Devon haven draped in jewels

A delight for the senses, Wildside is a colourful haven in the Devon countryside, inspired by treasured memories and testament to a couple’s shared love of the power of nature

SET AMONG THE rolling Devon hills is unarguably one of this country’s most beautiful gardens. It is tucked away down a narrow lane, which is lush, green and bucolic. The landscape lulls the visitor into expecting more of the same, and there is barely a hint of the pleasures to come.

Passing through the gate and entering the first part of the garden at Wildside is like opening a hidden door to a Moorish riad. What greets the visitor is exquisite, glorious and breathtaking.

Keith and his late wife, artist Ros Wiley, have created a truly inspirational garden at Wildside; their home since 2004, when they moved from The Garden House at nearby Buckland Monachorum, where Keith had worked for many years. They arrived at a raw site of two basic fields on a south-facing slope, with far-reaching views all around. It was windswept and wild, but it was to be a paradise.

They hoped for planning permission to be granted to build a house on site, but they had to wait seven years before work could begin. However, permission was granted straight away for a nursery and the garden.

“Our dream was to run a nursery and create a naturalistic garden in a more sympathetic landscape to the style that was at The Garden House,” says Keith, who had been, and still is, inspired to create idealised versions of special places he has visited. “I wanted to capture the deep emotional response one can have when faced with something especially beautiful seen in nature.” He feels that growing suitable plants on banks and slopes not only emulates nature, but totally immerses the viewer among them. It is this insight that gives the planting its romance: it catches the eye and the breath.

Courtyard Garden

On first entering the Courtyard Garden, the visitor is led through a pergola: a cloister enclosing a hot, dry, sunny ‘meadow’, populated by large, rotund terracotta pots. They punctuate the loose combinations of heavily scented lilies and light, airy grasses drifting in the breeze, and repeated through

the area. Repetition of the pots and key plants unifies the planting. The different combinations are entrancing: lime-green heads of euphorbia, silver mounds of santolinas, and sturdy towers of vibrant kniphofia power up joyously in between. Each combination is considered, thoughtful and striking. On a sunny day, the warmth, perfume and the saturated colour evoke the Mediterranean gardens of Crete that were Keith’s inspiration.

Adding water

Keith and Ros built their house here, at the midpoint of the garden. It was completed only two years ago, overlooking the Lower Garden, which falls away to the south. This was the first part of the garden to be tackled.

Throughout the garden, Keith used a digger and a dumper to scrape off all the topsoil and move it to one side. Then he started to excavate the underlying shillet, which is a broken-down and degraded slate-like stone, creating banks on the north, west and eastern sides to provide shelter and screen the nursery polytunnels. Keith also dug out drainage ditches, if not valleys, and structures to create the beginnings of watercourses. All the while, he replaced the topsoil as he went, in varying depths according to the projected planting. Over the intervening years, he has moved approximately 110,000 tons of soil and stone, and says he has become quite an accomplished digger driver.

Here, in the Lower Garden, the paths take the visitor past, alongside and over burbling streams that tumble down the slope between Japanese acers and free-standing wisterias that billow perfume in May and June. At the lowest point, the streams coalesce into a water garden. Wooden bridges criss and cross the watercourses. The planting is brilliant with colour: bright orange hemerocallis, yellow kniphofia and dancing pink dierama.

There is a naturalism in Keith’s planting. “I have always loved the way that wild flowers can produce these magnificent, yet often very transient, floral displays,” he says. “I wanted to see if I could create the same effect in this new

“Remembered joys are never past; At once the fountain, stream, and sea, They were, they are, they yet shall be”

James Montgomery, ‘The Little Cloud’

Keith sculpted the landscape to create an immersive experience, with the plants wrapping around the visitor and the placement of pots tying each area together. The mixed border of shrubs, perennials and trees in the Courtyard Garden includes mounds of santolina, blue agapanthus and fiery kniphofia (top right). A view along a gravel path to a sheltered bench on which to sit and take in the raised beds, with mixed plantings of drought-tolerant plants, including cordyline and Stipa tenuissima (below right).

Keith Wiley soaks up the natural beauty of the garden at Wildside.

Bold, luminous daylily, hemerocallis ‘Jake Russell’ makes a statement and is one of Keith’s favourite flowers.

Sunny yellow buttons of aromatic Santolina chamaecyparissus ‘Nana’ dotted above dense, silvery green foliage. A swathe of rainbow colour, including rodgersia, crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, gold to red-purple hemerocallis and vibrant astilbe, gives way to the water garden beyond, with its pond and bridge.

Slender stems of spiky, cool blue-mauve Eryngium x zabelii contrast with underplanted froths of compact euphorbia ‘Blue Haze’ (above left). Textured spears of Verbena hastata ‘Rosea’, with their dainty flowers (above right).