Whenever I tell anyone about my flat, I preface it with a caveat: it’s tiny, and the only reason we moved in was for the outdoor space to step out onto and breathe. Even if that space is a 5 sq/m balcony, or roughly two double mattresses laid end-to-end.
I live on a busy street ten minutes from the Garden Museum, and I’ve just ripped out everything in the flat to start again, with one goal: an open-plan space looking out towards our neighbour’s garden below, a mature willow framed by the doorway.
The balcony sits at the rear, incongruously peaceful against the main road’s energy just metres away – a respite from the sirens, litter, vomit, and Lime bike-blocked pavements.
A custom corten steel planter has Euphorbia characias, Achillea millefolium, Japanese anemone, scabious and hyssop, alongside perennial grasses including Calamagrostis epigejos and ‘Karl Foerster’. An antique galvanised bin is potted up with a Malus hupehensis underplanted with cranesbill; another serves as a container pond with UK natives, including a purple loosestrife that’s topped over 6ft this year. Black stem bamboo on one side and Virginia creeper on the other work to enclose the space.
Overplanted? Perhaps. But when so many of these plants carry memories, stories, friendships it matters to make room for them all. An Aeonium arboreum brought back from the Isle of Scilly. Oak saplings grown from seed gathered in a woodland near where I spent lockdown’s liminal days. A seedling propagated from the iconic Pinus nigra at Benton End (thanks, James Horner). A Pyrus spinosa gifted for my 40th.
The balcony is as much a space to be in as to look at, appreciate, fantasise about. Making the most of quiet moments while I can – after all, when has a city garden ever offered peace on one’s own terms?
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Follow Ollie: @lostonawalk
