Will Giles
Botanical artist who created a fantasy garden of bananas, creepers and begonias in central Norwich
WILL GILES, who has died of cancer aged 64, was a freelance botanical artist who developed a passion for exotic plants and created a spectacular tropical paradise, in the centre of wind-swept Norwich, a stone’s throw from Carrow Road football stadium and the old Colman’s Mustard factory.
Giles’s illustrations appear in practical gardening books such as the RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening and he made frequent appearances on television and radio gardening programmes. Yet he had no horticultural training, claiming that he had been “too thick to go to horticultural college”.
In 1982 he bought an undistinguished four-bedroom Thirties red-brick house with a half-acre south-facing garden. The garden had a 60ft drop from top to bottom; under its previous owner had become a riot of brambles, nettles, self-seeded sycamores and tall weeds. “I fell in love with the place straight away,” Giles recalled. “I knew it would be perfect for my dream garden.” Working from dawn till dusk, he cleared the ground, and over the following years a raised terrace, vegetable plot and herbaceous borders emerged around a circular lawn.
From the mid-1980s, however, inspired by the memory of childhood visits with his grandmother to the palm house at Kew, and the publication in 1988 of Myles Challis’s book The Exotic Garden, he decided to try something a little more exuberant. Gradually the vegetables and lawn disappeared, and Giles began travelling the world, searching out the unusual and exotic to stock his expanded borders.
A journalist who visited his “Exotic Garden” in 2002 found that where neighbouring houses had lawns, laburnum and hybrid tea roses, Giles’s house was “swallowed up by bananas, creepers, papyrus and hedychiums, underplanted with aroids and leafy begonias. Creeping into it under curtains of ivy, with malevolent pitcher plants dangling in my face, I thought I was hallucinating. You don’t expect to see these kinds of things outside in an English garden.”
Giles described his garden as a “stage set”. To complete the effect he built a colonial-style balcony at first-floor level across the front of his house. Covered in Vitis coignetiae and Begonia “Dragon Wing”, it evoked rum punches on the sun-dappled verandah of some Caribbean plantation house.
Giles was not particularly fussy about what ranked as an exotic. It just had to look different and be able to endure the Norwich climate. Popular specimens such as the hardy banana Musa basjoo rubbed shoulders with rarer Abyssinian bananas with large, paddle-shaped leaves, and more familiar English garden staples.
As well as collecting seeds and specimens on plant-hunting expeditions to Ecuador, Venezuela, India and Sri Lanka, he bought yamlike taro and Ethiopian edoe from the vegetable counter at his local Sainsbury’s and planted them in pots, their huge arrow-shaped leaves settling off the fiery reds, oranges and yellows of canna lilies and bromeliads.
He even confessed to incorporating that scourge of the countryside, Japanese knotweed, into his plantings. “I have three different types,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “I think it might be illegal to plant them, but they are such attractive plants. I grow them in beds they can’t escape from.”
Giles divided his time between working as an illustrator, looking after his garden, which he opened to the public every summer, leading RHS tours in the Caribbean, Japan and Madeira and, latterly, writing books. His publications include The New Exotic Garden (2000) and the Encyclopedia of Exotic Plants for Temperate Climates (2007), which has details of more than 1,500 plants that can be grown outside in Britain and other places with temperate climates.
Come November, much of Giles’s garden had to be lugged into greenhouses and polytunnels to be stored inside until spring – a process that took him about two weeks. His fantasy garden, he said, would be “somewhere in Italy, facing the sea on a hillside, where I could grow all these wonderful plants without the danger of frosts”.
William Rodney Sefton Giles was born on May 26 1951 in Norwich, where his father (a “dig-for-victory gardener”) had moved from London after the war. Will developed his passion for gardening as a boy, describing his youthful self as “one of those naughty kids who would take a matchbox to Kew Gardens and crawl around under the greenhouse benches looking for seed”. His father gave him space to create his own garden under an old apple tree and, for his 10th birthday, built him a greenhouse which was soon filled with succulents, cacti and other exotics.
Giles attended Bracondale School, Norwich, but was not much of a scholar, leaving with just one O-level – in art. As a result he had to give up hopes of studying horticulture and instead enrolled at Great Yarmouth Art College and the Norwich School of Art, eventually specialising in photography and illustration. During the 1960s, sporting an “Afro” hairstyle, Giles and a group of friends shared a large Victorian house in Norwich, where he redid the garden, creating herbaceous borders and tending the lawn so that his housemates could play croquet.
During the 1980s, Giles found himself in high demand as an illustrator and eventually went into business with a fellow artist, Sandra Pond. The developing exotic garden was opened to the public and Giles was invited to appear on such Channel 4 programmes as Gardens Without Borders and Real Gardens. The dissolution of the Pond & Giles partnership in 2001 prompted Giles to embark on a new phase of expansion at the Exotic Garden, including the construction of a treehouse, a waterfall and a “xerophytic” garden with an Italianate loggia folly, planted with yuccas, agaves and alliums.
Giles shared his home with several cats and was always delighted when visitors told him his garden looked like a jungle.
Will Giles was unmarried and is survived by a sister.
Will Giles, born May 26 1951, died September 2 2015