British Memorial Garden

Julian and Isabel Bannerman. Portrait by Johny Shand Kydd (cropped for use on this site)

Later this month, work will begin on turning a small corner of Manhattan into a garden that will be for ever Britain. The paving stones in Hanover Square, a few blocks from Ground Zero, will be lifted to begin digging for The British Memorial Garden - a place to commemorate the 67 British citizens killed on September 11.

While few would argue about the merits of the project, some might raise an eyebrow at the husband-and-wife design team who have been chosen to undertake such a sober enterprise. For Julian and Isabel Bannerman are better known as purveyors of extravagantly romantic English country-house gardens - replete with grottoes, temples and lush planting schemes. Their idiosyncratic visions have won them a client list of high-minded grandees which includes the Rothschild, Getty, Sainsbury, and Pearson families, Lord Lloyd-Webber and even the Prince of Wales. But it wasn't swanky connections which led to the memorial garden commission; the Bannermans won a competition two years ago which pitted them against the cream of Britain's garden design talent. The challenge, says Julian, was in creating a garden which not only served its commemorative purpose but which was also robust enough to survive the harsh New York winters, the quantities of de-icing salt spread during snowstorms, and the long shadow cast over Hanover Square by a neighbouring skyscraper. If they'd based their design on the beau ideal of a herbaceous border, he explains: "the garden would have been over in a moment".

Their solution was a design based around stone - frostproof stone from Caithness, Morayshire, Wales and Portland, inscribed with the names of the counties of Britain - and evergreen topiary shaped from yew and box.

Stone appealed to the Bannermans for historical reasons (many of Manhattan's flagstones were imported from Caithness in the 19th century) and as a medium for carved lettering.

Off the old block: Simon Verity carves Morayshire stone for the garden.
While working on the project, he went to live in a hut in Caithness

Besides, as Julian points out: "People like looking at things written in the ground. Americans have a great tradition of marking their footprints in the ground." The idea for the inscriptions, he says, came from "the poetry" of the Radio 4 shipping forecast. But instead of weather areas, they chose counties - as well as London boroughs and British dependencies - "because you find names like Cambridge, Boston, Somerset all over the States, so Americans would understand it."

The list of counties will run like a ribbon around the perimeter of the wedge-shaped garden, enclosing the topiary, raised beds of cyclamen and mock orange, and serpentine benches made in Portland stone.

The yew topiary, meanwhile, brings with it a double symbolism - of remembrance for a long-lived tree associated with British churchyards and also an added sense of the ancient. "Topiary," says Julian, "is timeless."

The project is the latest in a line of work which goes back to shortly after the Bannermans first met in Edinburgh, in the early 1980s. Isabel Eustace, a softly spoken Pre-Raphaelite beauty, was an undergraduate at the university, reading history and art history; Julian Bannerman, ebullient, fluent and trained in the arts ancient and modern, had already ventured into garden design and was running Bannermans, a bar and restaurant in the heart of the city's Old Town. They were married in 1983 and perfected their art by making a garden of their own at the Ivy, in Chippenham. Until the Bannermans took it on, the Ivy had seemed a hopeless case. It was a ravishing Grade I Baroque house in poor condition, its remaining plot of land hemmed in on two sides by Chippenham's ring road. For years an owner could not be found. But where others feared to walk, the Bannermans bravely moved in and - largely with their own hands - brought a Sleeping Beauty house back to waking life and created a garden which - with its ranks of pleached limes and rich herbaceous borders - caught the Zeitgeist of softened, slightly lush, formality in 1980s country-house gardens.

It was while restoring the Ivy that they received their first high-profile commission - when the stonemason Simon Verity asked them to join him in creating a grotto and hermitage at Leeds Castle, in Kent. Their breakthrough years were the early 1990s when they worked simultaneously at Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire - for Lord Rothschild and the National Trust - restoring the dairy and a three-acre rock and water garden (unearthing caves, waterfalls and three lakes), and at Wormsley in the same county for the late John Paul Getty - creating a grotto-like tunnel between chalk cliffs, 100ft long and 40ft high. Whether they are making gardens formal or romantic, the Bannermans - who won a Gold Medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1994 - are gardeners of ideas, in tune with the spirit of where their work. At Highgrove they have made two gardens for the Prince of Wales, with ferneries, temple groves and a green oak monument. The Prince gave the Bannermans his Royal warrant in 2002 and has come on board as patron of the garden in New York.

Simon Verity has been one of the Bannermans' main supports in developing their New York garden design. (Last Friday, a plan of the garden, carved by Verity, was due to be laid in Grosvenor Square, London). The other has been Camilla Hellman. A dynamic British businesswoman living in New York, she conceived the idea of the garden, found its site, set up and ran the competition to find a garden designer, and a second for a piece of sculpture for the garden, won by the celebrated artist Anish Kapoor - and is well on the way to raising the $6.5m (£3.5m) needed to build it and provide an endowment for maintenance.

For Hellman, the Bannermans' design has all the quality she hoped for in the garden, which she proposes will be opened in the summer of 2006. People who wish to support her fundraising can still "buy" a county or more from the list of British place names. The Bannermans, who, for all the poetry in their work, are the most hands-on of designers, can barely wait for the ground to be broken and to have what they call their first "dirt session" in the British Memorial Garden.

Visit www.bannermandesign.com or www.britishmemorialgarden.org for more information.

On Deadly Ground