A FINE BALANCE

The wild and the manicured get equal billing in Sarah Pajwani’s beautiful Berkshire garden

- NATASHA GOODFELLOW

Pure coincidence brought Sarah and Sal Pajwani to this house and garden on the outskirts of Maidenhead. Though they’d talked about looking for a new home, they’d made the sensible decision to wait and see which senior schools their two boys (now grown up) got into before making a move. But that all went out of the window when, having taken the morning off to take their eldest to an admissions interview, they spotted a promising looking property in the local paper, just around the corner from the cafe they were in. ‘We phoned the estate agent, told him we were free there and then, and that was that,’ says Sarah. The house was hidden away at the end of a lane, surrounded by meadowland and woods. ‘It felt like the start of an adventure. The two-acre garden wasn’t much more than a field with a tiny pond and some dilapidated sheds, but it felt like a huge, fantastic playground. We both felt really excited.’

The excitement grew the night they moved in, in March 2006. ‘We went to bed listening to the owls hooting, which was magical,’ says Sarah, ‘and then we were woken by bizarre noises which turned out to be muntjac deer.’ There was more wildlife to get acquainted with, too. The overgrown pond was full of newts and tadpoles, the survey had unearthed a badger undermining a corner of the house, and there were rabbits everywhere. ‘It was like Watership Down,’ she says.