This suburban garden has been utterly transformed to place ponds, plants and wildlife at its heart
WORDS JANE PERRONE PHOTOGRAPHS SARAH CUTTLE
Many of us revamped our gardens during the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic, but few of us can claim to have embarked on projects of quite the scale achieved by André Schott. In just three years, he has transformed the garden behind his semi-detached suburban home into a watery landscape that looks as if it could have been here for decades.
When he moved here from London six years ago, in search of more outdoor space, André already had a clear vision. It drew on a lifelong fascination with water, birthed from his childhood in the Netherlands, where every spare moment was spent exploring the many bodies of water for which his country is renowned. “That’s my favourite part of nature – where the water meets the land,” he says. His dream was to create a water-meadow garden, filled with plants that thrive in and around wet places. “The idea is to walk through the garden and not really know where one pond ends and another begins.” By placing water at the centre of his scheme, André believes he has approached things differently from the majority of people who add water to their gardens. “Ponds are rarely integral to naturalistic design, where they are part of the border,” he says. “Normally all you get is a single circle of marginal plants – the pond and the garden are two separate things. I wanted to integrate the ponds into the design.”
In November 2019, he asked garden designer and landscape architect Hayley Hughes of Warwickshire-based Plantology to use his ideas to create an overall design for the space and the planting. “André had already made a sketch of three planting communities that he named Low Marsh, High Marsh and Water Meadow,” says Hayley. “He also provided a detailed list of desirable plants and some inspirational imagery of planting he admired. It was a pleasure to work with such an exciting concept.”
André was confident with the aquatic side but less so with the landscaping, and was keen to avoid costly mistakes. “He wanted to ensure that the planting communities met his aesthetic desires, and that they would be stable and reliable in the long run, while working ecologically to achieve a wetland look on dry soil,” explains Hayley.
Everything changed with the pandemic lockdown in 2020. With time on his hands, André went full throttle. He found a builder to dig out huge quantities of soil to make way for water. The ponds and the outline of the paths were completed by the end of the year, an
