Nidderdale in North Yorkshire is a powerful setting in which to make a garden: great sweeps of upland heath flushed purple in late summer, giant rock formations carved from millstone grit by the action of glaciers, and small fields shaped by dry stone walls and isolated field barns more than earn its designation as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. For William Moore and John Wilson, gardening here brought with it “an almost moral sense of responsibility to make something that didn’t jar with the surrounding landscape.”
William and John bought Cow Close, an amalgam of 19th-century farm labourer’s cottage and barn, in 2008 while working full-time as a head teacher and a hospital consultant respectively. “We drove over from East Yorkshire in February, in sleet,
