PUBLIC PLACES
F
ounded in 1976 by current CEO James Goodnight and other faculty members from North Carolina State University, SAS is the leader in analytics software and services with global headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. Its solutions help businesses to access, manage, analyse and interpret data to aid decision-making. The company is one of the world’s largest privately held software businesses and its customers include most of the Fortune 100 companies. Their estate is an amalgamation of two previous sites - Wittington House, a former mansion which is now used as the company’s meeting and conference centre and an old MOD premises, which was purchased and demolished to make way for modern offices. It consists of formal gardens and lawns, a unique arboretum, a cricket pitch for staff use as well as the local village team, a 3-hole pitch-and-putt course, 5-a-side football pitch, wildflower meadow, river frontage to the Thames and staff allotments.
Landscaping manager George Reeder joined SAS as a gardener in 2005 and is the man tasked with the job of managing the grounds. He studied at Sparsholt College in Hampshire before joining Countrywide Grounds Maintenance as part of the team maintaining the green spaces of various hotels in the south of England. He has a team of five specialist gardeners to maintain the extensive grounds.
“It’s an amazing place to work,” he said, “we are extremely lucky to have inherited such a wonderful landscape and we continue to work hard to improve it. The flora and fauna are very diverse; deer, badgers, voles, stoats, ferrets, rabbits and bats - the latter being carefully removed then reinstated during building work at the Stable Block. Feathered residents include barn owls, buzzards, red kites and
a family of geese that, oddly, nested high in a 400-year-old oak, and in the summer, swallows that nest in our machinery sheds.” “Recent projects have included new herbaceous borders at the rear of Wittington House, construction of a three-hole golf course and probably our most ambitious, transplanting lime trees from other parts of the estate to form a new avenue to the house. We hired the largest tree spade in England to complete the task and it was well worth it.”
“We are located in south Buckinghamshire, by the Thames, within the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to the north. This region is characterised by quiet valleys, magnificent beech woods and a rolling chalk landscape; our riverside has one of only two sets of chalk cliffs on the Thames.” “Historical records show that Lord Devonport was very proud of the garden he created. It was nothing but poor agricultural land, gravel and chalky soil typical of the Chilterns back then, and the fields were literally covered with thousands and thousands of flints. To clear the estate, he engaged hundreds of men as stone- pickers, which provided major employment for the local community at a time of serious unemployment following the Boer War.” One of Lord Devenport’s proudest achievements was the building of the Rock Garden, constructed in 1912 with stone imported from Derbyshire. It was purchased at the amazing cost of a shilling (5p) per ton and shipped to Brentford by rail, then transported 40 miles up the Thames by barge to eventually be unloaded and positioned by two huge cranes. Other work included the bold planting of herbaceous borders, a rose garden, kitchen garden, planting rare trees, a golden privet hedge believed to be the longest of its kind in England, water meadows, and the
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