Iconoclastic multimillionaire the late Felix Dennis was a publishing legend, famed for his maverick, entrepreneurial style and, more lately, a successful and much loved poet who amassed one of the largest and most personal collections of figurative sculpture in the world in his Garden of Heroes and Villains. 

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Dennis began his career creating and fighting for the radical counterculture magazine Oz and became one of the preeminent periodical publishers in the world, rabble-rousing all the way. Dennis’ more outrageous outbursts belie his work as a passionate artist and environmentalist.

Dennis planted over one million native broadleaf trees before he passed away in 2014, kick-starting the creation of the Heart of England Forest, an ambitious charity creating a new 30,000 acre forest one tree at a time.

At the age of 52, Dennis began writing poetry which has received critical acclaim and garnered him the appellation, the “millionaire poet.” With such a rich life devoted to art and statement, it’s no wonder that Dennis’ personal art garden is a wide-ranging collection of odes to his shaggy dog inspirations.

Consisting almost exclusively of figurative sculptures, the Garden of Heroes and Villains is spread across Dennis’ garden like a trail of muses. Portrayed in over 50 life-size bronze statues are characters both real and fictional that the poet personally commissioned as each subject revealed their importance to him. Here a cartoonish representation of writer and critic Samuel Johnson is captured in full, apoplectic stride; there a life-like Stephen Hawking ponders the universe. From Billie Holiday and Robert Crumb to his fellow defendants at the Oz magazine obscenity trials and King Kong, Dennis’ garden is a remarkably personal and staggeringly beautiful monument to the publisher-poet-activist’s life of unceasing fascination.     

The Garden of Heroes and Villains is located in the Heart of England Forest but is only opened to the public for a few days each year to raise funds for the charity that is planting, preserving, and protecting native broadleaf woodland in the heart of England.