Meet One of England's Top Landscape Architects

English landscape architect Kim Wilkie prefers to intuit what a site wants to be rather than impose his will upon it. It’s an approach that has brought clients from around the world to the door of his farmhouse in Hampshire. But his best-known work is close to home: a garden at Boughton House, the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch’s seat in Northamptonshire. There, a pyramidal hillock, known as the Great Mount, had gone to seed, next to what Wilkie calls a “scrubby little stream” and a broad flat area. The duke asked him what should be done about the mishmash of features.

“That’s when the idea to invert the pyramid came to me,” says Wilkie, 60. He sank a reverse ziggurat in the earth and built a pond at the center, calling his solution Orpheus, after the mythological musician who journeyed to the underworld. “As you go 21 feet down, it’s amazing how the quality of the air and sound changes,” the Malaysian-born talent continues, acknowledging that his big, bold earthwork is “as much James Turrell as it is Greek myth.”

At Longwood Gardens, near Philadelphia, Wilkie played with depth, too, creating an outdoor performance area out of grass terraces—with enough mass and grade change to accommodate underground restrooms, beautifully fronted by a junglelike wall of ferns.

Wilkie’s next feat, starting this fall in association with British architect Níall McLaughlin, is to overhaul the grounds of and approach to London’s Natural History Museum. In a marquee spot right in front of the 19th-century Romanesque edifice (a masterwork by architect Alfred Waterhouse), the landscape guru is installing a fern-filled sunken garden. This, in turn, will be ringed by a geological timeline in the form of a wall made of rock strata from the Cambrian period to the present.Accompanying all this is a bronze replica of Dippy, the diplodocus plaster cast that has been a beloved exhibit at the museum since 1905.

“The grounds become outdoor galleries,” Wilkie says. “If people are waiting outside, they are actually already in the museum.” Fresh ideas like that are proof that this old hand is no dinosaur. kimwilkieom

The landscape architect at home in Hampshire.

Great Fosters hotel, near England’s Windsor Castle, Wilkie restored and augmented the 1920s knot garden, where fantastical topiaries punctuate baroque planting beds.

His earthwork amphitheater at Great Fosters hotel.

Wilkie‘s Green Wall at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania.