A successful gardener needs more than a facility with Latin binomials to tame and cultivate a plot of land. As one of the most sought-after talents in her field, London-based landscape designer Jinny Blom brings an especially diverse set of skills to her job.
Being English is, of course, a leg up—all that childhood time spent romping in country meadows. “When you’re a kid, you’re not thinking, This is an amazing garden,” explains Blom, the daughter of an agricultural engineer and a linguist. “You’re just in that environment and understanding it.” College theater courses taught her how to craft inviting settings, but Blom is also a trained psychologist, thanks to an earlier career path that took up a dozen or so years. That experience has helped make her adept at not only interpreting the desires of her clients but also unearthing the underlying personality of a property to bring order and a sense of calm.
In Blom’s first book, The Thoughtful Gardener: An Intelligent Approach to Garden Design (Jacqui Small), which comes out this month, she explains how a walking trip in the Spanish mountains led her to switch professional gears. “Protesting that I couldn’t give up my ‘sensible’ job as a psychologist,” she writes, “I found I couldn’t make an argument for keeping it.”
Two decades later Blom has a booming practice, working with a blue-chip clientele whose names rarely get dropped and whose budgets are merely suggestions. “Twenty years is not that long in gardening,” she explains. “I had to go into turbocharge. I had a rule that I didn’t want to do things that don’t get built.”
The Thoughtful Gardener , at once a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome and a friendly hands-on primer, offers a glimpse into some of the most magical gardens in the world—from a lodge in Kenya, where Kikuyu and Masai assistants broke into song when the plants were delivered, to the Buckinghamshire home of Victoria Getty, widow of Sir Paul, the philanthropist. “Lady Getty was quite terrifying,” Blom recalls with a laugh. “I asked her, ‘What do you want?’ She peered down her nose and said, ‘Well, you decide.’ It was one of my greatest experiences. I had complete freedom.”
Whether the project is a tiny urban garden or a full-blown estate overhaul, Blom takes a straightforward approach. “First, we must destroy,” is how she likes to start the conversation with a client. But of course there’s more to her gut renovations than just stripping dead trees and overgrown brush. “Blom is herself a cultural geographer who scopes out the historical features of paths, gates, and antiquated farm buildings on a given property prior to drawing up a plan that proceeds almost instantaneously,” writes Paula Deitz, the American garden authority, in the book’s foreword.
For the full story, subscribe now and get the digital edition immediately.
