Innholdsfortegnelse for 12-May-2021 i Country Life

HOW heartening to see the gates of Brodsworth Hall, five miles from Doncaster in South Yorkshire, standing wide in welcome as visitors wander the broad paths under unimaginably blue skies, simply enjoying all that this wonderful garden has to offer. The gigantic topiary displays are clipped sharp and, in the formal flower garden, pompoms of pink spring bedding are still looking fresh in their razor-edged beds. Lockdowns? Furloughs? Of these there is barely any sign. Thanks to the dedication of the team at Brodsworth, the garden has been looked after throughout this awful past year. It may have taken almost 30 years for English Heritage to have brought this garden back to life, but letting things slip for even one year would have required a mammoth task to reverse. Like…

I HAD just read the article on swallows (‘On a wing and a prayer’, April 14) when I took my usual walk. I passed my friend’s house and noticed he had two postboxes, rather than the one I was used to. I thought nothing of it until I was returning home, took a closer look and suddenly understood. The following day, I witnessed a starling emerge from one of the boxes. I wonder what other interesting nest sites readers have witnessed? Henry Holloway, Co Armagh The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne…

1902 Published May 17 The main street of Milton Abbas, Dorset, illustrated as part of a series entitled ‘Typical English Villages'. The photographer took several images of this model 18th-century settlement with its picturesque cottages. From the figures glimpsed, represented here by the couple in the door, it's clear that his presence excited interest. The Country Life Picture Library contains 120 years' worth of photography and articles from the world's leading architectural and gardens experts. We are delighted to note that works are again available to license or purchase in print form, from £35 plus VAT. Please email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

WHEN Andrew Peters first encountered the 40-acre gardens at Armadale Castle on the Sleat peninsula on Skye, he was entranced. He found magnificent specimen trees from the 19th century, as well as woodlands and exotic plants from across the globe. But what made—and still makes—the place remarkable is not so much what is there, but the fact that it is there at all on this rugged Hebridean island. Tucked into a coastal pocket facing the mainland, not only does the site benefit from the warm air of the Gulf Stream, but it is protected by the lie of the land from the worst of the westerly winds. ‘I love Armadale; it is pretty rare,’ says Mr Peters. That was back in 1984, when the gardens were enjoying something of a…

Paz Perlman Breaking Free in bronze resin, £2,530, by Paz Perlman, from DegreeArt.com (020–3701 7411; www.degreeart.com) Freddie Churchill Abzu in mild steel, £1,000, by Freddie Churchill (07980 740676; www.freddiechurchill.com) Nicholas Baker Astrid in mild steel, £950, by Nicholas Baker (07847 431452; www.nicholasbaker.co.uk ) Beth Kirby Conker in bronze resin with verdigris finish, £285, by Beth Kirby, from Surrey Sculpture Society (www.surreysculpture.org.uk) Emmanuel Okoro Three Graces in bronze resin, £1,800, by Emmanuel Okoro, from DegreeArt.com (020–3701 7411; www.degreeart.com) Nicola Axe Conch Shell in Maltese limestone on a reclaimed- oak plinth, £850, by Nicola Axe (07949 142770; www.nicola-axesculptor.co.uk) Ralph Shuttleworth Gestures of Walnut in black walnut, £750, Ralph Shuttleworth (07594 876751; www.ralphshuttleworth.co.uk) Freddie Churchill Tiamat in mild steel, £1,000, by Freddie Churchill (07980 740676; www.freddiechurchill.com) Jackie Perkins Forest in recycled slate, £1,375,…

IT was on a mid-February morning that a westerly brought the first hints of spring. Since then, despite hesitancy and downright back-tracking—snow at Easter, a sheen of dew each April dawn—the hints have become a pledge, something to hang our hopes on after a frightful year. On that first morning of promise, I sat with my back against the abandoned bowling pavilion, eyes screwed tight to the rising sun, and listened to the birdsong from the surrounding trees, mingled with the dog walkers’ ritual pleasantries. When I’d warmed up, lizard-like, and the pink glow behind my eyelids had become uncomfortably bright, I walked down to the little ornamental strip that’s fenced off from the rest of the park. There’s a streamlet here, landscaped long ago down some mossy steps for…

• Pre-1746 Tenants rent land from clan gentry, who lease it from chiefs • Post-1746 Clan chiefs remove communities to make way for sheep and deer forests in the Highland Clearances • 1800 Crofts are created, many in coastal areas, with tenants moving there to work in the kelp and fishing industries • 1880s Creation of the Highland Land League and radicalised discontent at the lack of crofting land • 1882 The Battle of the Braes in Skye brings public sympathy and government attention • 1883 The government-appointed Napier Commission travels the Highlands, taking evidence from crofters • 1886 The Crofters Act protects inhabitants from eviction, reduces and fixes rents and gives the right to pass crofts on to heirs. Security of tenure also encourages crofters to replace black houses…

Measuring about 2½in, the natterjack toad -our only other species-is smaller than the common toad, with a greener, smoother and shinier skin, together with a distinctive yellow stripe down the middle of its back. The biggest distinguishing feature is that natterjacks are far more vocal than common toads, hence the name-their loud, chirruping love song can be heard on warm spring nights. The fact they prefer to live in sandy, dry areas, such as heathland and dunes-where they burrow into soft sand and venture out at night to hunt for small insects-means they are a lot rarer, too. They are fond of spawning in shallow pools, which warm up easily, making it a risky business-particularly due to climate change. There is always a danger that, in a dry spring, these…

Train your sights on The Newt THE NEWT, just outside Bruton, Somerset, is opening up its gardens (right) to daytrippers, in collaboration with Great Western Railway. Buy a ticket to a Great Garden Escape—available on weekends between June 12 and September 26—and you’ll be ferried first class from London to Castle Cary, meet the hotel’s expert gardeners and be invited to take part in exclusive talks and tastings. You’ll depart with an afternoon-tea picnic hamper, too, to sustain you on the train home. The gardens themselves are nothing short of spectacular: kitchen, fragrance and colour gardens, an apple-tree maze (there are more than 3,000 cider-apple trees in total) and a walled parabola, all surrounded by ancient woodland and orchards. From £295 per person (www.thenewtinsomerset.com;01963 577777). Home is where the party…

AFTER her family sold Grade II*- listed Harlyn House to The Pig hotel group, Jessica Alken and her husband, Ash, set about building themselves a new house near Padstow. The project involved taking down a red-brick bungalow overlooking the sea and designing a beach house in its place. ‘Ash is a bespoke-home builder and we worked with Totnesbased architects Harrison Sutton Partnership on the designs,’ explains Jess. As she had grown up in old houses, top priority was re-using materials to avoid it feeling too new, including reclaimed slate for the roof. The benefit of building from scratch was that it allowed the couple free rein to design the open-plan kitchen. ‘We made a conscious decision to sacrifice the extra bedrooms we could have had upstairs to vault the ceiling—it…

ALMOST a year after it was originally scheduled to do so, the much-anticipated new RHS Bridgewater opens on May 18. ‘It’s the first time in more than 100 years that the RHS has taken on a garden project of this size,’ explains programme director Anna da Silva—and ‘it is a real shot in the arm for northern gardeners,’ adds RHS vice president Alan Titchmarsh. Indeed, everything about the new garden is larger than life, from its 154-acre plot in the former grounds of Worsley New Hall in Salford, once home of the Earls of Ellesmere, to the scale of the project, begun in 2017, which has made it the biggest of its kind in Europe. It is the society’s fifth public garden and the first to be so close to…

BRITAIN’S 3.5 million new gardeners have had a tough initiation: a month without rain, following weeks of deluges, now combined with frosty temperatures night after night. We longstanding gardeners cannot remember so prolonged and unhappy a confluence of extremes. No wonder the horticultural industry continues to battle with a heady mixture of record orders and vicious weather; farmers, meanwhile, struggle on with wind, rain and drought. Yet, this is weather, not climate. Britain has always been notorious for its uncertainties—summer temperatures in October, hail in May and continuous rain for Wimbledon, we’ve put up with it all. What we haven’t always dealt with is the underlying change in climate. That is a different matter, not least when it comes to water. Water stress has not really been a concern in…

Currently at Tate St Ives, this is a powerful expression of black female creativity. Two women command the foreground, their ocean journey taking them to a destination we don’t know. The bars of colour between them, the artist says, are maps the women have rejected and torn; the painting suggests the women are re-navigating histories and geographies from a female perspective. This alternative exploration of the movement of peoples suggests an open and empowering future–a message that resonates with me John McEwen comments on Between the Two my Heart is Balanced LUBAINA HIMID emerged in the 1980s, when she organised and participated in exhibitions as one of the pioneers of the British Black Arts Movement. It was in 1982 at the first National Black Art Convention that she urged her…

THE 100-yard double borders at Thenford have the characteristics of a carefully prepared concept from an original idea. Certainly, there would have been much to be said for such a professional approach. Fortunately, for those of us who are amateurs, the truth is a jumble of ideas, random acquisitions and planting co-ordinated over 20 years. The double border, in fact, began life as a single border created to take advantage of the sunny south-facing outer wall of the walled garden, then being restored by George Carter. Consisting of four herbaceous beds with yew buttresses, it faced a new beech hedge. Over the years, we added more features, including two oak arbours with ornamental benches based on a design at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Moon windows were cut into the maturing hedge…

WHETHER at home in the garden or further afield, alfresco dining is having its moment. When everyone is bringing a dish, make yours a savvy option with tips from the professionals. Tom Kerridge recommends a big hunk of mature cheddar instead of a soft cheese, which might melt in the sun; Thomasina Miers’s Mother’s curried eggs are a crowd pleaser: ‘Hard boil and whip out the yolks, mash them with mayonnaise, curry powder and a touch of mango chutney, then put back in—sensational!’ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall advises making sandwiches with freshly sliced bread at the time rather than preparing them early, which lets them go dry or soggy in equal measure—the story of a British summer, really.…

Devon £3 million The seven-acre grounds almost steal the scene at Grade I-listed The Manor House in Bradninch, where a lake, a bridge-topped stream and the landscaped gardens designed by Jill Billington and Mary Payne offer sweeping or intimate vistas, depending on the vantage point. Paths and seating areas are cleverly designed to enjoy the grounds-especially the horseshoe-shaped expanse at the top of a gentle slope, which overlooks an ancient Lucombe oak. However, the interiors, too, have much to be commended, not least the panoramic master bedroom (one of seven), in which Charles I slept when he visited The Manor House in 1644; the 18th-century dining hall, which Pevsner praised as ‘noble, restrained, classical'; and the 16th-century drawing room, with its stained-glass windows, oak panelling and beautifully carved overmantel…

EMBARRASSMENT can scorch like boiling water and I was 18 when I made one of my worst faux pas. During my first year at university, I was talking about an author when my tutor cut in: ‘It’s Pole, not Powell.’ I was talking about Anthony Powell, but I’d pronounced his name incorrectly. I had no business writing about the great man if I couldn’t even get his name right, she snapped. Just as most things in this country can come down to class, so, too, can language and whether or not we get it ‘right’, even down to the stress we put on words: ‘research’ or ‘research’? Knowing that the Marquess of Cholmondeley is pronounced ‘Chumley’ puts you in one camp; not knowing might put you in another. It has…

At more than 11 acres, the Weston Walled Garden at RHS Bridgewater originally contained a series of smaller kitchen gardens that fed the hall, peppered with coal-fired chimney stacks that heated the old glasshouses. When Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg, the Chelsea Gold Medal-winning pair that designed the new kitchen garden, took on the project, they decided to give a nod to history with industrial-style plant supports. They also discovered 23 original pears still growing on the walls-ancient specimens that had not been pruned for 100 years. These had to be removed so that the wall could be repaired, but this was carefully done, and DNA sequencing revealed 14 different, mainly French and Belgian, cultivars dating from the 1840s and 1850s. The pears have since been grafted onto new rootstock…

THE splendours of Wilton today owe a great deal to the early 18th century and the figure of Henry, 9th Earl of Pembroke, (1689–1750), known as the ‘Architect’ Earl. His often-overlooked contribution to this magnificent house—in origin a great Benedictine convent that was suppressed at the Reformation and repeatedly remodelled thereafter—was described by Horace Walpole: ‘The towers, the chambers, the scenes which Holbein, Jones and Vandyke had decorated, and which Earl Thomas had enriched with the spoils of the best ages, received the last touches of beauty from Earl Henry’s hand… No one had a purer taste in building than Earl Henry, of which he gave a few specimens besides his work at Wilton.’ As a young man, Henry developed an intense interest in architecture. He was educated at Christ…

THE tiny west Highland township of Elphin, north of Ullapool, stands out from the moorland landscape as a patchwork of bright green. Its rare fertility derives from a seam of limestone beneath the soil. Rank heath surrounds it as far as the eye can see and beyond that lie slabs of Lewisian gneiss, the oldest rocks in Europe, three billion years old. Home to about 60 souls, many of them crofting families, Elphin straddles the A835, until recently a road unremarkable for much other than the lonely beauty of the hills either side and the fish lorries from Lochinver that thunder southwards late at night. In 2014, the road’s fortunes changed. A group of Highland businessmen conceived the North Coast 500, a looped tourist route that travels most of the…

POOP, poop!’ Imagine the scene, as the eccentric, narcissistic Mr Toad comes careering around the corner dressed in gaudy Harris tweed, behind the wheel of his bright-red sports car. The toad portrayed in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is a far cry from the real Mr Bufo bufo, the common toad, although it is ironic that Mr Toad’s reckless addiction to automobiles is one of the creatures’ main perils. Far from gaudy in real life, this mottled-brown amphibian waddles about on short, stout legs—warts and all—unlike the more athletic, sleek frog, which propels itself by hopping and the occasional leap. A toad has semi-webbed feet and long toes, whereas his hopping mate’s feet are fully webbed. ‘Intriguingly, toads spend most of their lives out of water, hiding during…

IN an unassuming village on the edge of the Loire Valley in France, you’ll find an impossibly romantic building constructed out of soft tuffeau stone. So soft, in fact, that you can make out the signatures and drawings carved by Second World War soldiers. It was built in the 18th century using instructions sent by letter from owner Baron Jacques Pineau de Viennay. Upon completion, the Baron visited for the first time and promptly dropped dead of a heart attack—some say because of the château’s neo-Classical beauty. After a painstaking restoration, the hotel is almost overwhelming. The entrance hall features the original stone floor; elsewhere, the wood for the parquet was sourced from a forest 20 minutes away, from which timber was also sent to the Palace of Versailles. The…

WILLIAM LANGMEAD of Strutt & Parker’s Salisbury office (01722 344010) announces the official launch onto the market, in this week’s COUNTRY LIFE, of the historic, 906-acre Newhouse estate, which occupies a gloriously private setting overlooking its park and ancient woodland in the north-east corner of the New Forest National Park, near the village of Redlynch on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border. He seeks ‘offers in excess of £18 million’ for the Newhouse estate with its striking, Grade I-listed main house, built in the early 1600s by William Stockman and sold by him in about 1620 to Sir Edward Gorges, later Baron Gorges. In 1633, Lord Gorges sold the estate to Giles Eyre of nearby Brickworth House, Whiteparish, whose descendants have remained at Newhouse to this day. The house stands on high, dry…

THE story of modern British art is almost inextricably entwined with the two World Wars in which most of its leading names served as combatants or war artists, but Michael Ayrton was the odd man out. Within weeks of his call-up in 1941, the young RAF recruit was writing home in despair: ‘I think they are going to try and train me… and I think they are going to take my stick away from me. It will all do no good, but what can I do?’ Ayrton had had a slight limp since contracting osteomyelitis in childhood and stylish walking sticks were part of his persona. Plagued by ill health throughout his life, he was plainly not army material and—although suspected by the medical officer of having ‘definite reasons for…