Garden of the Week
This intriguing, two-acre Cornish garden, created with family and all sorts of wildlife in mind, is packed full of surprises
When ‘gardening doctors’ Sara Gadd and Daro Montag moved into their Cornish home in 2001, the garden was just a field of brambles and bracken and a rough patch of overgrown hedges and couch grass. Split into a series of animal enclosures and small paddocks, it had heavy, sticky soil that required eight tons of mushroom compost and regular work to keep it in good condition.
Today, it’s hard to imagine how it looked back then. The gARTen Garden (both have PhDs in art) has become a real garden not just for their family but also for all sorts of wildlife. Their artistic background shows in the imaginative and expressive planting and structure.
The garden now boasts numerous feature areas, with very much their own look and feel, each enclosed by the original hedges. This ensures the garden has plenty of charm, expectation and intrigue, as there’s always something new to see and explore round every corner.
These include the granite terrace, which is at the centre of the garden and a hub for four archways made from sleepers, and it leads on to the other areas – cedar verandah, kitchen terrace, the fernery, bamboo walk and willow walk, Oriental garden, acer garden with a square, slated pond and water feature, a vegetable garden and a children’s field. A conservatory appears to grow above dense plantings of yellow and white bidens and the lush leaves and exotic flowers of ginger lilies (hedychium), both of which still look superb in autumn.
Sara is ‘doctor in charge’ of the gardening, maintenance, planting and planning, with a special love of their productive veg patch of ordered raised beds, and has also developed many areas of perennial and shrub plantings throughout the garden.
Daro, along with Sara’s father, is responsible for keeping the lawns and grass areas in check. Daro also constructed all the wooden buildings, features and structures, as he loves working in wood. “We really enjoy the way the various wooden structures offset the orchestra of the surrounding plants,” Sara says.
“Daro also created the granite terrace, moving 20 tonnes of boulders by hand, using rollers and bars. There’s no need for gym training here,” laughs Sara. “He’s also in charge of the charcoal burner, which was one of his artworks. It’s now used to make biochar, which we use to improve poor soil, and as our own charcoal for summer barbecues.”
At this time of year, the garden is aglow with a range of cheery rudbeckias and Michaelmas daisies. Loud, colourful dahlias with large flower heads in creams and deep blood reds, hydrangeas – including a scrumptious H.
paniculata in raspberry cream colours – and double, white Japanese anemones are a major highlight in shady areas. Japanese maples, as their leaves start to change colour, bring a wonderful warmth to the cool, autumn evenings.
“And I adore grasses, which are planted in such a way to catch the low evening sunlight,” says Sara. “These include Panicum virgatum ‘Warrior’, Calamagrostis brachytricha and C. acutiflora
‘Karl Foerster’. They blow and sway in the wind above the lower plantings of colourful geraniums.
“But what we both love most is to share our garden. Our garden openings are just wonderful events and all kinds of people come to see us. We really enjoy seeing people wandering through the garden, drinking tea and finding quiet spots in which to contemplate, and young children running and hiding, climbing up into dens and scaling over the rope bridges. But, like many gardens, ours is developing all the time – it’s a long distance run, not a sprint! There’s a saying written on the side of the house that states, ‘with perseverance the snail reached the Ark’.”
Sara adds that the family - the couple have three children, Maia, Jamie and Eiger – see the garden as its own “small ecosystem”.
“We welcome all manner of