Across from the wide open greenery of Queen’s Park in North London, a garden quietly rebels. Sleeping Beauty is less a designed space and more a whispered invitation — a celebration of nature left to dream for itself. Created between 2015 and 2016, this intimate city plot embraces the idea of controlled wildness, where structure exists only to frame the chaos of untamed growth.
Self-seeding cottage garden favourites and edible plants jostle for space in a joyful, anarchic blend of form and fragrance. Here, foxgloves spring up where they please, poppies dance between courgettes, and sweet peas twine themselves through anything willing to offer support. It’s a garden that evolves daily, unapologetically seasonal and wonderfully alive.
Rustic timber pergolas rise like weathered sculptures, shading Himalayan daybeds — an unexpected nod to faraway places, tucked among English flora. A winding path of worn sandstone setts gently guides you through the space, encouraging slow discovery. At its heart, a bespoke seating area built from reclaimed jarrah railway sleepers offers a place to sit among the colour and texture, surrounded by the hum of bees and the soft creak of climbing plants.
In clever touches, mirrors are placed throughout — not simply decorative, but designed to catch and bounce light into shaded corners, stretching the illusion of space in this compact urban plot. They offer reflections not just of the garden, but of the gardener’s philosophy: that nature, when trusted, creates its own kind of poetry.
Sleeping Beauty isn’t just a garden — it’s a love letter to the imperfect, the evolving, and the free.
