Designer Visit: At Home in Jurassic Park, in North London - Gardenista
Tom Stuart-Smith likes high drama. The couple s townhouse newly remodeled by architects Guard Tillman Pollock had a two story glass wall overlooking a long narrow... ...backyard Stuart Smith planted strategically Dicksonia antarctica hairy trunked tree ferns from Australia with canopies as big as 20 feet in diameter Photographs courtesy of Guard Tillman Pollock. The setting called for “some sort of primitive wildness in the city,” Stuart-Smith said. Visible from the kitchen is a garden where texture and form triumph, and where the mood is, as Stuart-Smith wished, otherworldly. Stuart-Smith’s pared-down plant palette was limited to six. The tree ferns with hairy trunks and parasol fronds grow among clumps of rounded boxwood, creating a juxtaposition of textures and silhouettes. From the second floor landing (L), the garden is a tempting mystery. Stuart-Smith’s design for the garden, which measures approximately 65 feet long by 30 feet wide, takes into account an elevation change from the terrace to the back of the garden, where he designed a small sandpit. In every garden, a visitor should be able to go on a journey, Stuart-Smith believes. “The idea of the place is that even within a relatively small space there can be a liberating sense of other worldliness,” says Stuart-Smith. From the street, the garden is a hidden oasis, its privacy guarded by a high brick wall.