Press

Featuring Jinny
Vogue USA | July 2010 | A Sense of Place

If at first sight Jinny Blom’s landscapes seem planted fair and square in the tradition of the English garden, they have a disarming way of creeping out of the tired undergrowth of garden design with a freshness that escapes cliché. She herself is like that. Her language is as defiantly intelligent as her work, full of spark and allusion in a way that one can only hope will become the fashion. Her gardens certainly have.

House & Garden | June 2008 | People: Lifestyle

Award-winning garden designer Jinny Blom has already chosen her epitaph: 'This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, which is always excessively hard on the legs.' From Balzac's Cousin Bette, it is an entirely suitable text, since, in all Jinny's surprisingly diverse careers, she has always given herself to them 100 per cent.

Born in 1961 during a total eclipse of the sun, Jinny is the third of four children and the only girl. Her mother is French-Madagascan and her father Scandinavian. 'We were brought up conventionally, with strict rules on manners - but on both my mother's and father's sides there was a distinct, underlying streak of eccentricity.'

The Telegraph | 26 September 2009 | Return of the Natives

Jinny Blom. the award-winning landscape designer reckons she has planted a million pounds' worth of native hedging in clients' gardens in the past seven years. And into this mix of hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and wild rose she likes to add fruit - not just blackberry, but raspberry, gooseberry and currants, too. "When society breaks down, I know where all my hedges are and I'll live off them," she laughs.

Limited Editions
Gardens Illustrated | September 2009 | The Beauty of Decay

There's something enchanting about exploring old, empty buildings, especially if you catch that rare magical moment just before the romance of decay tips over that bit too far. Designer Jinny Blom experienced such a moment when visiting a Victorian workman's cottage that some friends had bought in Sussex. Hidden in a woodland, remarkably the cottage and garden had remained untouched since the occupants had left and nature was slowly returning the place to a wilderness. "I was struck by the beauty of the dilapidation and by the fine quality of the building itself. I wanted to capture the moment before the whole thing was sucked back down into the ground - to document the atmosphere and the patina of a life well-lived." Jinny worked in collaboration with photographer Charlie Hopkinson and now the resulting unique collection of 83 black and white images has been hand-bound into an exquisite, limited-edition book.

Jardins, Jardin 2010

Gardens Illustrated | May 2010 | Design Showcase

Jinny Blom has designed three gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show for champagne company Laurent-Perrier - winning gold for her most recent in 2007. This year marks Laurent-Perrier's 12th garden at Chelsea (see page 31 for details), but alongside all the high-octane glamour of the world's most famous flower show, the company is also involved in Jardins, Jardin, in Paris, a more intimate and innovative affair exploring the role nature can play in the city.

For this, the seventh Jardins, Jardin, Laurent- Perrier asked Jinny, who is half French, to design something that was ground-breaking and - it almost goes without saying - of the highest quality.

Scottish Highland Estate

UK House & Garden | June 2006 | Land League

When audacious architecture takes form on a rocky outcrop near Ben Nevis, it attracts a lot of attention- even if it is off the beaten track, only accessible via an 11-mile private drive through a wild landscape. Overlooking a Highland loch, Corrour Lodge - on the site of a Victorian shooting lodge which burnt down in 1947 - was completed only last summer, yet already the Royal Fine Arts Commission in Scotland believes it is 'one of the few examples of world-class twenty-first-century architecture in Scotland'.

The team responsible number Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, landscape designer Jinny Blom, and interior designer Suzy Hoodless. Moshe Safdie's first building in Britain, it has the floor plan of a traditional Scottish tower house built around the great hall, but there the tradition ends.

US House & Garden | Feb 2006 | The Highland Fling

A lodge at the heart of a deer stalking estate in the Scottish highlands, you'd expect, would be as traditional as Sherlock Holmes's tweed cap. A 12-mile private drive, though, leads not to a Victorian array of slate, turrets and dormer windows, but to a dazzling modernist structure of granite, steel and glass. Soon the shock of the new is subsumed by admiration for the peerless quality of the architecture and the spacious, restrained interiors, which combine to make a most exquisite piece of classic twentieth-century design.

Set on 50,000 acres of remote moorland, surrounded by majestic mountains, and overlooking a secluded loch, Corrour Lodge is in its third incarnation.

Country Life | 26 Jan 2006 | Corrour

If ever there was an opportunity for a domestic building to convey the mood and drama of a wild landscape, it must be that provided by the Highland shooting lodge. In recent years, a number of good, interesting examples have bee built, but few make the sort of powerful architectural statement that defines so many of those designed during the heyday of the Highland sporting estate in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But at Corrour, on the edge of Rannoch Moor, the wheel has turned full circle. Here at the head of loch Ossian, 12 miles from the nearest public road, a new shooting lodge has been built that fulfils all the functions of its predecessors in an emphatically contemporary idiom.

Chalkland Farm

House & Garden| May 2010 | Rooms with a View

Some gardens give themselves over completely to the landscape that surrounds them; others are inward-looking and contemplative. This garden, designed by Jinny Blom around a recently restored farmhouse, has it all - magnificent open views over a forgotten Oxfordshire valley as well as quieter, enclosed areas where the view is tantalising hidden. Quite rightly, the garden pays homage to the pastoral English countryside in which it is set, but the view isn't simply offered up on a plate. 'The whole idea wa to feed the visitor the views and slow the sense of arrival,' explains Jinny. Essentially the garden is made up of a series of staged vistas, leading visitors through various contrasting gardens 'rooms', before reaching the front of the house, where the full drama of the scenery is exposed.

Chelsea Harbour Design Centre

Gardens Illustrated| March 2009 | Sitting Pretty

Designer Jinny Blom has introduced a range of indoor and outdoor furniture, starting with three stools inspired by her BALI award-winning atrium at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour (featured in Design News last month). The 'SPORE' stools are made of eco-friendly mouldable stone cast to order and hand finished. Outdoor versions of the stools are available in White Marble, Portland Stone and Buff Sandstone, with a choice of waterproof cast rubber seats or upholstered fabric seats from Lelievre's Entre Ciel et Terre outdoor collection. £1,360 each (plus VAT and delivery).

Matchbox Magazine | March 2009 | The Accidential Gardener

Jinny Blom didn't always want to be an award winning garden designer. After training in theatre design, Jinny ran her own delicatessen for a while, before starting a 12-year career working with deeply psychologically disturbed people as a transpersonal psychologist.

In 1996, a life-changing event caused Jinny to change her career path "like a river bursting its banks". The said event was the death of her best friend who passed away halfway through the completion of a garden. Jinny finished it off, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Dome News | December 2007 | Focus '07

Offering the best in design and decoration with an emphasis on understated luxury, the importance of Focus is reflected in the high calibre of visitors who attended from home and overseas.

Described by the Evening Standard as 'unfailingly fabulous', visitors admired the finishing touches
to the £6m refurbishment project. Award-winning landscape designer Jinny Blom masterminded
a scheme that enhanced the Design Centre's architecture. Spectacular trees and a powerful
installation of swans suspended, as if flying through a rain shower and coming into land, bought the
iconic domes to life.

Primrose Hill Garden
The Sunday Times | May 2009 | Shock of the New

Building or reinventing your own house is a huge commitment in every sense, requiring more than a little courage. Anyone who has ever done any work on their own home knows that it soon swallows up time, energy and passion - not to mention money, plus the inevitable battles with the planners and negotiations with disgruntled neighbours.

At the end of these epic stories, the house itself is the main prize - but how rewarding it must be to achieve recognition from the judges of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) awards for all the blood, sweat and imagination.

Eaton Square Garden
Saturday Telegraph | May 2009 | Your Own Garden of Eaton

A pied a terre in Eaton Square in London is the ultimate trophy property, particularly when it includes a designer-label garden. Number 71 has just one bedroom to show for its £2.2 million asking price, and only 16 years remaining on its lease. But according to Peter Bevan of selling agent Sotheby's International Reality, this is a fair price for a property in the capital's most sought-after address, with two grand reception rooms and a garden designed by Chelsea Flower Show gold medallist Jinny Blom.

Cotswold Garden
Country Life| April 2010 | A Cotswold Secret

Somehow, the Cotswolds still manage to keep secrets. It is something to do with the landscape, the small, steep valleys that can keep one village hidden from another. Just when you think you know all the best manor houses in the area, yet another one is pointed out, with its own complicated and intriguing stories.

One such is at Temple Guiting, a village that takes its resonant name from the Knights Templar, a religious order that guarded the sites and routes of the Holy Land.

 
Gardens Illustrated | September 2009 | Formal Glory

What most clients want from a garden designer is a safe pair of hands, a confident swagger and a sense of humour. Jinny Blom has all three and, since changing career in 2000, she has taken the garden design world by storm. For many, she represents romantic planting and English meadows but she enjoys taking gardens apart and reconstructing them, walls, pools, paving and all. She remains as fascinated by dry-stone walling as by the ratio of yellow rattle to ragged robin, which is just as well for her project at The Manor in Temple Guiting, Gloucestershire.

Domino Magazine | March 2009 | The Neo-Traditionalist

Blom favors a period-specific mood that's never too perfect or museum-esque. "A garden's design should always lead from the style of the house and its context," she says; her love of the past and of green architecture (in the form of yew and boxwood) yields a classic framework that she subverts with innovative horticultural combinations. Still Blom's designs are never random: A former psychologist, she believes that , foremost, gardens should be calming. "I'm not out to shock anyone," she says.

Garden Design | May 2008 | Match Point

It was sheep that first made the Cotswolds famous, and prosperous, in the 1400's. This middle England region has been known ever since for very fine wool, so much so that its medieval houses of worship are known as "wool churches" - to acknowledge the source of construction funding, not to belittle the beliefs. The sheep, or more accurately, their descendants to dot the rolling hills. But they now have famous and prosperous company.

Today parts of the achingly quaint Cotswolds have become the British version of the Hamptons, where the likes of Kate Winslet and Moss, Liz Hurley and Damien Hurst hole up for the weekends to "rough it" in rambling farmhouses.

House & Garden | June 2007 | Soft Centred

Cocooned in its own picturesque little valley, Temple Guiting Manor is a world apart from the realities of everyday life. In a scene reminiscent of The Wind in the Willows, the fifteenth-century Cotswold-stone manor house overlooks the meandering source of the River Windrush with its own small lake (complete with Ratty-style rowing boat), a setting so idyllic that it simply had to have an exemplary garden to complement it. Enter award-winning garden designer Jinny Blom, who in 2001 was commissioned by owner Steven Collins to redesign the gardens. The house was Grade I listed and in need of major work, so Jinny introduced Steven to architect Ptolemy Dean, who collaborated with Jinny on much of the historical research and on some of the architectural elements in the garden, including the walls.

Chelsea Flower Show 2007

Gardens Illustrated | May 2007 | Jinny Blom

Symbolising the unpredictable journey we all take through life, a series of pathways on various levels invite visitors to take different routes around the garden. Made of travertine marble set on concrete plinths, the paths flow through the planting rather than the other way around. Jinny's design reveals the detailing of the hard landscaping (including the fixings, braces and back stays), all of which are beautifully crafted. "In the spirit of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, I wanted to show how beautiful materials can combine with functionality;' says Jinny.

The English Garden | May 2007 | Chelsea Flower Show '07

At heart I'm a very retiring person, so exhibiting at Chelsea is excruciating, but it's a good discipline. Last year's design blended classical French elements with new - you can never shake off your history, but in the contemporary context, you can interpret things in a different way.

I see a garden as an intimate thing, a series of glimpses and angles that entice. I'm inspired by Carlo Scarpa, a modernist Italian architect, who used mundane materials like concrete in beautiful ways - he also influenced my design for this Hampstead garden (far right) with its broad, central panel. For Chelsea 2007, I'm using similar panels to lead around the garden, placed at varying levels to create different pathways, and built from Travertine marble set on concrete plinths.

Daily Express | May 2007 | Best in Show

Jinny is one of the favourites to land the coveted Best Show Garden award for her Laurent Perrier-backed display, known as A Moment Of Reflection. Prince Charles, who is one of her clients, chose Jinny to design the Healing Garden for the 2002 show, for which she won a silver medal.

Warm, emotional and supremely picturesque, Jinny's work is very feminine and she admits to being inspired by the world of art. She says: "Chelsea is like falling in love and in many ways reminds me of the Oscars. You know it's when the eyes of the world are on you." This year her Laurent Perrier Garden has been designed to reflect life's journey. It is an element of a larger garden attached to the modernist-style house of an Italian art collector, and commemorates his "journey of life".

Daily Telegraph | May 2007 | Ecology, But Not As We Know It

Chelsea gives us a sneak preview of where garden design is heading. This year a more holistic approach and greater consideration of how outdoor space might be used is replacing the emphasis on innovative and striking planting. In the Show gardens, a number of interesting structures seem to acknowledge the role of the garden not just as an attractive adornment to the house, but as an entity in its own right. It reflects the personality and views of the owner, and our ever more ecologically aware culture. In that spirit, most of the Show gardens at this year's Chelsea have something to say about mankind's place in nature.

Chelsea Flower Show 2006

UK House & Garden | June 2006 | Outside Interests

Aspects of Jinny Blom's design for a garden in Scotland (featured in 'Land League' in this issue) are resolutely Scottish - the use of dykes and indigenous trees, for example. The steeply pitched, finial-bedecked roof of the metalwork arbour that forms a focal point in her Laurent-Perrier garden at Chelsea, however, is reminiscent of the roofs of chateaux in the Loire.

Gardens Illustrated | May 2006 | Chelsea Portraits

I used my sponsor Laurent Perrier as my brief. I'm half French and have a great passion for all things limestone. Laurent Perrier's vineyards are on chalk, so I've used limestone and chalk as a building material and substrate. Tucked behind some trees in the corner of the garden I've built a 6m Gloriette, inspired by my summerhouse in France and unmistakably French. The architecture of the garden is all white and the Gloriette is lime washed - creating a negative to the plants' positive.

London Garden

The Independent Review | 7 July 2004 | White Magic Casts Its Spell

There is, in north-west London, a £3.5m home, a glittering, white tiled property that is a taut exercise in post Bauhaus modernist architecture. In considering it, a nagging voice starts chipping away, a mean spirited, wheedling complaint. Why write about bespoke architecture for the exceedingly wealthy? What has it to do with 99.9 per cent of the so- called built environment - and how can we possibly gain anything from considering it?

Ah the villainous white stuff. Well, nothing changes. We're in the realms of severe modernism, the Thirties kind, the pure, white, glassy variety, originally equipped with radical socialist credentials, which sought to bring health and efficiency to the masses.

Hampstead Garden

Homes & Gardens | April 2007 | Designer Secrets

The gardener's owners, Emma and Bernard Shapero, asked me to create an outdoor space that would tie in with the very contemporary extension to their period home in London's Hampstead.

"The gardens slope posed the greatest challenge. This required tons of earth to be excavated to make a flat basement level and an upper area. After this we used 'in situ' concrete to create the gardens structure, which included the steps to link the two levels. As the structure supports not only part of the Shaperos' house but also on side of that of a neighbour, we had to call in a structural engineer to help us. I filled the sloping flowerbeds either side of the steps with low maintenance plants as my clients are not gardeners.

Gardens Illustrated | May 2006 | A Sense of Escape

Concrete can be a harsh and uncompromising material. You might think twice about using it extensively in the enclosed town garden of a genteel Victorian terrace in north London, but this garden challenges you to think about concrete in a different way. The poured concrete walls and steps are bold and solid and, perhaps surprisingly, appear as majestic and beautiful as if they were crafted in natural stone.

Used in conjunction with a froth of soft perennial planting, glass, limestone and wood, the concrete takes on an almost luminous quality; any thoughts of this material being dense, monolithic and unforgiving are banished when you step into this calm, free-flowing family garden.

Sussex Garden

The Guardian | 10 Nov 2007 | A Bit of Rough

When landscape designer Jinny Blom first visited her client's East Sussex farm in 2002, the three-acre garden was beautifully manicured, with well groomed flower borders and lawns of neatly mown stripes. "Most of my projects are about designing nice, tidy gardens," says Blom., "but this client wanted to rough hers up and create a sense of wilderness."

The current owner has made it her mission to turn the agricultural land on the farm over to conservation. In the garden, Blom's challenge was to convey the illusion that here, too, nature was in charge. This didn't simply mean sowing a few wildflower seeds to create a meadow.

Gardens Illustrated | April 2007 | Natural Beauty

Some gardens are imposed upon their surroundings. You know the sort of thing; majestic lawns, deeply luxurious herbaceous borders and cool shrubberies; in other words, all that we love about classic English gardens. Other gardens are more subtle and their claim on the countryside is less brazen. Like chameleons, they insinuate themselves in the landscape.

There is no doubt whatsoever into which camp Jinny Blom's design for this Sussex garden fits. At the end of a winding track through a coppiced woodland, the garden suddenly opens out into an idyllic landscape of water meadows, lazily twisting streams, ancient pastureland and mooching deer.

Notting Hill Garden

The Sunday Telegraph Magazine | 17 July 2005 | The White Stuff

In a part of Notting Hill where the large stucco houses are painted in ice-cream colours lies an essentially monochrome garden. The paths are palest limestone, the wooden fences and furniture have bleached silver grey, and the only plants allowed in the flowerbeds are white and shades of green. White marble mosaics fill the gaps between decking and paths and the containers are purpose made in grey galvanised zinc.

The owners, a textile designer and her husband, guttered the house to create a modern, open-plan interior, and wanted the garden to have suitably strong lines, but not at the expense of the plants. The called in Jinny Blom, whose architectural style and exuberant, naturalistic planting has gained a following among the fashionable and famous.

The Healing Garden: Chelsea Garden Show 2002 with HRH The Prince of Wales

Daily Mail | 21 May 2002 | My Healing Garden

At the Chelsea Flower Show this week some of you may possibly come across a garden for which I have been partly responsible.

I have called it The Healing Garden and have dedicated it in memory of my beloved grandmother, The Queen Mother, as, apart from anything else, she introduced me to the practise of homeopathy, in which she had an abiding interest. The garden is designed to remind people of our interconnectedness with Nature and of the beneficial medicinal properties She provides through countless plants, flowers and trees.

The Sunday Telegraph | 16 May 2002 | Prince Dedicates Garden To Queen Mother

The Prince of Wales has dedicated a garden designed by him for the Chelsea Flower Show to the memory of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The Healing Garden, which has been entered for a medal at the show, grew out of the Prince's desire to promote greater awareness of homeopathic medicine, of which he has long been an enthusiast.

The garden contains 125 varieties of medicinal herbs and shrubs, promising help for maladies ranging from bruising to stress. There is even one, hornbeam, promising relief from procrastination - as long as the sufferer can make the time to take it.

Henry Moore Foundation

The Architects Journal | 15 April 1999 | Less Is Moore

'We wanted to design a building which was as bland as possible,' says Roger Hawkins of Hawkins/Brown. This may sound like an extreme stance in the context of the ongoing debate about whether galleries should be background or exhibit, but then this is an extreme case. The Sheep Field Barn at the Henry Moore Foundation's estate at Perry Green, Hertfordshire, is a simple and economical building designed to house, among other things, works which are considered 'medium sized' by Moore aficionados but are positively monumental to anybody else. There would be something faintly ludicrous in the notion of this modest building attempting to complete with pieces of sculpture which manage to look imposing outside corporate headquarters or town halls.

Stockwell Garden

The Sunday Telegraph | 8 June 2003 | Physicians' Garden

Jinny Blom's brief to create a garden for two busy young doctors in Stockwell, south London, was clear from the start. 'They simply told me, "We don't garden, we have three children and we entertain a lot,"' she remembers. The house attached to the garden had once been occupied by squatters but the couple had spent the previous two years transforming it into an award-winning contemporary family house with an open-plan, split level living space , floor-to-ceiling windows and an oversized glass door opening to the garden. 'They wanted a garden that was as modern as the house', says Blom. 'And the house did need anchoring in its surroundings'.

The Mill House

The Sunday Telegraph | August 2001 | Run Of The Mill

It is hard to imagine a better gift than an idyllic small garden, attached to an 18th-century water mill, bordered on one side by a swift, noisy brook and on the other by an orchard. This is what the painter Maryrose Hodgson gave to her husband as a reward for converting the five-storey mill, at East Hanney, in Oxfordshire. She engaged the young designer Jinny Blom and gave her a free hand except for two caveats: no lawn and no yellow. On May Day 1997 Blom and Hodgson began - putting in 3,500 plants - and for the next three weeks it rained in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. Today the garden is ravishing.

Millennium Dome

The Garden Design Journal | Spring 2000 | Planting On the Peninsula

An eleventh hour call from the New Millennium Experience Company in January last year altered the subsequent course of our work quite unexpectedly. Our initial meeting at the Dome, in diabolical weather, was fired by the incredible enthusiasm of the assembled team from NMEC and Richard Rogers Partnership. In spite of the increasingly dire deadline for creating something from scratch, their vitality and energy was inspiration enough to convince us to take the work on.

Journalism

Gardens Illustrated | August 2009 | Designing a Small Garden

Consider how your space will be used and how it will be viewed - as an extension of the house, for example? Colour is vital but don't go for harsh primary colours - soft, powdery, muted colours are great at giving warmth to green foliage....

Gardens Illustrated | June 2009 | Ravishing Beauty

I am hopelessly unfashionable, so being asked to create an 'unashamedly romantic' border was a delight. We have a tremendously benign climate in Britain; at least we do at the moment, and it's well worth relishing, even if it does drive one mad at times. Having lived on the Continent and on the Mediterranean I can vouch for the fact that the dramatic seasonal shifts from freezing cold to boiling hot make gardening there an absolute trial...

Easy Living | June 2006 | Where to Find Inspiration

This is my favourite time of the year in the garden. The sky is a pale, watered blue, the leaves a fresh, new green. All around us is an air of lovely promise, months and months of sunshine and flowers. I love it all but what I love best is the anticipation, the joy of planning the garden's summer form. Should it be brilliant this year, filled with saturated purples and bold reds? Or shall I go for a romantic, lyrical tangle of wildflowers and grasses? I stand in my garden and stare, feeling a yen for chalky blue delphiniums and buff apricot roses. I can't decide so I take myself off to Chelsea, to the annual garden show, which is a gardener's equivalent of the Paris collections...

The Times Weekend Review | 11 Oct 2003 | Spirit And Place

Recently I have been involved with siting art in the garden I'm designing and was reminded about how demanding it can be, and how rewarding when it works well. By "art" I mean pieces crafted with little inherent use but that spiritually, creatively or intellectually uplift the beholder, not the ornamental items - pots, urns, mirrors, gates - that adorn or embellish a garden. The gardener needs to consider what will work best - places the piece near a building, near water, in a flowerbed, beside a wall or in a specially created location…

The Times Weekend Review | 6 Sept 2003 | Vertical Thinking

Well-grown climbing plants are one of the best things in the garden. They are spectacularly useful in a small space and can transform an area which has few inherent dynamites, such as a flat garden without trees or decent walls. Many of us have tiny gardens and these days a good supporting wall is something of a luxury. This is where freestanding vertical supports come to the rescue…

Gardens Illustrated | August 2003 | Real Gardeners

I love every aspect of my working life. Designing gardens is a challenging, stimulating business. Especially these days, as everyone, it seems, expresses a passion for plants and outdoor life. So why should this sunlit landscape be troubled by storm clouds on the horizon? It is a pleasure to create a new garden with a receptive client. Landscape contractors are, in the main, thoughtful people with strong currents of creative ability. In recent years I have discovered a breathtaking array of skills that allow one to take greater creative steps in each successive design…

The Times Weekend Review | 19 July 2003 | Party In The garden

To live in the British Isles in summer means you must throw at least one garden party. If you didn't start planning it on Boxing Day, all is not lost - imagination and a credit card will do wonders. Sunshine and sangria fading into moonbeams margaritas; a good garden party is such stuff as dreams are made of…

Antiquarian Book Review | May 2003 | The Secret Garden

As a garden designer with a reputation for contemporary work, it is fascinating to realise that much of my design philosophy is rooted in old books. Two men are responsible for this education, my great uncle Tim Kenrick and my great grandfather, the impressionist painter Louis Tinayre…

Press and Journalism

A selection of published articles featuring completed projects combined with articles I have written for various newspapers and magazines.