INTERVIEW:When Laetitia Maklouf wrote ' The Virgin Gardener', a guide for newbies composed like a cookbook, she didn't even have a garden. She is now in the process of building one, gleefully documenting her mistakes for her next book. Her madcap ideas include a bee bar – 'for them to get drunk on nectar,' writes LOUISE EAST
THE FIRST TIME I heard Laetitia Maklouf’s rather fabulous name was at a dinner party. The china was mismatched, the napkins started life as cotton tea towels, and the lightest guest was sitting on a laundry basket. What converted the table from neo- studentia to boho chic were the clumps of tiny white cyclamens, repotted in Campbell’s soup cans, all sharp edges disguised by wedges of moss.
The idea, confessed the hostess, was not hers but one of Maklouf's, and she'd found it in a rather beautiful book, The Virgin Gardener. More like a recipe book than a gardening manual and aimed squarely at Nigella and Jamie fans, The Virgin Gardeneris packed with projects for the distinctly pink of thumb.
Why not grow mini pickling onions for cocktails in a pot on the balcony, wonders Maklouf. Why not make muffins from self-grown blueberries, or convert some cheap garage flowers into a cute posy? It doesn’t hurt that Maklouf is very pretty indeed, and the book is full of pictures of her, artfully wielding a secateurs while dressed in a floral tea dress and wellies.
Maklouf's life, as seen through the pages of The Virgin Gardener, would seem to be one of spontaneous dinners and glamorous picnics, so it's kind of a relief when she opens the door to her west London house in a denim skirt and T-shirt, fretful baby on one hip.
“I’m so sorry – it’s chaos in here,” she says cheerfully. “We just moved in last week and half the boxes are still unpacked.”
“We” meaning Maklouf, her systems-analyst husband (aka “the hunk”) and her year-old baby (aka “the babbety”), Jemima Velvet. The “here” is a small Edwardian terraced house, with turret-like eaves and a long, unruly and as-yet untamed back plot. Over mint tea and shop-bought biscuits (bought because they’re iced the same lurid pastel shade as the china), Maklouf outlines her plans for what will be her first garden.
" The Virgin Gardenergets her virgin garden," she says wryly. "I'm agog with plans – I want everything, including an Ewok-style treehouse, a sunken trampoline and a stumpery. I've got a whole long list. Of course, I can't have any of those things, at least not yet, but at least I have enough room to swing a cat."
Until recently, when Jemima’s arrival made her yearn for “doors and walls”, Maklouf lived in an open-plan loft once owned by Kate Moss, where outdoor cat-swinging was not a possibility. Instead she packed a 4ft x 10ft balcony with pots of euphorbia and scented geraniums, a moss garden, hanging baskets of strawberries, and tubs of tiny carrots. With the balcony opening onto her living room, the emphasis was on creating a wall of green to block out the tangle of chimney pots beyond, with an offshoot in delicious night smells.
If that sounds like a picture of domesticated bliss, it was not always so. For years, the balcony was a clutter-filled after-thought and Maklouf was a party girl, having drifted from an English literature degree into working as a PA. She knew she wanted a creative outlet (her parents are artists, one Welsh, one Israeli-born), but didn’t catch the gardening bug until after she found a packet of seeds in an unopened Christmas stocking in the back of a cupboard.
“I planted them, thinking nothing would ever come of it, but they actually came up. They didn’t last, but just to see the seeds sprouting was enough. It was kind of an epiphany. I quit my job and enrolled on a course, because I just had to know how it all worked.”
With a thorough training from the English Gardening School at the Chelsea Physic Garden under her belt, Maklouf, a self-confessed “townie”, became a gardening nut, but what would prove to be her greatest strength was that she did not forget just how little most non-gardeners know.
“Really, an experienced gardener has gone to another place, and they’re not bring-backable. For them, it’s all about the plants, and the pursuit of bigger or better or whatever,” she says. “But for most people, a garden has got to work as an outside room. For people with families, that means somewhere to kick a ball. You want space to sit and have a glass of wine on a summer evening, space to have a barbecue. It’s got to be liveable-in.”
It was with the aesthetic ignoramus in mind that The Virgin Gardenerwas conceived. At a dinner party decorated with usual Maklouf panache (several pots of violets brought in from the balcony scented the apartment), one of the guests mentioned an editor at Bloomsbury who was searching for a gardener to write a book for newbies.
“It shouldn’t have worked, really,” muses Maklouf. “She wasn’t a gardener, and I’d never written a book before. I didn’t even have a garden.”
Together, they lit upon the idea of creating garden “recipes”, each clearly spelling out a list of ingredients, method, and timings, and accompanied by beautiful photos.
“The people I’m interested in inspiring are the people like me who didn’t know what ‘perennial’ meant. Every single page I write, I take myself back and remember what it was like to know diddly-squat.”
Now Maklouf is back at the bottom of the learning curve, trying to work out compost bins and raised beds as she builds her own garden from scratch. It is an odd shape; a triangle with a misshapen rectangle tacked on top, and the section nearest the house is in full shade, but she has a wonderful south-facing end wall and a head full of plans.
Along the way, Maklouf, already a keen Twitterer, is going to write a blog about her progress, and take photos, and the whole lot will become the subject of her next book.
“My main plan is to show that you can take a completely empty piece of land and create something really rather fabulous in a year, even if you start, as any sane person would, in March rather than in January. I intend to make millions of squillions of mistakes and write about them.”
So far, her plans include shade-loving sarcococca (“smells like a sweet-shop”), dicentra and ferns in the sinewy beds between the apple trees in the first section, and a more formally laid-out section beyond, with the angles softened by the inclusion of “wafty” plants aimed at attracting bees, bugs and butterflies.
“The back bed is going to be like a bee bar, somewhere for them to get drunk on nectar. I’m going to raise a lot of the plants from seed, because we’ve spent all of our money – and then some – on the house.”
There will be a lawn (“because I have a baby and want more”) and four vegetable beds to allow for crop rotation (“very exciting”). A side plot will house a garden shed, those compost bins, some beds of asparagus, and another of potatoes. Even with the moving crates still unpacked, Maklouf has an egg carton full of seed potatoes sprouting.
“My vegetable-growing experience heretofore has been about creating luxurious morsels rather than feeding my family and I want to keep it that way. I’m a totally lazy gardener. I’ll always take the easiest route, and I’m always looking for ways to have an easier, more fun time doing something. If it takes blood, sweat and tears, I’m frankly not interested. So those veg beds, if they don’t work out for me, I’ll turn them into flower beds.”
That’s all very much in keeping with Laetitia Maklouf’s garden philosophy. The pots and planters she puts together may be chic, but the woman herself is relaxed, unfussy and as un-perfectionist as they come.
“I learnt a lot from plants at a time when I was kind of at a loss. Plants don’t have insecurities, and they don’t refuse to grow because they don’t feel like it. They don’t get out of bed the wrong side. They don’t think: does my bum look big in this?
“It’s that kind of putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other quality that has been important for me, because I was always a person who wanted everything to be perfect now. I think that the biggest thing plants teach you is that perfection is not beautiful, it’s just that perfection is where beauty lies.”
The Virgin Gardener(Bloomsbury, £20) is out in paperback next month. Follow Laetitia Maklouf on Twitter for details of her garden blog, which will go live next Friday
If you’ve got a long-neglected scrap of garden, Maklouf recommends showering it with hardy perennial seeds such as poppy and nigella. “See what comes up this summer and let that give you the enthusiasm and encouragement to go a bit further next year.”
Plant a herb garden on your window sill. “Spring is a perfect time to plant herbs. They’re easy and you can use them pretty much straight away. Decide what you’ll want to eat – thyme, mint, parsley, basil. Rocket is very easy to grow.”
To ensure a constant supply of fresh basil, Maklouf suggests buying a supermarket pot of the herb, dividing it into three, repotting each clump, and using in rotation.
If your garden fantasies are confined to a small balcony, Maklouf recommends lugging in a good-sized pot and planting something structural, such as a box ball or a standard bay tree at its centre.
Add some trailing ivy, leaving three pockets that you can fill – and refill – with cheap potting plants and flowering bulbs such as narcissus, crocuses and pansies. “It’s cute and it’s instant.”
