The Gardens at Ready Token House

 

 

From Country Life:

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, finds George Plumptre. Photos by Mimi Connolly. 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 and a range 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.

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. (Read more.)