When Marina Adams was designing a garden for Stamos Fafalios on the Greek island of Chios, she suggested that the roses be brought over from Britain. Although Fafalios had asked that his garden be filled only with plants native to the island, they both baulked at the gaudy hybrids that adorn most Chian gardens. So David Austin roses it was, in tasteful shades of pink, white and pale gold, the last of which matches the colour of the house: in the glare of the Greek sun, they grow paler than than they do in more temperate climes.

Both Adams and Fafalios are Greek, but their homes are in London, where they met. Fafalios, 55, was born and bred in the capital, his father having moved there from Chios in the 1930s, but he and his family always return to the house built by his great-grandfather for summer holidays.

The house for which Fafalios asked Adams to design a garden is opposite his family’s 19th-century home. Both are on a hillside overlooking the Aegean, facing Turkey’s Izmir peninsula, a proximity that gives the island a flavour of both east and west: Chios’s 350-year occupation by the Turks ended only in 1912.

Chios is the fifth-largest Greek island, yet it remains largely untouched both by mass tourism and by development — much of the island is uncultivated scrub and pine, and heaven for wild-flower enthusiasts. Gardens there, as in the rest of the country outside the smarter suburbs of Athens, tend to be places in which to grow vegetables and an array of bright annuals in pots and painted cans, so Fafalios’s project is unusual.

His father bought the plot in the 1960s. Having studied as an architect in London before the family shipping business took up all his time, Fafalios designed the house himself, which was completed in 1984, along traditional Chian lines. It is a large, high-ceilinged mansion that sits comfortably within its three-acre site, and it looks as if it has been there forever.

Having never had more than a small balcony garden before, he decided to call in Adams, whose work for the National Trust for Greece he admired, especially her designs for a monastery garden on Patmos.

“I wanted to create a garden using only plants from the island (roses excepted),” says Fafalios. “There were also certain characteristics I was after: mottled light through the leaves of a citrus grove, some flowers, running water, and I always wanted a jasmine walk.”

He was also keen to have a large wild-flower area to show off plants that grow on the slopes of the hilly island: “It would make an easy walk rather than tramping round the mountains.” And as the island is famous as the place where chewing gum was invented by the ancient Greeks, there is a clump of sap-bearing mastic bushes, Pistacia lentiscus var chia, in recognition of the fact. Today, gum is usually made from other natural latexes.

While Adams included these plants in her designs, she baulked at the idea of a lawn, as it would be totally out of place in a climate where grass has to be constantly irrigated from deep wells to maintain any semblance of greenery.

When Fafalios saw her plans, he was delighted. “I didn’t have to move one plant,” he says. Adams, on the other hand, had her own ideas about moving things, and they were big: she wanted to uproot a palm and several olive trees in order to resite them. The local workmen drafted in to do the moving thought Adams and Fafalios were both nuts — “They coughed politely and said, ‘These foreigners!’ ” laughs Fafalios — but, sure enough, the trees have survived the move, though they are now a little shorter than they were originally, as they had to be pounded into the ground to survive.

Fafalios mostly visits the house during the summer, so the garden is geared towards entertaining and has several “rooms”.

At the front of the house is a mosaic path of black and white pebbles — a traditional Chian paving material — set to look like tiles. It passes through rectangular borders of roses edged with box, and the theme is carried through the house and on to the back veranda, with black and white tiled floors. It makes a formal entrance, green and shady under one of the large palm trees that his father planted (the other one has been moved round the corner to the citrus grove). At the front of the house there is a lovely cool eating area under an aged olive tree, and here Adams has been more abstract with her mosaic design, creating a circular pattern featuring olive leaves.

Nearby is Fafalios’s running water, in the shape of a traditional Chian water cistern, filled with fish and shaded by a wisteria pergola, with vines behind. Adams intended to use the cistern and channels dug into the soil to water the garden but the land slopes, so the channels don’t always fill up. An automatic watering system also tended to clog up with dirt, so they have resorted to the most traditional method of all: the gardener, Dimitri, waters by hand new plants and pots requiring the most attention.

Fafalios’s terrace has lovely views over the sea, but can be uninhabitable on account of the high meltemi winds, the Greek equivalent of the sirocco, that buffet the island, especially in August. “The wind blows away the furniture,” he says.

Another climatic factor is the harshness of Chian winters. “It can be colder than in London,” says Fafalios. Two winters ago, temperatures dropped to minus 10C. “All the lemon trees were burnt by the frost,” says Fafalios, “the jasmine, bougainvilleas and jacarandas, too.”

Fafalios and Adams have created a sensual haven, drawing on the Islamic influences of the island’s history, with water, scent, shade and cool spaces under the relentless sun. But their efforts are not appreciated by all. When Fafalios was planting 144 cyprus trees at the back of the garden to mask the concrete brutalism of the house next door, his neighbour said: “Are you building a cemetery here?” To which he replied: “I am giving you a wonderful garden to look at from your kitchen window.” Perhaps one day she will appreciate it.

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers