Newington, Edinburgh

City Garden

When the new owners took on this garden, the area was dense with 50ft high Leylandii trees and the ground sloped steeply upwards towards the back of the garden.

The brief was to design a formal and stylish garden that could double up as an area for the children to play football. The owners wanted a flat lawn and to achieve this we needed to extract about 160 tonnes of subsoil from the garden, all of which had to be taken out in wheelbarrows through a narrow corridor in the house.

The lawn is framed by pleached hornbeam (Carpinus betulus). These have tall trunks that are branchless up to head-height and allow you to see under them to the gravel path and raised borders behind. Tall buttresses of clipped yew (Taxus baccata) project out from the garden’s boundary walls, and this evergreen planting is supplemented by low-growing box hedging. (Buxus sempervirens).

Between the yew buttresses the planting is predominantly white-flowering, with Syringa ‘Madame Lemoine’, Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’, Rosa ‘Susan William-Ellis’, Paeonia ‘Jan van Leeuwan’ and Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’. The whites are offset by the phlox ‘Purple Paradise’ and the mauve flowers of the English Lavender ‘Munstead’.