Tamara Beckwith is talking enthusiastically about her garden in Chelsea, west London, and the wildlife it attracts. “I have so many birds: robins, blue tits, love doves,” she says. “It’s because I feed them all. My husband thinks I am a bit loopy and have lost the plot.”

Avian care and deadheading petunias is not an obvious interest for the former wild child who notoriously left Chelten-ham Ladies’ College pregnant at 16. Nowadays, she is a Hello! columnist and permanent fixture on the posh party scene. Yet domesticity comes to even the most dedicated socialite. Beckwith, 38 (whose property-magnate father, Peter, is estimated by The Sunday Times Rich List to have a fortune, together with his brother, Sir John, of £450m), bought the house for £1.6m in 2005, with her then boyfriend Giorgio Veroni, 36, who also works in property. The couple married last year, and are now selling up, as the Italian Veroni wants to live somewhere more lateral; there are five floors here, including the roof terrace.

Domesticity for Beckwith and Veroni doesn’t mean spending too much time sitting at home, and our interview had to be fitted in between jaunts. When we meet, they have just returned from the wedding of Formula One boss Flavio Briatore in Italy, and the white petunias and busy lizzies in the window boxes are suffering from a lack of water. The plants will need a good soaking, as the couple are off again in a couple of days’ time.

Up on the decked roof terrace, which covers the whole floor area of the house and is the only one in the street, Beckwith has gone for the minimalist look, with a few cordylines in large wooden planters dotted around the edges. The site would need serious attention to keep it filled with happy-looking plants, as it is exposed to full sunshine and drying winds.

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Down at ground level, however, the main garden is an inviting little bower of greenery - including oleander, jasmine, lemon trees, laburnum and wis-teria - and none the worse for some neglect. Beckwith admits to not knowing much about gardening and says she leaves the nuts and bolts to Mark Collier, from Collier & Co, a London gardening company, who comes once a week to keep it looking good.

“I don’t get involved in bringing things home and having a little idea. That’s not my idea of gardening at all,” she says, with her distinctive, throaty laugh. Then, so as not to look completely hands-off, she adds: “I love doing the deadheading, but I don’t know what I am doing.”

Beckwith’s garden is only 28ft by 18ft, a typically tiny inner-city space. However, under her direction, it is a lush haven – somewhere to hide from the rest of the world and to entertain friends. Those wearing her friend Tamara Mellon’s spiky-heeled Jimmy Choo shoes, however, would be advised to enter it through the basement study rather than down the steep wrought-iron stairs that lead from the open-plan living area on the raised ground floor. Appropriately for such a party girl, it was once rented by the footballer George Best and it’s amazing he didn’t break his neck coming down them after an evening’s hard partying.

Beckwith likes “loads of flowers, and for everything to smell”. Actually, apart from hydrangeas, and pots of white stock and purple and white petunias, the garden is rather lacking in flowers. The narrow, raised borders and the canopy of greenery put paid to burgeoning herbaceous borders. People forget, however, that green is a colour in itself - this year’s heart-stopping show gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show had little in them but leaves.

There are two things Beckwith needs in her new nest, though: enough room for her clothes, and some outside space. “If I am going to live in a flat, then I do need a garden,” she says. “It’s not like you’ll be out there in your 6ft by 3ft witha barbecue and all your friends, but what is nice is the feeling that you can open the door - it’s not just a wall.”

Tamara Beckwith's house is on the market for £3.2m through Knight Frank 020 7439 3400

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