A well-designed garden is more than simply ‘outside’ space.
Garden designer and PAD collaborator Lulu Roper-Caldbeck throws a little light on her holistic take on botanics, texture and colour.
A well-designed garden is more than simply ‘outside’ space.
Rather, it’s a zone for meditative and bucolic reflection, an amalgamated transition between interior and exterior zones and, in London, an escape from the din of urban life.
Before designing gardens, I worked in fashion and had an interiors shop. Around 2010, my husband and I bought a property on Arlington Avenue in Islington. It needed a complete renovation, so we appointed PAD to come on board. I liked their use of natural materials and timber. My taste used to be bolder and brighter, and I liked the juxtaposition with their architectural simplicity, working with clean lines. It fitted together nicely. That was also the first garden that I had; the brutal reality of working in retail meant it became a space to get away.
By 2019 I was drawn more and more to being outside, so I took a course at Capel Manor College and started out as a designer. In 2020, I was asked to do some interiors on a house in De Beauvoir but took on the garden instead, so I recommended PAD. It was all quite organic.
I adapt to work with my clients, but my personal style is wilder. A lot of the planting I use isn’t formal; lots of grasses and perennials, natural materials and colours, not creating stark white spaces with hard geometric lines. London isn’t about big landscapes – it’s about creating living areas outside, an extension of the home.
The client wanted something ethereal, quite romantic. Pinks and buffs and whites and green textures; roses, hydrangeas, ferns, grasses. We had an image of a springtime woodland garden, keeping those elements coming throughout the year.
PAD had done the majority of the design, and I was introduced by the client for planting and texture. It was a traditional Victorian house, but PAD played around with some of the traditional elements and incorporated new materials. That was echoed within the tiny garden. There was lots of metalwork, vertical slatted cedar fencing, storage and a pond, but we retained the boundary walls – an old London stock with intricate detailing. It’s north-facing; low light, shady with overhanging trees at the boundaries. The client wanted something ethereal, quite romantic. Pinks and buffs and whites and green textures; roses, hydrangeas, ferns, grasses. We had an image of a springtime woodland garden, keeping those elements coming throughout the year.
It’s the biggest battle! Maintenance is so underrated. These beautiful spaces need to stand the test of time. It’s about gently working with nature so it does what you want it to do, but then also letting it do its thing. It’s important having somebody to balance the things that can take over, that might seed everywhere. Knowing how to contain them and letting other things thrive. You need to invest in the future
With Hebron House, it was about understanding PAD’s thought processes on the wider project: this is what they’re doing on the inside, this is what I’m doing on the outside, and then conversations around how we can marry those. But the best thing is being involved in the early stages of projects. It’s wonderful – having that opportunity to work closely with architects to really blend things, rather than it just being the house and the garden as two separate entities.
