Wildlife Botanical Garden

October 25, 2025

Coleton Fishacre - Inside the House

Coleton Fishacre has been described as "the perfect combination of the simple architecture and high standards of craftmanship of the nineteenth century Arts and Crafts movement with the modernity of the Jazz Age." I was told that there are not that many Art Deco style houses in the UK and this is one of the few private residences that are open to the public. Among the furnishings are Lalique wall lights, an eighteenth century Venetian chandelier and a carpet designed by Marion Dorn. Most of the furniture was designed by the architect of the house, Oswald Milne. After Rowland and Freda Smith bought the house in 1949, they did not make many changes and the furnishings that they didn't use were stored. After the National Trust took over the property, they meticulously recreated the furnishings based on photographs that had appeared in Country Life magazine. The library, pictured above and below, features a celebrated wind-dial map that was created by noted mapmaker Georg...

I made another visit to the Wildlife Botanical Garden in Brush Prairie, about 15 minutes from our house. We had visited earlier in 2018. Since that time, it was not surprising to see that things had really grown. I was looking over the photos from my earlier post and I didn't even see certain plants this time (for example, the Mimosa tree).

Fall flowers, like rudbeckia and asters dominated -