Natural magic - The private garden at Bonnington House, near Edinburgh The home of Mr and Mrs Wilson

Arabella Lennox-Boyd has designed a garden of underlying structure overlaid with colour and charm creating many different areas, each with its own personality, discovers Caroline Donald

- Caroline Donald

ROBERT WILSON, co-owner of Nelsons natural medicines—of which Rescue Remedy is the most famous—and his wife, Nicky, are a generous couple. Since buying Bonnington House in West Lothian, a few miles from the western reaches of Edinburgh, they have opened up their 100-acre estate to the public in order to share their impressive, site-specific art collection: walk through their woods and you come across works by the likes of Anish Kapoor, Laura Ford and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Over the past 12 years, Jupiter Artland, now run as a charity, has become popular not only with art lovers, but school groups and families keen to meet up for a stroll and a coffee in the countryside.

However laid back the Wilsons are about the occasional child charging up and down the slopes of the large Charles Jencks land installation at the entrance to Jupiter Artland or the hundreds camping in the meadow for the Jupiter Rising art and music festival, the family’s private garden remains exactly that: private, for all but one day a year.