Building on a dream

When Nicola Taylor took on her plantsman father’s flower-filled woodland, she knew more about horses than trees, but, as Tiffany Daneff discovers, that hasn’t stopped her from making a great success of the garden

Evenley Wood Garden, Northamptonshire IMAGINE if you combined the beauty of an old English wood, with its mixture of broad trees and skinny saplings, sudden clearings and dappled glades, with a garden where specimen trees, flowering shrubs and bulbous plants have been planted to give pleasure at different times of the year and you will have something of the hybrid that is Evenley Wood Garden near Brackley in Northamptonshire. The 60-acre wood first came to the notice of a keen local plantsman, Timothy Whiteley, when he was out hunting in the late 1970s. The Rhododendron ponticum that was growing beside the rides indicated a seam of acid soil running through the typically alkaline Northamptonshire clay. With such variation in soil, the woodland—which was only 700 yards from Whiteley’s home—would enable…

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Country Life (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 19, 2025

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