What does a high backyard designer do to loosen up? He gardens, after all—however not precisely the place you’d count on. Cleve West, winner of seven Chelsea Flower Present RHS Gold Medals, spends his free time tending to a plot that couldn’t be extra totally different from the conceptual areas he creates for shoppers. Not particularly non-public and the other of stylish, his patch is in a West London group backyard (within the UK it’s known as an allotment) and has been his private undertaking for a decade.
Cleve’s 2011 ebook, Our Plot, half memoir, half handbook, half state-of-the-world discourse, takes us by means of the highs and lows of allotment life. In the meantime, we’ve been invited for lunch:
Pictures by Andrew Montgomery.
Cleve West is the Gary Cooper of the backyard design world. Modest, honest, assured, he’s admired by all. Did I point out that he can prepare dinner? In addition to rising greens, fruit, and flowers, Cleve does a stunning quantity of entertaining within the allotment that he shares along with his accomplice, Christine Eatwell.
They use a wide range of garden-side cooking contraptions: a grill, a gas-fired oven, and a hand-built pizza oven. “Many hours are spent not rising greens,” admits Cleve, proven right here along with his grill, picked up in Normandy, and the spectacular pizza oven, which has a brick base, mud and sawdust dome, and bottles positioned within the center to cease the warmth from happening.
