“There’s a vacuum in design,” he says, “that new ideas can rush in to fill. I’m not really against any traditional form of garden or plants I like the tension between the natural and the man-made. All I ask is that people think about it and ask themselves what their garden is going to mean.”His partner, the horticulturalist Jo Matthews, shares his radical approach. She is used to the challenge of finding plants that not only match his clean geometric lines but that also refrain from growing rampantly all over them and ruining the effect. For this garden in Golders Green, Jo’s challenge was to provide a range of plants happy to grow in containers, at a variety of heights, and to provide all-year interest. They also had to be low maintenance for this busy family with limited horticultural enthusiasm.”Because this garden is an experiment,” she says, “there are many alien associations of colour, materials and texture.

I’ve used orange rock roses at the highest level, bronze conifers, epimediums, dark purple irises and black and blue grasses. With the French lavender and Eleagnus ebbingeii, it’s also intensely fragrant, even in the winter.” To avoid upstaging the overall design, she used a lot of white flowering plants to echo the Foamex surfaces and mounds of evergreen hebes, “just to bubble over the edges but not go trailing over everything”.Having spent the last year perfecting this special garden, she admits that it will be hard to let it go. She can’t really feel happy at the prospect of it being changed, dismantled or moved elsewhere. “It’s so rare to get a commission like this but we know we can’t be too possessive.

At the end of the day it’s not our garden.” The irony of the situation is not lost on her. So rare (if not unique) is it for a garden like this to be built in Britain that the philosophy behind it – the disposable garden – becomes painful for its creators “Perhaps it will end up being listed,” jokes Jo Matthews. “If we have pioneered the throw-away garden, someone will have to preserve one to show it really happened.”Is this small corner of Golders Green really so outrageous? “You would have thought so if you had seen some of the neighbours’ faces,” Jo says Is it a blueprint for the future? “It ought to be. The garden of the future will be closely tailored to the people who use it and this one certainly is.” Paul Cooper and Alastair Burgess agree with her. After all, they point out, by using new and surprising materials and working on a multi- level plan, they are at least raising questions about the function of gardens to come. (Readers who would like to know more can contact Paul Cooper and Jo Matthews at Ty Bryn, Old Radnor, Presteigne.)Paul Cooper tries to provoke, not to destroy traditions or dictate new ones but to create a flood of alternatives Some may look like this; many will not.