Case study: Garden design in Sydenham, South East London

Garden size: 125m2

Project value: £60,000

Garden aspect: NNW

Landscaper: Perlarose Landscapes

Build completed: Spring 2025

When we first visited this garden Sydenham, there was just an uneven patio that posed a tripping hazard, overlooking an unusable, steep, grassy slope with overgrown shrubs flanking either side.

The clients were looking for a garden that complimented their recently renovated home, creating usable spaces for dining and entertaining, yoga and relaxation, and space for a future garden studio. And of course, all enveloped within naturalistic planting to create a relaxing setting the family could enjoy all year round.

To address the challenge of the slope, the first half of the garden was terraced. This approach felt like the lowest impact intervention; only terracing as much of the garden as we needed to create the usable garden rooms the clients needed, and leaving the rest of the garden with its natural slope intact.

A new dining area was created at the rear of the house - using London Stone’s Jura Grey limestone, picking up on the blue-grey shingles on the house - with bullnose steps leading down through bespoke CorTen planters that act as retaining walls.

These steps lead down to a ‘laundrola’ - a pergola that provides space for typical uses such as shade, private space from neighbours, but also for drying laundry under cover outdoors. The laundrola was designed by our client, an architect, academic and writer, and was part of the broader collaboration with the client and Perlsarose Landscapes on the garden design project.

The existing garden included two mature tree specimens which we encouraged the client to retain, our native silver birch and a yew tree, where a new garden office will be built in future, nestled under the canopy. These mature trees provided a lot of ‘mass’ all concentrated at the bottom of the garden, so new multi-stem trees were planted throughout the garden including Malus ‘Evereste’ (crab apple) and Amelanchier x lamarckii (serviceberry), balancing the existing trees and adding a sense of depth to the garden, while also providing blossom for pollinators and berries for birds.

The clients have family roots in Eastern Europe and Asia, so a planting palette that included plants from these biomes - as well as some British natives - was really important to create a sense of home. The nearby Sydenham Hill Wood provided inspiration for the garden with its folly ruin, so the garden was designed to accommodate garden rooms and buildings nestled among woodland-edge planting as a nod to the restful feeling in the clients’ local woodland.

Planting gently froths over the edges of the planters and paving, softening the edges of the rectilinear, geometric design and immersing you in planting as you travel down the garden. A mature Osmanthus x burkwoodii specimen, gently pruned and shaped over a number of years, was selected by us from a local nursery to act as a focal point, providing evergreen interest with its evergreen canopy and intricate, multi-stem framework. Pittosporum tobira ‘Nanum’ has been repeated around the garden, leading your eye down the terraces. Its mounding form is echoed in the likes of Hakonechloa macra (Japanese forest grass) and Alchemilla mollis (lady’s mantle), creating harmony and rhythm, providing a ground cover layer for this edge-of-woodland planting scheme.

The north-north-west aspect of the garden lended itself to this planting style, showing that low light levels needn’t be a challenge. Now, the clients have usable space, a view from the house with year-round interest, and a future “commute” to their garden office through a woodland edge that fuses European and Asian woodlands in perfect harmony.

Our clients say: ‘Studio Mooney and Perlarose Landscapes transformed our garden from an overgrown, neglected space into a true oasis. It feels like our house has been extended - the garden adds beautiful, valuable extra space to be enjoyed in the summer and beyond. Shaun was sensitive to our needs and his passion for garden design and plants was palpable. He handled the design and project oversight expertly, as well as providing us with clear advice on how to care for our new garden.’