I turned my suburban plot into a beautiful, naturalistic garden

It was the garden that attracted the interior designer Tamsin Saunders to her 1940s home in Twickenham 10 years ago. Which sounds like a familiar house-hunting story, until you hear that it was a typical London terrace-sized plot with crazy paving, a small pond, a rectangle of lawn and five sets of sheds which had been “painted to within an inch of their lives”.

The front garden had been paved over to provide off-street parking, with an enormous light-blocking conifer in the middle.

Not, perhaps, what one might call charming.

But what got her creative juices flowing was the possibility of what it could become. “I like houses to feel as if they’ve emerged or grown out of the garden and the landscape in which they are set, rather than looking as though they have been ‘done up’,” she explains.

Saunders has a romantic, painterly approach to the way she tackles design projects (as a teenager she wanted to study art, but was persuaded to do a degree in Spanish at the University of Edinburgh). She fell into interior design almost accidentally, by decorating her own previous homes, which led to friends and neighbours asking her for help with theirs; she set up her interior design studio, Home & Found in 2012, and in March added an online shop of vintage pieces.

While she mainly deals with interiors for clients, she always has one eye on what is going on outside; so, when designing her own home, she tackled the house and garden as one. “I wanted the effect not just of looking out at the garden, but being in it; I wanted it to feel immersive,” she explains.

Nature has always been important to Saunders. “I grew up on top of a hill, above the South Downs, in a house with windows framed by wisteria that looked out over fields, trees and hills,” she says. “Just being surrounded by that is so nurturing. Even though I live in London now, I’m not a city person; I need to see the natural world.” 

She wanted a garden that reflected the nature around her home, near the banks of the Thames. But, she explains, it was never meant to be a replica of an English cottage garden, “rather a celebration of all nature”, and she drew inspiration from a range of sources, including water meadows, the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, and the Gardens of Alhambra in Spain.

The concept was to create a garden that was full of discovery. “I wanted it to feel, from the moment you approach the front door, as if you are walking into a hidden, slightly overgrown and forgotten world where nature has been let loose and you are completely away from it all,” she says.

The voyage starts as soon as you step over her boundary: she pulled up the paving and the huge conifer at the front of the house and replaced it with a path to the front door, lined with flowers and grasses that reflect the nearby river meadows.

“My neighbours thought I was mad to lose my off-street parking, but I do not want to look at my car from my windows; I want more nature,” she says. “The sound of the grasses blowing in the wind calms your senses and slows you down.”

In the back garden, she ripped out the crazy paving and the sheds, dug up the lawn, and then divided the long, rectangular garden into three separate sections to provide different “rooms” and experiences to enjoy at different times of the day.

Key to the design was a basic structure; after sketching out the rooms, she planted trees to help divide up the spaces. She had inherited a cedar at the bottom of the garden, which provided screening from the neighbours, but was emboldened by the knowledge that the land had historically been an orchard, and planted apple, fig, pear, magnolia and witch hazel trees, along with climbers such as roses, clematis and passion flower, to add more layers and structure.

In the first section, straight outside the house, she has created an area where she can sit in the morning with a cup of tea, with a patio of reclaimed warm brick laid in a herringbone pattern to reflect the parquet floorboards inside the house. “I set the outdoor bricks off at an angle because I didn’t want it to just look like an extension of the floor inside,” she says. “I think offsetting things gives a sense of magic.”

Creeping perennial mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii) grows between the bricks to lend a lived-in look, and around the edge of the patio, Saunders and her eldest daughter created a border of pressed pebbles that they had collected from a favourite beach. “We laid that on the hottest day of the year about two years ago, and it was a race against the cement drying,” says Saunders. A vintage table and chairs are shaded by an apple tree that she planted, surrounded by valerian.

From there, she created a little path lined with nepeta, pink geraniums, verbena and sage, to a middle section of the garden planted with foxgloves, flox and geranium, a black elder and a fig tree. An antique stone trough is filled with more self-seeding valerian, sedum and fennel. “I meant to take the trough further down the garden, but it landed there and that’s where it is staying,” laughs Saunders.

The final section at the end of the garden is the shadiest part. “The black elder provides a natural arch, which you almost have to crawl through, and as you enter the back section the scent from the fig really hits you,” says Saunders, who planted the area with “those lovely shady narrow lanes in Cornwall in mind”. 

Wild garlic and crocuses in spring are followed by flox and ferns, and a seating area and barbecue are surrounded by a mishmash of pots containing scented geraniums, creating the perfect area for leisurely summer lunches. 

“It is such a gorgeous spot in the heat of the day because it’s so cool in the shade from the trees,” Saunders adds. Just as important to her as how the garden looks while you are in it, is how it looks through the frame of a window from inside the house. 

“I planted the witch hazel tree in a spot where I can see it from where I fill up the kettle first thing in the morning, and then the magnolia further down the garden, which I can see when I sit down at the kitchen table with my tea.”

The vista changes, of course, with the seasons, and Saunders has planted carefully to reflect that. Sarcococca, for instance, fills the air in winter with its sweetly scented winter flowers at a time of year when, says Saunders, “the air is devoid of any other floral smells”, and it is followed by early-flowering spring bulbs including bluebells and crocuses. 

In high summer, the irises have faded away, the foxgloves are still just about hanging on, and the cosmos, nepeta and hollyhock are in full bloom. Grasses including Stipa gigantea and Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ (Black Dragon) keep the interest alive well into autumn.

Many of the plants in the garden have come from Saunders’ mother, an “excellent gardener”, along with friends and neighbours. 

“Gardeners are such generous people,” Saunders says. “They love sharing their joy and knowledge. When I first moved in, a neighbour saw me working on my garden and asked if I wanted to look at hers, which, of course, I did. She gave me a handful of nigella seed, which has turned into lots of beautiful plants.” 

She also loves to buy from roadside honesty boxes, village plant sales (“where there are often very experienced plantswomen who will give advice”), and a nearby plant centre. “There is so much joy in thinking about how different plants interact – but also in being surprised by how they behave,” she says. “The thing with gardens is that you’re trying to make the most of what nature is going to do anyway.”

Her garden, which has been done in lots of stages over her 10-year tenure, is, she says “never going to be finished – that is partly what is so brilliant about gardening. There is always something to do, something new to plant.”

Even though the plan and planting scheme is designed to look wild and “on the brink of chaos”, and she enjoys how lots of her plants, from the nigella to the verbena, self-seed and pop up in unexpected places, Saunders says it is not left entirely to do its own thing. “Gardens do need help, otherwise some things completely take over.”

What she truly values is the thought of the continued joy her garden will provide for years to come – even beyond her time there. “When you are planting a garden, you are planting for the future,” she says. “That is so magical.”

Are you inspired to implement any of Tamsin’s ideas into your own garden? Please share in the comments below. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ%2BRp7Gmusinnmign6x6tbuMoKmor1%2BeerXB0aecnWWdrnq0wcGuqZuZnmK9rbvTZqCnrJ9irm66wK2sq5mcnsC1tcJmnpqqlJq7cA%3D%3D