Chiswick Low-Allergen Town Garden

This narrow town garden with a sad lawn in Chiswick was transformed with a curving brick path towards the new garden office. The lawn was taken up and planted with low-allergen perennials and shrubs. The purples and pale yellows of early summer are replaced by oranges and burgundy later in the year.

The clients' priority was a garden they could actually spend time in without triggering hay fever, so the planting palette was chosen carefully: pollen-heavy grasses and strongly scented plants were left out in favour of perennials with showy but low-allergen flowers. A reclaimed brick path curves through what was previously an unremarkable strip of lawn, drawing the eye — and the feet — towards the new garden office at the end of the plot, and making the narrow space feel like a journey rather than a corridor.

Early summer brings the garden's coolest palette: yellow Sisyrinchium striatum stands in spires against near-black bearded Iris Sable, while Geranium Orion spills its violet-blue flowers over the path edge and Salvia nemorosa Caradonna adds structure in deep purple. Euphorbia Humpty Dumpty’s acid-green flowerheads thread through the front of the border, sharpening the whole scheme without adding a scrap of pollen to worry about. As the season turns, this cool early-summer palette gives way to warmer oranges of Helenium Moerheim Beauty and burgundy tones of Penstemon Raven, so the border keeps working right through to autumn rather than peaking once and fading.

Height and structure come from bamboo and shrubs planted along the boundary, giving the garden office privacy and a green backdrop rather than a bare fence, while the layered planting either side of the path means the border reads as full and generous even in a relatively narrow plot. The result is a garden that solves a real, practical problem — allergy-friendly planting — without ever looking like a garden designed around a restriction.