London's ivy league calling

And like Alice, I tumbled into a wonderland of houses in Richmond that showed the most amazing green thumbs!

A warm day surfaced in the midst of chilling March and I began to explore the lanes around this town where Virginia Woolf spent so many years writing, and found a treasure trove of houses that were dressed up in nothing but garden finery.

Kew Gardens was forgotten as I met a house with a lettuce green collar all round its neck and two large ones proudly wearing a dazzling jacket of green, all of them using ivy for their winter clothing.

The ivy houses of London are so plentiful that they can quite easily form their own collective, a kind of Ivy Houses Association of London. And they can have a league of assistants with houses that use plants other than ivy to paint themselves green, ginger, even ruby red or yellow! They use ivy, jasmine, camellia shrubs, yellow forsythia glittering to create climbers, hedges and screens with delightful results.

Green exotica

They are all environmentally conscious, smart tailors, these houses that prefer ivy to marble, clematis and roses to cement or stone, and shrubs to plain stone walls! They are all mesmerising as they reveal how plants can do for you, something exotic and enchanting, without having to pay heavily for an interior designer.

For the visitor to London, ivy houses can become a minor obsession that will make you walk miles to find the next new one! I walked without tiring, as I spotted a new swirl and a delightful twirl at the next corner or lane! Every house snoozed comfortably in its stunning simplicity, revealing the heart and soul of its owners.

Houses that had taken in these green designers have a voice of their own that is somehow beseeching. It encourages creativity using the environment to coax the boutique designer inside the owner to come out of hiding. 

There was an amazing garden wall proudly wearing a shawl of five kinds of green shrubs! Lettuce-green, river-green, sea-green, mint-green and lemony green! Two tall houses had windows wearing green lace while bronze leaf curtains covered their porches. One innovative flat had windows with a solemn white jasmine necklace! To add to the spell, for a month, white and pink cherry blossom trees bloomed before shops, houses, flats and schools.

Some of the most inventive and winsome green thumb houses were in Richmond, which was not surprising as this town owns Kew Gardens from where its residents can grab every bit of plant know-how, expertise and a wealth of every plant under heaven’s garden, to give their houses green glamour.  

The sad news is that England’s obsessive greed for gardening has created an unpleasant problem — all of London’s stunning gardens are robbed by thieves — most of them elderly women who take away cuttings in handbags, coat pockets, underwear etc! Mansions with exotic plants too are drained as garden thieves come in the night and cart away rose bushes, entire hedges of exquisite design, any exciting gardening ornaments! Now you know why green thumb houses are so hard to resist or ignore.

One cucumber green and lemon ivy had made a pensive party dress for a huge six feet by six feet wall in a house in Surbiton near Hampton Court. Then I found it slyly posing as a lace of sea green for a small cottage window. Ivy ornamentations began to appear over ledges, post boxes, fences, windows and even over pub walls, adding a border to pansies, crocus and begonias. The ‘ivy itch’ slowly began to sneak into my senses as it changed its patterns and colours at will — it even appeared as the sign of the cross in one adventurous house.

There are many people against ivy which they say is invasive and harms trees and old houses. But many experts on the side of this plant say that it actually protects houses in winter from the chilling cold and does more good than harm. But once the ivy itch has got you hooked, you will put it in bottles, containers, on ledges and alongside walls, the way I have.

Richmond can be reached through the underground — go to Waterloo and from there to Clapham Junction from where you get a train to Richmond and then another to Kew Gardens. If you don’t feel like spending 13 pounds for a ticket to Kew Gardens you can follow your nose as I followed a feline, and the houses with green thumbs will lead you into a free wonderland of garden wisdom. You will not return from such a house-hugged outing without filling up your diary with at least 30 exotic tips to dress up your home with flimsy, flighty, frilly green garments. And all for free!