The Commonside Garden
There’s a wonderful outpost of Victorian houses situated just on the edge of Barnes Common, the owners look out over beautiful views and now when road and aircraft noise is much reduced they wake up to life in the countryside. Celia and Richard’s covetable garden has beautiful herbaceous borders, an immaculate lawn, topiary and a fruit and vegetable patch.
Celia says: It’s a south-facing garden with walls on three sides. The west facing border contains mainly shrubs with cotinus, hydrangea panniculata, viburnum and myrtle. The herbaceous border facing east has a variety of perennials aimed at giving colour any time in the year. The vegetable garden is separate and we grow broad beans, runner beans, beetroot, courgette, spinach and chard.
When we moved in thirteen years ago we started to change a rather formal designery garden with a lot of box and topiary into a more natural, varied garden by creating a herbaceous border, planting fruit trees and by starting our vegetable garden. I look after the day to day maintenance of the garden with some help from my husband and professional help once a week from two wonderful gardeners, one of whom is marvellous with pruning and the vegetable garden and the other who looks after the lawn.
The vegetable garden gives us a lot of pleasure and we love growing and eating our own vegetables. The herbaceous border is a constant source of delight, especially the hardy geraniums, salvias and delphiniums. And of course we love our rose garden.
We, and our visitors, get so much pleasure and enjoyment from our garden and we’re only sorry that it’s not possible for people to visit it this year.
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