Rocky Butte in Portland

October 28, 2025

The Garden House (Devon, England)

The destinations are beginning to blur but looking at the tour guide booklet, I see that we are now in Plymouth. Today, we visited two gardens designed by Keith Wiley. The first is The Garden House , where Wiley worked as Head Gardener for 25 years (from 1978-2003). The 10-acre estate was purchased in the 1940s by former Eton schoolmaster Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katherine. It was formerly home to the vicars of Buckland Monachronum. The Fortescue's renovated the gardens and ran a market garden business and raised cattle. The remains of some of the original buildings in the vicarage still stand in the garden and serve as a romantic backdrop in the Walled Garden - I loved the way they had massed ferns together. Just stunning! Surrounding the walled garden and venturing out away from the house are more naturalistic plantings - Today, the head gardener is Nick Haworth, who was previously head gardener at Greenway , which we visited earlier. Keith Wiley lef...

Our friend Cindy is visiting from Alabama and we visited a new spot yesterday - Rocky Butte in Portland. This is a small park atop a hilltop that overlooks PDX airport.

You can watch planes coming in for landings. The city where we live - Vancouver, Washington - is across the Columbia River in the distance. That is Interstate 205 on the left.

This is the overlook area. Personally, I think they could do some things here to improve the landscaping but I suppose the views are what brings people up here.