Natural swimming pond
Grasses and perennials create a stylish, monochromatic backdrop in this nature-friendly garden. Owner Sarah Murch shows us around
Winter isn’t the most enticing time to take a dip in an outdoor pool, but the birds at Ellicar Gardens don’t seem to mind. “I love the way our naturalistic garden draws in the wildlife in winter,” says owner Sarah Murch. “The garden is designed to be wild and natural in style, and as a result we get hundreds of goldfinches, wrens, wagtails, sparrows and starlings. So although there’s not much colour at this time of year – it’s very monochromatic compared to summer – you do have the birds flitting through the borders. And when the low sunshine lights up the grasses and seedheads they look amazing.” Sarah moved here with her husband Will and their family in 2008. “We needed more space,” she says. “We had five young children and we were just setting up our new natural swimming pool business. We also keep lots of farm animals: Golden Guernsey goats, Hebridean sheep, two pet pigs, four ponies, two llamas, four dogs, 20 free-range bantam hens and a guard goose, who runs around the garden with the hens, guarding them.” The property needed a complete overhaul. “The house was a former care home for teen offenders and was very institutional, with fire doors, CCTV and lots of boxy bedrooms. The garden was overgrown and neglected too, with thickets of brambles to clear. The soil was so uncared for it had become oxidised – if you don’t cultivate fenland soil it goes peaty, hilly and lumpy. So it all needed digging over and aerating before we could start planting.” Sarah had just finished her training at KLC School of Design when she took her own rambling plot in hand. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “It was a giant five-acre blank canvas with a seven-acre paddock behind, and I didn’t know where to start. It took me a full six months to create a concept plan. “The first thing I did was excavate the natural pool. Everyone was telling me to ‘put it anywhere’ but I wanted to pick the exact right spot because it would be impossible to move it later. So, I watched the sun for a year
to work out where the shadows fell and considered how the prevailing wind brought in the leaves from the garden boundaries. Eventually we put the pool in about 50m from the house, and designed the rest of the garden, all the views and vistas, around it.” A gravel garden now wraps around the pool, its shingly texture softened with generous clumps of thyme, thrift (Armeria maritima) and tall grasses so you can just glimpse the water from the house, but you can’t see the house from the pool. “These borders give the pool area a very wild and natural feel, with a loose planting of perennials, grasses and seedheads that last well in winter. We don’t cut anything down until the end of March,” says Sarah. The garden has a shelter belt around it and the couple have planted 270 specimen trees – among them, Himalayan birches for their stark white winter trunks and conifers including Xanthocyparis nootkatensis ‘Pendula’ (weeping Nootka cypress), Picea mariana (black spruce) and Pinus nigra (black pine). Deciduous trees offer autumn colour and a bold winter branch silhouette, including sorbus, acers, Cercidiphyllum japonicum (katsura tree) and Cercis siliquastrum (Judas tree). Curving grass paths frame sinuous borders filled with grasses and seedheads. “We use upright grasses to punctuate the garden,” says Sarah. “They bring structure to a space and move attractively in the breeze. They’re loose and airy to look at, perfect for screening one area from the next, so you can’t see the whole garden at once. “My favourite grasses include swathes of deschampsia, which look good under the deciduous trees, Calamagrostis acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, which mimics the reeds by the pond, pennisetum ‘Fairy Tails’ in the gravel garden and lots of wafty molinias, including Molinia caerulea ‘Edith Dudzus’. Stipa calamagrostis arches over the grassy pathways and looks great with scabious and clumps of Iris sibirica.” Partnering the grasses are spent summer flowers and shapely seedheads. “The best ones for winter structure are rudbeckias, stachys, veronicastrum and eupatorium, which looks like lacework with its fine filigree heads,” says Sarah. “Verbena bonariensis is good for the
Grasses punctuate the garden and move attractively in the breeze
goldfinches, while sanguisorba has lovely dotty seedheads, that look fabulous bobbing among the grasses in a breeze.” Sarah has a dedicated winter area too. “It was one of the first areas we created here,” she says. “It’s very fragrant, with flowers of sarcococca, daphnes and witch hazel scenting the air. There are heathers, colourful cornus stems, prickly rubus and willow stems in green, black and gold. We have a carpet of hellebores under the birches, all grown from seed, as well as snowdrops and Iris reticulata, scillas and crocuses in late winter. We’ve planted thousands of bulbs here and every year they pop up all round the garden. It’s worth it for the injection of colour they bring. “For me winter is all about shape and texture, the curves of our borders and the movement of the grasses in the wind. It’s about tints and tones too, a tonal landscape that’s absolutely beautiful.”