Case Study Into The Wild

When James Ogilvy and his family moved into their new home in the East Neuk of Fife in 1991, the garden was in a sorry state.

- Catherine Coyle

The house itself was little better: a one-time summer home built in the late 18th century for a Dundee merchant, Coates House could most kindly be described as a ‘doer upper’. Undaunted, Ogilvy and his wife Julia and their two children had fallen for the place and its breathtaking views; the garden, around an acre and a half of land, was an ‘extra’ that he didn’t realise would become career-defining.

At that point, Ogilvy was working from home, running his own publishing company, and was able to venture outside often to start tidying up the more over - grown and bedraggled parts of the grounds. “I knew nothing at all about gardening,” he recalls. “I was just trying to smarten the place up.”

Today, 28 years on, things are very different. He gradually discovered that the more he did to the garden, the more interested he became in it. He talked to the owners of neighbouring properties about what they were growing and what was thriving on their land, and he read lots of books on the subject. “I really built it up over a long period of time,” he says. “Ninety per cent of what you see today was done by me and a spade, so it was certainly a labour of love.”