Natasha Merchant-Pappu has lived all over the world. She is comfortable in Massachusetts and Connecticut, London, Bombay and Poona in India. But there is probably no place where she is more at home than in her Ladue garden.
It is a space of her creation. In the past 13 years, she has taken the previous garden that was there when she moved in and transformed it into a showplace featured on the prestigious Missouri Botanical Garden Garden Tour. While beautiful, it is a landscape that is in no way intimidating. Rather than filling the one-acre space with needy perennials and shrubs that require extra care, she has opted for drifts of plants that are comfortable in the St. Louis extremes of summer heat and winter cold. Many are native to this area.
From the front of her garden to the very back she also has introduced plants that offer fragrance to garden visitors. “A garden without fragrance doesn’t feel fully alive,” she believes.
Natasha’s move to St. Louis came as a result of her husband, noted biophysicist Rohit Pappu, accepting an offer to join the faculty at Washington University. After living briefly in University City, they bought their home in Ladue.
There was never any question that she would have a beautiful garden. Natasha lovingly recalls growing up gardening under the direction of her “granny” in India. Due to her grandmother, who was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, the Latin botanical names for plants come as easily to Natasha as daisy and dandelion do to the rest of us.
“She was a ‘hands in the dirt’ gardener,” Natasha says of her grandmother. “She had a big garden in Poona, and she would set me and all of us to weeding. She was the general and we were the troops.”
Summoning the gardening knowledge she had absorbed from her grandmother and her own self-taught experience, Natasha tackled her new landscape methodically. “Essentially, I pulled out things that had ‘gone over’ and then left other things to see what would happen,” she recalls. “I wanted to establish the shapes and borders, then I began to fill in. I wanted the garden to look nice even in winter, and I approached it from that standpoint. I enlarged some borders and changed the shape of others.”
“Learning how to garden in Missouri (with the extremes of weather) was a new experience,” she admits. Fortunately, in trying to put together her first garden in University City, her realtor introduced her to landscape architect Susan Lammert, who became a trusted advisor and friend.
For the bones of her garden in addition to boxwoods, Natasha has learned to rely on Midwest natives. Masses of ‘Annabelle’ hydrangeas, with their dome-shaped white blossoms in early summer turning eventually to chartreuse, cascade down a hillside leading from the house to a creek that runs along the back one-third of the property. Stretching along the creek, soft, 3-foot-tall pillows of feathery blue star or Amsonia hubrichtii sway in the slightest breeze. Along with the movement it adds to the garden, the amsonia, sports clusters of star-shaped blue blossoms in early summer and turns bright gold in autumn.
Clethra alnifolia or summersweet is another native she enjoys. With fragrant, plume-like blossoms in late July and August, the large shrub does well in both sun and part shade and thrives in moist soils. Gold fall color is a bonus.
Natasha always makes sure that fragrant shrubs such as summersweet and Korean spice viburnum, which blooms in the spring, are planted at the back of the garden as well as near the house to draw visitors to the entire space. A bench in the back garden is her husband’s favorite spot to sit with his evening gin and tonic, she notes.
Other unfussy shrubs and perennials that Natasha has grown to love for their adaptability and multi-season interest include:
Deutzia gracilis ‘Chardonnay Pearls’: Graceful lemon-lime foliage and a compact 2-3 foot height are an asset, but the best part of this small shrub are the small, pearl-like spring blossoms that open to dispense a honey-like fragrance.
Calamintha nepeta ‘Montrose White’: A clump-forming perennial, ‘Montrose White’ features tiny white blossoms on graceful, gray-green stems that cover the plant from June through October. It has a compact 1-1.5 height and width and is lovely lining walkways or as a cut flower in bouquets
Allium ‘Millenium’: Looking like rosy purple Tootsie Pops, the round, long-lasting, fragrant flowers stand straight on strong stems. Growing in sun or part sun and tolerating a wide variety of soils, this perennial, blooming in mid- summer, tops out at 20 inches in height and provides a long season of interest when the flowers turn to attractive seed heads. It also makes a good cut flower.
Heuchera villosa ‘Autumn Bride’: Native to Virginia and Tennessee, this heuchera species is noted for its large, sharply toothed mounds of green leaves and abundant, airy white blossoms in late summer that can reach 36 inches in height. It prefers part shade and will perform better than many heucheras in our hot, humid summers.
While the entire garden is lovely, the vegetable, herb and cutting garden just outside the house gets Natasha’s special attention. Surrounded by her favorite ‘Elizabeth’ pale pink English shrub rose, zinnias and cutting annuals, Natasha tends the fenced space herself. Most of the vegetables she starts from seed in the bay window of her dining room. Herbs include lemon verbena, basil, chives and oregano. She grows calendula or pot marigold “to keep the bugs away.” The strong scent is believed to deter mosquitoes, flies and other annoying insects.
The charming garden “shed” with comfortable, pillow-filled furniture, lovely gardening books and tea making supplies was an outgrowth of the Covid epidemic. The couple’s daughter Minerva was a student at Washington University and allowed to shelter in place with 10 friends, who often made their way to the Pappu’s home. With 10 college-age girls almost continually around and finding herself constantly cooking, Natasha needed a place to be alone. She created what her husband calls “her sanctuary.” She still finds it an ideal place to read and reflect. Natasha uses Pinterest as a way to catalog her gardening and design ideas and have “everything on one page. In the old days, we would have cut pictures out of magazines and put them in a scrap book,” she says with a laugh.
Natasha’s expertise quickly endeared her to the St. Louis gardening community. She joined the Ladue Garden Club and went on to become president of the group. Beyond that, she became the Zone XI Conservation/National Affairs and Legislative Representative, covering Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois for the club’s parent organization the Garden Club of America and was invited to serve on the Members Board of the Missouri Botanical Garden. She also is part of the floral ministry at Ladue Chapel.
For Natasha, the creation of her garden, which she loves to share, has a spiritual component. “When I am in the garden, I feel at one with nature,” she says. “It is very spiritual; I feel closer to God.”
Resources:
Landscaping, small carpentry:
Euphorbia Landscaping
Eduardo Puerta
(314) 452-8819
Shed/vegetable garden/stonework:
CA Construction
Jeff Kisner
(314) 753-4644
Irrigation, stonework:
Irreco
Aaron Dippold
(314) 246-0099
Bespoke furniture, fitted cabinets:
Rustic Farmhouse Furnishings
Louis and Margaret Marino
(314) 800-5777
Native border design consultation:
Garden Edit
Megan Clinton
(314) 378-0108
Soft furnishings, lampshades, antique rugs:
Susan Deliss
www.susandeliss.com
Upholstery:
The Great Cover Up
Teddy Karl
(314) 995-5701
Bespoke tiles, shed plaque:
Aviva Halter
Instagram: @aviva_halter
Pots, annuals, perennials, vegetable starts:
Bowood Farms
(314) 454-6868
Stone benches, statuary
Haddonstone
www.haddonstone.com
Garden furniture:
Kingsley Bate
Forshaw of St Louis
(314) 993-5570
