Corfu is known as the Green Island, which is a reference to the fact that it rains more than you would think – its average annual rainfall is nearly twice as much as London’s. However, it rains pretty steadily throughout the year in London, whereas in Corfu the heavens open with increasing abundance from autumn through to late spring, and then hardly at all from May to September. But the autumn rains wake up plants and bulbs from the scorch of summer, creating an exciting second spring of growth and flowering.
Designer Jennie Gay has been a gardener and designer in Greece for 23 years and knows the country’s climatic tricks; Corfu has a few extra ones up its sleeve, such as high humidity, sweltering summers and potential sub-zero lows in winter. ‘Establishing a garden there is much less forgiving than in the UK, because the hot, dry summers take no prisoners.’
Jennie has worked on the garden at Agnos House, which belongs to the London-based interior designer Looby Crean and her husband Paul, for 10 years and has helped create a place where nature is allowed to have her head without losing the balance required of a garden. Agnos (‘pure’ in Greek) is 450 metres up a steep hillside in the north-east corner of the island, with views over to the mountains of Albania.
The Creans first saw the tumbledown farm and olive press in 2000, when they were holidaying on the island with their young family. ‘We loved it so much that I contacted a local estate agent to say that if anything came up in the area, we’d be interested,’ recalls Paul. The couple did not expect things to happen fast – this is Greece, after all – but within weeks the farm was for sale and they bought it. ‘We wanted to keep the spirit of the place,’ says Looby. ‘The man who farmed here, Pipis, had been vital to the community in the war and later brought up four daughters here single-handedly. We wanted to respect that.’ The house and garden together create a space that feels well loved, not just one that is visited occasionally.
Jennie extended the scope of the garden in a series of interconnected rooms, encompassing the land around the house, through which to stroll on evenings when the cicadas sing and the air is cooler. Overgrown trees, including pomegranates, olives and figs, were pruned to allow the elemental feeling of the mountains, sea and sky into the garden. The abundant wildflowers of the dazzling Corfiot spring, such as wild carrot (Daucus carota) and honesty (Lunaria annua), are allowed to mature into seed heads without the usual strimming as soon as they finish flowering. This may sound a small thing, but in a land where the whirr of a motor is never far away, a certain wildness is a major change in approach. The Creans have incorporated three water tanks under the buildings, so that the garden can be irrigated fortnightly in summer, although Jennie encourages plants to deep root and find their own water. This approach is rare in Corfu, where daily summer watering is often the norm.
Around the house, the sinuous silhouettes of evergreen drought-tolerant plants, such as lavender (Lavandula x ginginsii ‘Goodwin Creek Grey’) and creeping rosemary, snake over white limestone walls. Jennie makes use of more classic dry-gardening perennials and shrubs, such as airy beeblossom (Gaura lindheimeri), the mauve long-flowering orchid-like Tulbaghia violacea and Russian sage (Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’), which flower repeatedly over the hot summers. ‘In the UK, you wouldn’t cut back these plants in July but, here, reducing them by about a third at this time and deadheading regularly encourages fresh growth and keeps them blooming for longer,’ she explains.
Last summer, the devastating wildfires that broke out on Corfu concentrated Jennie’s thoughts about what she could do to make her gardens even more resilient to climate change. Properly managed landscapes that work with nature and not against it can be part of the solution. ‘We need to accept natural process rather than perfection all the time,’ she observes. Fortunately, in Looby and Paul, she has clients who understand this from not only an aesthetic perspective but also an environmental one.
Jennie Gay: medlandscapes@gmail.com. Agnos House is available to rent through Scott Williams: scottwilliams.co.uk
