A FINE BALANCE
The wild and the manicured get equal billing in Sarah Pajwani’s beautiful Berkshire garden
This beautiful Berkshire garden has just the right mix of wild and manicured spaces
Pure coincidence brought Sarah and Sal Pajwani to this house and garden on the outskirts of Maidenhead. Though they’d talked about looking for a new home, they’d made the sensible decision to wait and see which senior schools their two boys (now grown up) got into before making a move. But that all went out of the window when, having taken the morning off to take their eldest to an admissions interview, they spotted a promising looking property in the local paper, just around the corner from the cafe they were in. ‘We phoned the estate agent, told him we were free there and then, and that was that,’ says Sarah. The house was hidden away at the end of a lane, surrounded by meadowland and woods. ‘It felt like the start of an adventure. The two-acre garden wasn’t much more than a field with a tiny pond and some dilapidated sheds, but it felt like a huge, fantastic playground. We both felt really excited.’
The excitement grew the night they moved in, in March 2006. ‘We went to bed listening to the owls hooting, which was magical,’ says Sarah, ‘and then we were woken by bizarre noises which turned out to be muntjac deer.’ There was more wildlife to get acquainted with, too. The overgrown pond was full of newts and tadpoles, the survey had unearthed a badger undermining a corner of the house, and there were rabbits everywhere. ‘It was like Watership Down,’ she says.
At first, making the house habitable was the top priority and the garden was left to its own devices, although even the most basic tasks proved to be a steep learning curve. ‘The rabbits went for every single plant I put in and the first time we mowed the lawn it took us eight hours,’ says Sarah. ‘So we bought a ride-on mower, but that cost more than our car!’ Eventually, time and budgets >
❝WHAT MAKES THIS GARDEN SO SPECIAL IS THAT IT LOOKS GOOD PRETTY MUCH EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. IT’S A CHALLENGE, BUT I REALLY ENJOY IT ❞
allowed for a more considered approach and, in 2008, Sarah asked garden designers Acres Wild to put together a masterplan. ‘We loved the garden’s wildness but I was longing for more interest and colour,’ says Sarah who, armed with copious tearsheets from magazines, had resolved to do the planting herself. ‘Much more daunting for me was the challenge of how to create a layout that made sense.’ Her design brief was straightforward: something ‘simple, natural and easy to maintain – with a bigger pond.’ Wildlife ponds are generally considered fairly high maintenance, so this was something of a contradiction in terms, but Sarah’s mind was made up. ‘We had so much fun watching all the newts and the tadpoles and the birds, we were determined to find a way.’
Before any work could begin, and if any new plants were to stand a chance, the dilapidated fences had to be repaired and rabbitproofed, and hedges planted to hide them. Once that was done, they brought in the diggers and dug out the pond and the beds.
Sarah was keen to ensure the garden looked good all year round, so successional planting was key. Hornbeam and holly hedges, conifers (yew and cypress) and evergreen box, used in the parterre and in some judiciously placed domes, were planted to ensure the garden has ‘good bones’ throughout the seasons. Bulbs – cyclamen, winter aconites, snowdrops, daffodils and tulips – add interest in late winter and spring before the blossom from the old apple and pear trees start to take over.
Grasses have been particularly useful, adding a sense of movement to the borders throughout summer and autumn –
‘I love their softness and texture,’ says Sarah – and then a structural,>
❝What we love most is the pond – it’s the heart and soul of the garden because it attracts so much life ❞
sculptural element as their seedheads stand over winter. The golden oat grass, Stipa gigantea, is one of Sarah’s favourites, while in the ‘grass island’ bed at the heart of the garden she has combined erect Calamagrostis, the cloud-like Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’ and the fluffy bottle-brushes of Sanguisorba obtusa with a romantic mix of long-flowering perennials and roses to great effect. Laterflowering plants such as echinaceas, heleniums, dahlias and asters ensure touches of colour right through autumn, when the stems of Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’, the backbone of the borders around the pond, ignite into a blaze of fiery orange. Wildflowers, which Sarah encourages in both the long grass around the lawn and in the woodland border, add a further layer of interest.
As the garden has matured, happily, the rabbits have become less of a concern. ‘They still come and have a nibble on things but it’s not a problem,’ says Sarah. ‘In fact, the longer I stay here, the less importance I place on individual plants and the more importance I place on all the life that it brings. When we first moved here, we had people offering to shoot the rabbits, the crows, the foxes; talking about the ‘war on slugs’. I’m still not sure I’d go so far as to say slugs are a joy, but it is lovely to watch all the creatures doing their thing. This was a wildlife paradise when we came here. We’ve made it into a garden for us to enjoy, but I still want the wildlife to feel at home, too. I want that balance.’
Sarah opens her garden for the NGS several times throughout the year. On 29 October she hopes to be able to hold a ‘talk and walk’ on ‘Grasses and the Autumn Garden’. To find out more, visit ngs.org.uk and search for St Timothee.