Jinny Blom's compact London garden is a verdant haven without a blade of grass in sight

Jinny Blom's garden in south London is in its fifth incarnation. When she bought the house nearly 30 years ago, it was a standard London garden with a lawn, a path and a few apple trees, plus an Anderson shelter. Now, since a redesign last year, it has become a stylish urban retreat with sleek new walls, raised beds and not a blade of grass in sight.

When Jinny moved to south London, she co-owned a delicatessen; the idea of a career in garden design hadn't even crossed her mind. A few years later, she trained as a transpersonal psychologist and psychotherapist, concurrently working for a residential charity caring for men with schizophrenia. Horticultural therapy was very beneficial for them. 'They would grow brilliant things for our gardens,' she remembers. 'Plants, landscapes, architecture and people have always interested me, but until much later I didn't put two and two together and realise that these were the perfect qualities for garden design.'

Having always gardened herself, Jinny had also helped friends restore the Menagerie garden in Northamptonshire, and they persuaded her to redirect her career and try her hand at garden design. In 1996, she went to work with Dan Pearson, before starting her own business in 2000.

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Two decades on, Jinny is one of the highest profile garden designers in the country. Her gardens are beautifully put together, structured spaces with elegant planting and detailed craftsmanship, each one intelligently tailored to its own environment. Her own small back garden is a microcosm of her art.

Modest and down to earth, she has never had any desire to move from her south London base, although she dreams of having a garden big enough for a studio as well as space for vegetables and chickens. 'I'm hugely busy, so this garden is all I need,' she says. 'I don't want to hand it over to a gardener: I enjoy the immediacy of having somewhere that feels under control. I'm a very private person and would never bring clients here - this garden has nothing whatsoever to do with my work. It's my home, somewhere I can come back to, somewhere I can just be myself.'

After a period of enforced non-gardening, the garden in its previous incarnation had become overgrown. 'Everything was collapsing and a tidal wave of bindweed was coming over from all sides, with self-seeded verbascum everywhere. It was still beautiful in its own way, but I had to do something about it.' Jinny had always dreamed of putting walls all around the garden, so the old fences came out and a new walled garden was created in the autumn of 2014, with a lower wall at the far end to draw the eye and create the sense of a bigger space. A 'gate to nowhere' fools you into thinking the garden goes on beyond the back wall, but in fact it screens a tiny space just big enough for storing unsightly things.

In addition to the walls, Jinny created new raised beds with the same brick, a long rectangular pool divided by a central path, and further areas of reclaimed decking and terracing using narrow Belgian bricks. 'I wanted to impose a much more manageable structure so it's easy to look after,' she says. 'The whole premise is to make it relaxed. My life is anything but relaxed, and I'm not a relaxed sort of person, so I like to make my environment as calm as possible.' Structure, colour and water are equally important, and the simple body of water that stretches from one side of the garden to the other, reflecting the sky and foliage, is another device to make the garden feel more expansive. The brick walls plunge right down into the water, so that the pool feels seamlessly connected to the whole structure, and three lead pipes create water jets that Jinny says - with typical humour - commemorate a history of leaky pipes in the house.