Just add water

This suburban garden has been utterly transformed to place ponds, plants and wildlife at its heart

- JANE PERRONE

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.”