Julia Flynn Siler

Neil Wigfield stands in front of a mostly bare flower bed on a bitterly cold afternoon in February without a hat or gloves. Though the temperature hovers around freezing that day in Oxford, he’s wearing a single fleece top on to keep him warm. But, as he explains the succession of spring blooms that will soon erupt in the beds, his hands waving as if he’s conducting an orchestra. His passion for gardening generates plenty of heat.

Now one of the longest serving employees of the Rhodes Trust, Neil has been responsible for tending the gardens at Rhodes House in Oxford for the past eighteen years. About two years ago, he oversaw the ripping up of the Arts and Crafts garden laid out by socialite Norah Lindsey in 1927 (who apparently gardened wearing leopard-print, baroque pearls, and her “second-best emeralds”) and replaced it with a modern, architecturally nuanced garden – one of the most significant new gardens to be planted in Oxford in many years.

To honor Norah through his design for the modern garden, Neil kept a form of the Hornbeam topiaries that she had used to create interest in the garden. In his 21^st century interpretation, Neil explores through his plantings with the contrast between the delicate beauty of transparent grasses juxtaposed with vertical South African “Kniphofia” Hot  Pokers and the humble wild carrot, “Daucus carota.” The contrast, he explains, is meant to “form a haze of colour and texture to “float” in a living roof above the conference delegates below.

Neil arrived at Rhodes after spending a decade as a field environmental archeologist, deciding to swap “working with dead plant remains for living ones.” He also was the Head Vegetable Gardener at one of Britain’s most storied hotel and restaurants, the two Michelin starred le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. These days, he is Rhodes House’s resident garden philosopher who writes a column on changes in the landscape for the scholars and staff. In one of his recent essays, he mused on the “days of dove-grey light” and how, inside the greenhouse, “the sunlight spreads and ignites new growth in trays of nascent seedlings, imprinting belated Valentines on the hearts of tender leaves.”

On the cold afternoon in February when we visited, the changes about to occur over time were much on Neil’s mind as he walked our group of scholars around the garden. “Gardens are always ephemeral,” he told us. “Always changing. Nothing stays the same,” adding in the next breath that “a garden that stays the same is a dead garden.” It was a fitting lesson for our group of people mostly in their fifties and sixties who would be spending the next few months together exploring questions of aging, change, and adaptability. “My philosophy is that everything is an experiment, and you learn as much from the failures as successes.”

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Julia Flynn Siler is an academic visitor with the Oxford Next Horizons Program, studying with the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. She also has completed a master gardener program in California, though her home garden is hardly masterful.

Neil Wigfield in the garden at Rhodes House and the poppies at Rhodes House in the summer