In Your Garden: Shaun Mooney

“Our garden’s style is ‘Medi-coastal’ with a bit of woodland edge. We’re in Woolwich about 200m from the Thames, so the wind cuts through like a knife. Our garden is L-shaped, with a larger south-facing area, and a longer, thinner area on the west side. It’s a new build, so we got about 10cm of top soil on top of rubble when we moved in.

Trying to amend the soil drastically didn’t feel right, but we do add our own homemade compost and worm casts. I always try to work with mother nature instead of against her – she always wins in the end. We’ve got ‘3.5’ garden rooms; a main deck area for dining, a kitchen garden, a lounge area, and a boardwalk connecting to it (which is probably my favourite part).

My fiancé, Danny, is an architect. Sometimes we collaborate on client projects together, but working on our home and garden has been the best adventure. He has a photo on his phone of the garden door swung open. He drew a line, with everything inside his domain and everything outside my own little kingdom. But really everything we do is a team effort; we built all the decking and internal fencing ourselves, which was an education. Our garden is really one of the biggest visible pieces of our love story.

I think garden designers can learn a lot by doing “gardening” as a verb. We visited John Little’s garden this summer for the open day, and I loved when he said we can “garden the design out of it [gardens]”. I tell clients it takes at least three years to make a garden, because there’s a lot of love and aftercare needed. This is our third year in the garden, and it really does feel like a proper place now. We’ve got frogs, colonies of ladybirds, parasitic wasps. We even had a family of great tits nest with us last spring. I can’t wait to see what this year has in store.”

Follow along with our #GMInYourGarden series on Instagram @gardenmuseum