The garden of Wildside, Devon
The home of Keith Wiley
KEITH WILEY has been practising innovative horticulture for well over half a century, but his naturalistic planting style is very different from that created by Piet Oudolf and his followers. Mr Wiley's visionary, painterly approach, combined with his nurseryman's understanding of what any plant most needs, turns a visit to his Wildside garden on the edge of Dartmoor into a revelatory experience that is almost beyond comprehension.
Twenty years ago, after a long time making the Garden House at Buckland Monachorum, Devon, one of the most famous gardens in England, Mr Wiley and his artist wife, Ros, moved a few miles away to start their own garden and run a plant nursery. The site they chose for Wildside was four acres of flat Dartmoor pasture, where the annual rainfall exceeds 60in and winds blow bleak. For a plantaholic, it was hardly a welcoming prospect. 'Right plant for the right place' is a mantra most gardeners by now know, but Beth Chatto's dictum was turned on its head when Mr Wiley took a bulldozer to the place and began sculpting the unpromising site to suit the plants he knew he wanted to grow.
Denne historien er fra August 10, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra August 10, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
