I was very sorry to hear that Ros Wiley died recently, after an illness of some months. Ros was married to Keith Wiley and was the co-creator of the Wildside garden in Devon for which Keith is well-known. Any of us who knew Keith also knew Ros as an essential part of the garden team but also her unique contribution as an artist. I always felt she was one of the very few who could translate naturalistic planting onto canvas. I’m putting up a few images here with some text from an article I wrote about her for Gardens Illustrated in 2014
“The garden has always been my subject matter, I have always loved painting plants, and I have all this material on my doorstep... I love the colours, I just love colour”. So says Ros Wiley, whose husband Keith is the creator of Wildside, one of the most innovative, daring, and vibrant new gardens in Britain.
Photographing or painting naturalistic, perennial-based plantings, or wild plant communities like meadows is always a challenge. The loose, wispy, fine-textured mass of inter-twined stems, grasses, open flower heads, seed cases and complex arrangements of foliage have proved very difficult to represent artistically. Ros is one of the few who can do it successfully. Her paintings initially make an impact through their vivid colour, but many also represent the apparent chaos of stems and foliage which makes up contemporary perennial planting. Although her images of plants are stylised, and sometimes even verging on the abstract, it is very often easy to recognise particular species – she has a remarkable gift for capturing the essence of a plant.
As Keith's co-worker, Ros has an intense intimacy with plants and his planting style. The couple met at Wye College, Kent, when, as she explains, “he was doing Horticulture, I was doing Environmental Science, and then we came down to the Garden House around 1980... I was working in the nursery while Keith worked in the garden”. Until 2004 Keith was head gardener at this very special Devon garden, which gave Ros an opportunity to paint a very wide range of planting styles and garden habitats. When the couple left the Garden House, to start up their own garden business just down the road, Ros had a whole new world to explore. While it is Keith's unique vision which has created the garden at Wildside, an extraordinary private landscape of miniature valleys carved into the local shale, and then intensively planted, Ros has played a crucial support role, planting, propagating and weeding.
Never formally trained, Ros describes how “I have always painted, I studied Design at college, not painting... but's it's not in the family... we were Cornish farming people”. Some of her work is of particular scenes but a lot are general and non-specific, “I get ideas from lots of images, I take photographs and work from them in winter, it's a kind of jamming”. she explains, “very much like when Keith does planting, that's jamming too... its like going for a run, I get high”.
”There are a lot of parallels to what Keith does in the garden and what I do” says Ros, “we think of the garden as an art form, I love the way that he plants, drifts and dots of colour, he knows what I like to paint so I think it influences the way he plants too”. “We feed off each other” says Keith, “there are new areas I'm developing, where I'm going to try to make some colour mixes that Ros has painted”. Planting and painting influencing each other – a truly creative, and almost unique partnership.
