Wild about the garden

The garden of Ready Token House, Gloucestershire The home of Mark and Tabitha Mayall Retaining the Arts-and-Crafts elements of a 1920s garden, the owners have added a sympathetic new terrace, as well as returning the surrounding fields to meadow

- George Plumptre

The chequered path to the kitchen is lined with Persicaria affinis ‘Donald Lowndes', Gillenia trifoliata and Alchemilla mollis

RECENTLY, there have been quite fanciful ideas circulating about rewilding. If you believe some people, in the not-too-distant future, tracts of the British countryside could look like a mixture of the western US and the African savannah, with wolves, lynx and bison emerging from dense forests, rivers dammed into lakes by families of beavers and swathes of grassland and scrub bush populated with bustards, cranes and wild boar. At Ready Token House in Gloucestershire, Mark and Tabitha Mayall have introduced an altogether gentler style of rewilding, creating the perfect habitat for a host of native wildflowers andаrange of small creatures—many endangered—in particular butterflies.

When they bought the property in 2015, to one side of the house and garden was some 60 acres of sheep pasture. They negotiated with the tenant farmer to stop the sheep grazing and returned the whole area to permanent meadow, where a rich array of wildflowers has rapidly established itself.

The junction of the terrace and the lawn, with beech pyramids, Veronicastrum virginicum and Verbena hastata f. rosea 'Pink Spires'.

Ready Token's elevated position is confirmed by the spectacular views to the southeast, which, on a clear day, reveal White Horse Hill 30 miles away. It also means that the not-too-fertile soil over underlying Cotswold Jurassic limestone is an ideal base for wildflower meadows, naturally limiting grass density and allowing for a wide variety of both grasses and wildflowers to get established and thrive. The hands-off management regime of recent years has brought spectacular results, with both the variety of plants and insects, and the quantities of individual ones increasing dramatically.