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In a horticulture - craze land that loves to talk , read , and gather about the internal Falco subbuteo , the British landscape architectJinny Blomhas no web log and no video show . She is famously tight - lipped about who her clients are , and stays in close-fitting pinch with her purpose : in her London office , Blom employs a faculty of just five , counting the person who answers the phone . Nobody who knows Blom ’s work , however , would call it untalkative . She ’s prolific , with two dozen projects going at once ( including , currently , a private garden in the States ) , and wildly varying : she moves from neotraditional schemes , with wall gardens and giant topiary , to initiation that are nervily contemporary . At last year ’s “ Jardins , Jardin , ” Paris ’s hip urban - garden exposition , she fuse the forbidding masses of giant stone seedpods with romantic Mary Jane and glowering violet salvias . Blom has the sweeping vision , and the direction skills , to transform full landscapes , delivering large - scale dramatic event while getting the detail precisely right .
see the gardens of Jinny Blom in our two sloping trough show : Temple Guiting , andChalkland Farm Gardens . Photo by : Charlie Hopkinson .
The gardening public might be surprised , then , to rule that Blom is rather fun to be around . Witty , with a broad , easy smiling , she is a sharply intelligent woman who cite Balzac while remaining comfortably down - to - earth . Before starting work on a project , she diligently bones up on the site ’s account , and once the planting is under way , mirthfully picks up a coon and digs in alongside her work party . Andrew Wilson , chief assessor at the Royal Horticultural Society ’s Chelsea Flower Show , calls her “ a refreshingly dissimilar kettle of fish . ”
It is this human fellow feeling , as much as her unsubduable endowment , that has made Blom one of a handful of char at the top of her professing . “ I like citizenry , ” she say . “ I need them to feel like their garden belongs to them . I get a groovy deal of pleasure from give them that . ”
No obstruction to that delight is too heavy . Corrour , a 57,000 - acre estate in the Scottish Highlands , is a landscape of hills , moorland and loch so coarse and the possibility of sitting outside so occasional ( when it stops raining in summer , the midges will eat you ) , there was minuscule point in planting a traditional garden . And unless Corrour ’s owner , packaging heiress Lisbet Rausing , likes moss and rough Gunter Wilhelm Grass , anything Blom embed would have been rust by marauding deer . Blom ’s first step was to raise 11 mil of deer - proof metal - mesh fencing . Within that vast margin , she establish what she call an “ antigarden”—an sweetening of the stark natural environment , rather than ornaments plan to unhinge from it . Thousands of trees and a timber of natives — Sorbus aucuparia , birch , alder , and Scots pine — now grow up to the modern hostel designed by Moshe Safdie . A mix of wildflowers , studded with panther lilies and giant Himalayan marsh marigold , not only reflect the estate ’s Victorian legacy but thrive in the Highlands moistness .
The granary walk in summer . Photo by : Charlie Hopkinson .
Blom ’s skill as a plantswoman fall , too , in urban position , where she can let her hair down . “ You ca n’t plant exotics , such as phormiums , in the countryside . They just jar , ” she says . “ But in a township , where there are no degree of mention , you’re able to get away with all sorts . ”
Blom ’s French mother was raise in Madagascar . Her former Fatherhood was an inventor and agrarian technologist . On both sides she is descended from artist , scientists , and writers , which perhaps explains her ease in working in a numerosity of mode . Her pattern school of thought , however , derives directly from her schematic pedagogy . Blom studied drama and dramatic art design , then take aim as a clinical psychologist before joining designer Dan Pearson ’s business firm in 1996 , when she was in her mid-30s .
Blom never shy away from showing a human imprint . She ’s an avid builder of permanent structures : flower plants may come and go , but the bone of her gardens — walls , hedge , well - proportion spaces and vistas — must look good , whatever the season . “ I care to build something that look as adept fall down as when it went up , ” she tell .
In this garden , just 40 minutes from London , Jinny Blom converted a fail hilltop farm into a garden of exquisitely designed rooms with an astonishing elevated finish , overlook a wide-eyed valley in the high chalklands . Lavender and garden roses decorate the wall of a garden way . Photo by : Charlie Hopkinson .
In 2007 , she gain a gold palm at the Chelsea Flower Show , the top pillage at the world ’s top garden show . She is as proud of the dry - stone walls she commissioned at Temple Guiting , a privately own 15th - hundred manor in Gloucestershire , that advance her a Pinnacle Award in 2006 . Her prizewinning wall divide the 14 - acre site into 18 “ rooms , ” each with a distinct style and a level to tell apart . Blom , who grew up in Gloucestershire , likely took brainchild from Hidcote , a nearby estate that is one of England ’s most spectacular examples of this approach . ( Vita Sackville - West ’s Sissinghurst is the other ) . She sympathise , at any rate , the power of a formal body structure to outlast the tastes of the second . “ Human lives are so fugitive , ” she says . “ A garden should have a longer life . ”
On a rural brow southwest of London , Blom recently made another serial of garden room , this time for Lady Getty , widow of Sir Paul . ( The Internet is less discreet than Blom about naming her clients . ) Blom filled the raw infinite with a 45 - cadence cloud - pruned buxus hedging , an avenue of box - head calcium oxide , and added yew topiary for an instant common sense of history . Everything in the garden take its position in the built environment . “ There are minimal amounts [ of flowering plant ] that work very heavily , ” Blom luff out , “ such as chalk - large-minded , long - flowering roses and a hugeMagnolia grandifloraagainst the b . ”
The pièce de résistance is a curved citadel , which juts out from the hillside to reveal the beautiful valley beyond . “ It ’s a real showstopper . masses pant when the final doorway is open up , ” she says proudly .
Most gardeners wo n’t ever deal in the expansive scale of Blom ’s projects , but Blom says her approach translate to any garden , however lowly . “ Take peril . If someone tells you something is impossible , see if you may do it . Gardening is a knife edge between catastrophe and serendipity . ”
Caroline Donald is a gardening editor atThe Sunday Timesin London .
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See moreEnglish gardens .
