Innholdsfortegnelse for 14-Jun-2017 i Country Life

PLANTLIFE, which works to protect Britain’s native plants, has launched a hunt with an unusual quarry: wildflowers. A YouGov poll commissioned by the charity in May revealed that young people have very limited knowledge of Britain’s flora, but would like to find out more about it. They are being encouraged to go for a walk in the countryside or an urban park and report back on what they find. This will allow them to learn more about flowers while helping Plantlife preserve them for the future. For more details, visit www.plantlife.org.uk/wildflowerhunt…

THIS week sees the opening of a new National Gallery exhibition devoted to Italian painter Giovanni da Rimini and 14th-century art. Curated by Dr Anna Koopstra, the exhibition reunites two important pieces of da Rimini’s work: the magnificent Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and other Saints, which belongs to the National Gallery (above), and Scenes from the Life of Christ, which is on loan from Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. These panels, together with other important 14th-century works, represent a pivotal moment in Italian art, when the decorative details of Byzantine art met the intense, more naturalistic style pioneered by Giotto. The exhibition runs until October 8 and admission is free (www.nationalgallery.org.uk). The National Gallery has also announced its exhibition calendar for next year, which includes a display…

DEFRA is asking bird- and gamekeepers to be vigilant after it confirmed an outbreak of bird flu in a flock of about 35 chickens and geese near Diss, in south Norfolk. The virus has killed some of the birds and the rest are being humanely culled. The risk to public health is very low, but, to prevent the disease spreading among other flocks, keepers within 10km (six miles) of the outbreak area need to observe strict biosecurity measures, which are detailed on the Defra website (www.defra.gov.uk).…

Quiz of the week 1) Who was the original drummer for The Beatles? 2) What does a toxophilist practise? 3) The alligator pear is more commonly known as what? 4) In which city would you have found Checkpoint Charlie? 5) In which year did Torvill and Dean win Olympic gold? 100 years ago in COUNTRY LIFE June 16, 1917 BECAUSE there is so little sign of it, the chance of the normal waistline coming into favour again is distinctly good. That this will not be received with enthusiasm this side of the Channel is a foregone conclusion, for the flat, almost boyish figure now affected has become an obsession. Though it has become an obsession, it has ceased altogether to be smart in the best sense of that hackneyed…

Letter of the week Getting to grips with grass FOR some years, the mowing of the grass around Trereife, my family home, was the responsibility of David, a retired employee. When David’s dedication was beaten by ill health, I decided that I would take over. The family was doubtful, but I asserted that no lawn would be too big or difficult for me. After some tuition from David, I began. Over Easter, my daughter came to stay with friends and I demonstrated my new art. One friend even compared my efforts favourably with the mowing of Lingfield Racecourse, where she works. However, I have found that my white hair becomes green with blown grass. The simplest remedy seemed to be the crash helmet I usually wear to ride my…

‘They are full of celebration of the medium and enjoyment of life’ JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856–1925) once declared that the virtue of watercolour was that it allowed one ‘to make the best of an emergency’. It’s unclear whether he was simply referring to the practical convenience of being able to whip out his watercolour box and sketchpad to fill any unexpected break in the day—a delayed train, a broken appointment, a sudden downpour—or whether he was alluding to the challenging unpredictability of the medium itself, which constantly creates its own pictorial ‘emergencies’ for which solutions have to be found. Perhaps, of course, he meant both. Certainly, his watercolours—dancing with light, extraordinarily sure in their deftness of touch and bold in their abbreviations of form—show how well he met his…

FOR all the millions of pounds of art on offer at this year’s Masterpiece fair and the London Art Week, perhaps the most important thing is free. Slow Art Workshops (SAW) will take place at the fair at 6pm each evening from June 29 to July 7, as well as at numerous London galleries from June 20, especially during the week from June 30 to July 7. SAW is the brainchild of my colleague Susan Moore, an alumna of COUNTRY LIFE who now writes authoritatively on art, collecting and the market for The Spectator and Apollo. In conversation at Maastricht in March, where we were surrounded not only by so much great art, but also by so much of the world’s expertise, she lamented how little is done to…

THE gardens at Willaston Grange, in Willaston, Cheshire, will be open to the public under the NGS for the first time in 20 years. In the past, it had been a firm fixture of the NGS Cheshire calendar, having been open continually for 30 years, but a long pause followed—until the current owners, Anita and Mark Mitchell, decided to revive the tradition. ‘When we bought the house in April 2009, it was in a state of disrepair, with no roof or windows and a jungle of a garden,’ says Mrs Mitchell. Having now completed the restoration work, the Mitchells felt it was time to welcome new visitors. Garden enthusiasts can expect to tour ‘six acres filled with mature trees, herbaceous borders and vegetable gardens, plus a small lake and a…

FINDHORN: what images it conjures up! A fine salmon river. A bay on the Moray Firth between miles of pine forest and pristine beach. A fishing village with a popular pub. A ‘spiritual community, ecovillage and international centre for holistic education’. This last, the Findhorn Foundation, was started in 1962 by three hoteliers guided by an ‘inner divine source’. Visiting recently, we found it cocooned between the fences of an RAF compound and a vast expanse of gorse dunes. A red sign implored us to ‘STOP worrying’, so we disembarked and explored on foot, admiring the ‘ecologically benign’ homes made of recycled tyres, straw bales and whisky barrels, new, multicoloured terraced housing and a building dedicated to singing. In the shop, New Age merchandise jostled with books such as Rise…

IT was a delight to find such a positive review of my latest book, Linescapes, in COUNTRY LIFE (May 24). However, an error managed to sneak in and I feel I need to offer clarification. It was suggested that ‘the entire hedgehog population only requires a habitat the size of three golf courses’. Now, I know that hedgehog numbers are in steep decline (I work as a spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society), but things haven’t got that bad. I was highlighting how large an area a viable population requires—about 90 hectares [about 220 acres] or three golf courses—not the entire 500,000 or so hedgehogs left throughout the countryside. Let us hope we can stop things from getting to that. Hugh Warwick, by email…

‘Heritage is not just about the jewels in the crown. Context matters’ THE Mausoleum of Augustus is among the greatest monuments of Ancient Rome, built in 28 BC on a colossal scale—nearly 300ft across—equalled only by the later Mausoleum of Hadrian, which subsequently turned into the Papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. It fell into ruination in the Middle Ages and, at various stages, served as an arena for bullfights and circuses. In the 1930s, the buildings huddled around it were destroyed to make way for a grand bit of Fascist urban planning and the dilapidated mausoleum was left stranded in the middle of the Piazza Augusta Imperiale. It acquired a somewhat incongruous neighbour in 2006 when the Ara Pacis museum, designed to provide a home for the Augustan altar of…

‘I like the thought that the rose is so old as to be nameless’ WHEN my daughter Camilla was posted to Prague—she’s a diplomat—she lived in a suburb called Barrandov, famous in its day as the home of the Czech film industry. We all went there for Christmas one year and I noticed that part of her garden was carpeted—I could almost say ‘invaded’—by a small, creeping rose. The leaves were an unusual shape, being slightly corrugated like a hornbeam’s, but I had no idea what it might be, so I dug up some pieces and planted them back in England. They grew prodigiously to about 6ft in height and turned out to be something rather rare: a ‘Frankfurt’ rose. Frankfurt roses are a small group of closely allied…

AN arresting crop of modern masterpieces is going under the hammer at Christie’s during the company’s 20th-century art event, which runs from June 17 to 30. Kicking off the proceedings is the Modern British and Irish Art sale, which includes sculptures by Henry Moore—Family Group and Seated Woman—plus Barbara Hep-worth’s Curved Form (Bryher II) and works by Sir Anthony Caro, L. S. Lowry and Sir Stanley Spencer. The highlight of the week will be the Impressionist and Modern Art sale, in which the star piece is a painting by Picasso. Estimated at £25 million to £40 million, Femme écrivant (Marie Thérèse) (above) is a striking portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his muses, which he painted in March 1934. ‘This painting portrays Marie-Thérèse, the young lover who was his amour…

ANEW literary festival launches next week—at a girls’ prep school. Hanford School in Child Okeford, Dorset, considers reading ‘the heart of a good education’ and is celebrating books in style from Monday, June 19 to June 24. ‘We’d been thinking about having a literary festival for a while and, with our 70th anniversary coming up in July, this seemed exactly the right time to do it,’ says Carrie Lewis, the school’s head of English and the driving force behind the event. The festival’s programme comprises talks, storytelling and workshops and Mrs Lewis has gathered a strong line-up of speakers, including Emma Carroll, the author of Strange Star, the Financial Times’s children’s book of the year in 2016. Daytime events are open to all local schools but five evening talks will…

LAST Thursday, our local school closed for the day to serve as a polling station. The prospect of this keenly anticipated extra holiday encouraged the children to a laudable, if slightly wearing, interest in the election campaign as a whole. I have been asked for detailed explanations of the voting system, the manifesto positions of the principal parties—with a notable bias towards animals, the environment and, unexpectedly, Brexit—and have refused to answer the inevitable ‘who are you voting for?’ more times than I care to remember. It’s the third time in as many years that such a midweek holiday has been thrust upon us and, to judge from the result, as I write, there may be another in prospect. Meanwhile, the school itself has been running a parallel election to…

In a recent column, I expressed a certain nostalgia for the days when rosé didn't have to be ultra-pale and über-sophisticated, in the Saint-Tropez mode, and when pink wines could get away with a certain depth of colour or even character. At a recent tasting, I found my wishes being granted by the wine-buying equivalent of the Tooth Fairy, the thoughtful and accomplished Katherine Dart MW of Berry Bros & Rudd. Why you should be drinking them You might think serious rosé is a contradiction in terms, but such thinking would be historically shallow. Not long ago, during a cellar tour at Guigal in the Rhône, Philippe Guigal remarked to me that, as recently as the 1980s, Guigal's Tavel rosé was as dark as a pale Pinot Noir red…

THE eagle attacking the snake on the Mexican flag (Spectator, May 24) in fact says rather a lot—it recalls the founding of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. Legend tells that the Aztlan people (later known as the Aztecs), who had left their original lands in the north, would know where to settle when they saw an eagle devouring a snake, perched on a prickly-pear cactus. Fiona Green, Buckinghamshire…

VICKY SLOWE remembers the day in 1967 when Donald Campbell died attempting a new speed record on Coniston Water in Cumbria. She was at school in nearby Hawkshead and heard the announcement on Radio Caroline. It was mid morning on Wednesday, January 4, and Mrs Slowe was in a crowd of fellow pupils around a transistor radio. ‘There was a palpable sense of shock. Campbell was a hero to people in the Lake District—it was a horrendous moment.’ Mrs Slowe is now the director of the Ruskin Museum in Coniston, a new wing of which will soon house a fully restored Bluebird K7, the jet-powered craft Campbell was driving when he lost control at more than 300mph. ‘I’d seen Campbell testing Bluebird when I stayed with friends by the lake.…

REDEFINING the idea of ‘getting away from it all’, IGO Adventures organises multi-disciplinary challenges for individuals who can only spare a week of their time. Sign up and, this August, you could find yourself alongside IGO founder Bobby Dundas, 10th Viscount Melville—winner of his class in the 2013 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge—and a team of adventuring amateurs with a taste for the outdoors, exploring Montana’s dramatic and diverse terrain. The W114° expedition marks the first time that IGO has ventured to the USA, although there have been two successful tours in the Norwegian tundra. Deep in the designated wilderness of Flathead National Forest, participants will complete a lake swim, a 5–7-hour mountain-bike trail, a kayak race and a run. The state motto here, where elk, antelope and bison easily outnumber…

Rupert Lawson Johnston, head of Strutt & Parker Chichester ‘First impressions count and you want to look smarter, cleaner and more inviting than your neighbours. If your house is of Cotswold yellow stone, duck-egg blue can be appealing. For country cottages, soft blues and greens are charming. A darker royal blue can look smart against red brick. For a white façade, a deeper shade of green. If it’s by the sea, however, it’s a mellow, chalky, duck-egg blue. My personal choice is a matte from Little Greene’s Lead Colour range or Elephant’s Breath from Farrow & Ball, but greys only work if the door is dressed with a freshly painted crisp-white door frame, green trees either side and chrome door furniture.’ Lindsay Cuthill, head of Savills country department ‘Pink!…

All good gardeners plan ahead. The leek, queen of winter crops, needs our attention now if success is to be assured in the dark days. Prepare a strip of good ground by forking through it and levelling it. Pull up a handful of leek seedlings, which should now be pencil-thick. Top and tail them with an old knife by shortening the leaves by a third and trimming the roots to a neat tuft. Set a tight line and make holes with a dibber at 6in intervals. Into each hole, drop a leek seedling. Fill each hole with water and leave it…

. ‘ He saw it as his mission to educate and civilise us’ GO away lorry driver’, Michael Kidson’s pithy response to a tirade of abuse after Dougal, his beloved dog, ran into the road, earned him a place in Eton folklore. Erstwhile Eton headmaster Sir Eric Anderson summed him up as ‘inspirational, unconventional, indiscreet, dismissive, confrontational, outrageously opinionated, sarcastic, rude, politically incorrect, contrary, sartorially correct, charming, kind, generous, shy and deeply private’. He taught ‘modern history’, mostly 19th-century, and his heroes Peel, Palmerston and Gladstone he described as ‘giants’; you felt they were in the room with you. His lessons in his old-fashioned classroom with blackboard and map of pre-Versailles Europe were pure theatre, using a combination of descriptive genius to bring events alive, dramatic interventions to maintain attention…

Leslie Geddes-Brown ‘This fiend would turn type upside down and cause spelling mistakes ’ MY favourite bookmark is a chunky piece of brown card with, at the top, a horned and tailed red devil sprinting with a sheaf of paper and, underneath, ‘I became a Printer’s Devil at Robert Smail’s’. The old print unions wouldn’t allow me to tinker with type in the newspaper composing rooms, but Smail’s positively encouraged it. I was allowed to pick up the metal upper- and lower-case letters and compose my name in Rockwell type, which is generally used for theatrical posters. I did become a printer’s devil—the bookmark has my name clearly printed on it. Smail’s is an old Victorian printing works set up in 1866 in the high street of the small…