Totally tropical: tiny west London plot transformed into exotic oasis with palms, blooms and plants aplenty

Sizzling red and hot pink petals sit beside palms, olive and bamboo turn this city garden into a tropical paradise.
Round the bend: the garden path has meandering curves designed to slow footsteps so that visitors can enjoy the exuberant plantings on either side (Nicola Stocken)
Pattie Barron4 August 2017

Anyone who thinks town gardens are past their best in late summer should take a huge leaf — banana, palm, canna — from a west London plot that sizzles with tropical foliage and brilliant, clashing colour.

Ten years ago Antony Watkins and Christopher Hutchings moved to a terrace house in west London with the ideal outdoor space for this pair of plant lovers: south-facing and backing on to allotments. Now, instead of a patchy lawn surrounded by lacklustre shrubs, there are palm trees, olive, tree fern and a curtain of towering golden bamboo, backed up with a very full supporting cast of perennials and annuals in luscious shades, such as sky blue salvias and navy agapanthus, many of which are raised and protected out of season in the couple’s equally burgeoning allotment, conveniently a few steps away.

In one fabulously eye-watering section, the butter-yellow heads of heleniums brush against orange zinnias, crimson monardas and scarlet crocosmias. Watkins’ idea of a colour scheme is as follows: “Bang it all in! I purposely put yellow and pink and red all together and I love it. Christopher prefers blocks of colour, so next year it’s his turn.”

There was, however, a grand plan they both agreed on, that cleverly divides the garden into several zones and makes the space — just 58ft by 22ft — look a lot larger. A broad paved path leads down the right-hand side of the garden, but it has a winding, meandering S shape because, says Watkins, who specialises in designing and planting borders, “We wanted people to take their time and really look at the plants, rather than shooting down the path.”

It’s impossible to imagine anybody shooting past the giant shuttlecock leaves of the tree fern, the deep red Abyssinian banana, the giant white blooms of Hydrangea Annabelle or the mini-grove of giant Canna Musifolia with paddle leaves that soar up to eight feet and more. The agapanthus leaves alone are a splendid sight; Watkins’ trick for success is to sink the pot into the ground with the bottom smashed off so the roots can grow through, giving them the restriction they prefer.

At lower levels, banks of flowers and foliage tumble and cascade over the edges of the beds’ low, retaining brick walls: Firecracker begonias, grey-green Euphorbia myrsinites, tiny Mexican daisies, metallic plum heuchera leaves and a mass of white pompom flowers that Watkins calls Nana’s Plant because it’s from his grandmother’s garden.

Living it lush: the sheltered, south-facing garden is ideally suited for growing exotic plants but part of it, at the back, offers a cool contrast of duck-egg blue outdoor kitchen and dining area. (Photos Nicola Stocken)

Take a different route higher up the path, turning left, and you reach an informal, bark-floored clearing in the jungle, with a great view of the garden’s architectural evergreens, investments bought at the start: three different fan palms including the rare blue Brahea armata, the hardy palm Trachycarpus fortunei that now has exotic pineapple lilies sprouting around its base and an olive tree, pollarded every alternate spring to keep it bushy.

The bark clearing leads to a circle of impossibly perfect lawn, which is Obi the dog’s domain. He doesn’t mind that it’s a very good fake. “When we first made the garden, we had real grass but because we have irrigation and the garden gets sun all day, we were constantly cutting it,” says Watkins. “So we gave up and switched to the finest grade of Easigrass.”

At the end of the path, behind a trellised cedar wood panel, is a cool, calm contrast — the dining and entertaining area, comprising a duck-egg blue, streamlined outdoor kitchen with grill and granite worktops. Built-in benches with adjoining planters allow plenty of space for favourite succulents that chime with the more Mediterranean feel of this area.

There are several seating areas throughout the garden, so that it can be enjoyed from different viewpoints, including a café table and chairs on the patio, the chosen spot for breakfast alfresco. The original terracotta-tiled floor of the patio remains, but the previously jarring hot shade now makes a perfect foil to the colony of potted plants that include shocking pink dahlias, deep crimson scabious, stripy zebra grass and golden rudbeckias. A big zinc bin holds the large, neon-bright daisy heads of gerberas, better known to most of us as cut flowers, but Watkins says his have lasted for five years in containers of free-draining compost.

With faded flowers to deadhead, overzealous plants needing to be checked and the next wave of seed-grown annuals waiting in the wings — the allotment next door — this sensational garden is as intensive as it gets, but then Watkins and Hutchings wouldn’t have it any other way.

Antony Watkins is available for commission. You can email him at antonymwatkins@btinternet.com