garden should look so, in many ways, starting from scratch was an advantage.

'It was an awful lot of work,' she remembers. 'We changed the levels in the garden, digging out around the basement area and putting steps up to the lawn. Pipes and cables for water and electricity were installed at the start -there were trenches dug right down the garden and it looked like the Somme for a while.'

The garden was divided into three main areas - a stone terrace near the house, a central circular lawn surrounded by raised flowerbeds and a secret shady area beneath a huge old walnut tree. The York stone for the terrace came from Munstead Wood in Surrey where Gertrude Jekyll lived. Camilla knew the head gardener who let them buy it alter it was removed due to renovation work. 'It's funny to think we have Gertrude Jekyll's old terrace here in our
Earl's Court garden,' she says with a smile.

The structure of the garden was built using the ripped out crazy paving to make a series of raised beds that sweep around the central lawn and link the different levels. 'Plants look so much belter raised up a bit from ground level,' savs Camilla. 'After all, when you buy them at the nursery they are on shelves. So often when you get them home and put them down on the ground they look disappointing.' These beds are about 30cm or so off the ground and tilled with a mixture of soil and garden compost.

Camilla began with a number ot strong shrubs and small trees that anchor the design and create a permanent structure. Japanese acers and the purple-leafed Cercis canadensis were chosen for their stunning foliage, while a tree fern, various phormiums and bamboos add an air of the exotic. The honey spurge,E.mellifera, which towers behind the pond was bought for £1 in a tiny pot soon alter Camilla moved in.

Other large foliage plants include the glaucous leaves of Melianthus major, which look as if they have been cut out using pinking shears, and the silvery' 'hands' of Rubus lineatus an ornamental relation of the raspberry. Some particularly striking combinations are grouped around the pond, including the striped giant reed Arundo donax ‘Variegata', which sits against a clump of dark purple-leafed cannas and the corkscrew curls of Juncus effusus.

Different areas of the garden are devoted to different types of planting. Against the blue-painted trellis near the house, where Camilla grows tomatoes, the plants have been chosen to complement the red fruit, such as marigolds and nasturtiums, and the beautiful climber Abutilon x hybridum 'Kentish Belle' with its apricot and maroon flowers. The sunny beds in full view of the house contain the brightest colours. Scarlet and crimson monadas with their splendidly ragged petals, dark red snapdragons, burgundy penstemons and tangerine osteospermums make a stunning combination.

Beneath the walnut tree, in perhaps the greatest challenge of the whole garden, Camilla has gathered together a wonderful collection of shade-loving plants. There are the gold and silver ferns, lamiums and ivies to lift this area out ot the gloom. Varieties more commonly seen as house plants flourish here, including begonias, dark red Coleus and a Plectranthus with leaves of silver on top and purple underneath. Above it all the Hydrangea sargentii, holds out its cream flowers like circles of handmade lace.

Camilla's artistic touch is in evidence everywhere, not least in her skilful use of the newly fashionable dark flower and foliage colours, which can so easily get lost among other plants. She grows the black hollyhock, Alcea rosea Nigra, and the dark lobe-leafed Ipomea 'Blackie'against thelime-green leaves and magenta flowers of Geranium 'Ann Folkard'. She has also carefully positioned a grass with dark purply plumes against the lilac haze of Thalictrum delavayi 'Hewitts Double'.

By playing with pots around the steps up from the basement gallery and the stairs down from the sitting room, Camilla satisfies her desire for change in the garden each year. She trains morning glories up the handrails, groups pots of blue agapanthus on the treads and creates clusters of tender agaves, begonias, cannas and the silver spears of Astelia chathamicu at the bottom.

Camilla particularly enjoys using annuals in London for their welcome brightness and the way they lend the garden a blaze of colour in early autumn. She grows many from seeds herself, including the dark purple amaranthus or Love Lies Bleeding. The castor oil plant, Ricinus communis, with its dark glossy leaves and red spiked buds, is another good choice for adding interest in the autumn. Phlox and cleomes also prolong the garden's colourful appearance.

Long after the flowers have finally faded Camilla's sculptures remain, contributing to the garden's structure right through the winter. They are a subtle, mysterious presence in the garden - from the Green Man, whose face, surrounded by ivy and oak leaves, spouts water into the pool, to the young man with a mohican haircut who lurks, like some punk Pan, amid the Gardener's ||| Delight tomatoes.

Camilla Shivarg's sculptures cost from around £400 for a small terracotta figure to several thousand pounds for a large bronze. Contact her at Gallery 286 on (020) 7370 2239 or see more of her work at www.gallery286.com.

This article first appeared in The London Magazine, October 2001

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