Commissions - Seaside Garden

In 2005 I was asked to landscape the garden of a new build house on the coast – literally next to the sea. The garden was completely bare. At the time, I did not own a car, so I was walking everywhere – and mostly along the coast from Kato Paphos to Chloraka.

It was this daily walk that inspired my thinking behind the final garden design – to ‘grow’ the garden from the sea – wilder at the bottom and becoming ever more garden-like as it approached the house, and to incorporate features of the coastal landscape both in the planting and in the hard landscaping – rocks and hardy indigenous plants such as oregano, thyme, lavender and rosemary. Other constraints were a tight budget and the need to make it a low maintenance garden as the owner was away most of the time.

After a few abortive meetings I met landscape gardener Doug Whetlor of Cyprus Joy who miraculously sourced the massive rocks and sculptural feature that I had envisaged, took me around various nurseries to find the plants and trees and finally organized delivery of the rocks and the forklift truck operator to install them. What a day it was, the day we set the rocks…..and how I wondered at Costa’s skill and delicate accuracy with his great big yellow machine. And how they worked, those men, Doug himself and Sipol and Khan, his two Bangla Deshi workers.

At the end of the day a bare patch of earth was beginning to take shape as a landscape with features, and within a few weeks of planting and careful tending the lavender was filling out nicely and the garissa at the ‘Zen End’ scenting the evening air delightfully.