Innholdsfortegnelse for 13-Sep-2023 i Country Life

1930 Unpublished A medieval undercroft, presumably a monastic building, picturesquely converted into a garden shed. The unidentified image comes from a group labelled ‘Sussex Cottages’, but the contents suggest a more considerable house. The room seems to have been cleared and swept for the photograph. Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www.countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

SCOTLAND has a strong tradition of walled gardens created at a distance from a country house or castle, originally to supply the Victorian or Edwardian homes built when productive kitchen gardens were at their zenith. A number survive and have been restored in recent decades, but even more impressive is when one is created from scratch, as has happened during the past few years at Aldourie Castle, which sits overlooking the head of Loch Ness a few miles south-west of Inverness. In 2014, the 500-acre Aldourie estate was purchased by the Danish couple Anders and Anne Povlsen. Over the previous 10 years or so, Mr and Mrs Povlsen had acquired a series of Scottish estates, which, collectively, have made them the country’s largest landowners. The inspiration for their acquisition of…

IT is not only plants that come in and out of fashion; entire approaches to gardening experience the same ebb and flow. Fifty years ago, gardeners would have been at ease discussing groundcover plants and garden publications would have been filled with advice about what plants could best be used en masse to smother weeds, retain moisture or simply cut down on maintenance. Today, the talk is of plant communities, planting matrixes and prairies, never of anything as old-fashioned as groundcover. The word itself is perhaps part of the problem, evoking images from the 1970s of sterile plantings in supermarket car parks or around municipal buildings, with swathes of periwinkles and dull shrubs. Recently, the term ‘monoplanting’ has been used to describe groundcover, but this is probably not going to…

ON May 3, 1811—a little over two weeks before his 18th birthday and almost exactly 200 years to the day since the first family owner of the property died there—Robert Berkeley laid the foundation stone of his father’s new seat at Spetchley Park. The completed building remains an exceptionally well-preserved Regency house on the grand scale. Designed in the Grecian style, it is entered up a spreading flight of steps through a monumental temple portico. The Bath-stone exterior is sparingly detailed and sits within rolling parkland in a quintessentially English grouping, with the medieval parish church beyond. Spetchley Park remains in the ownership of the Berkeley family and is perhaps most familiar today for its outstanding gardens. Since 2019, however, the house itself has been the object of an ambitious…

IN July 1763, Horace Walpole visited Drayton House in Northamptonshire. The house belonged to a sprightly octogenarian, Lady Betty Germain, who had inherited it more than 40 years earlier. That Lady Betty—who had since made her home with the Duke and Duchess of Dorset, lodging in a four-room apartment at Knole in Kent—seldom visited Drayton for more than six weeks a year, did not mean that Drayton was neglected. Indeed, its upkeep earned Walpole’s enthusiastic commendation. ‘The old furniture and customs She has kept up most religiously,’ he wrote, ‘and maintained the house in the most perfect order and preservation. There is scarce a house in England so entire in the old-fashioned manner.’ Maintained in a state of crisp geometric perfection were the Dutch-style formal gardens laid out at the…

Floral fantasy ‘I love to open the door to a room that sings with colour,’ says Kit Kemp, interior designer and founder of Firmdale Hotels, whose latest collection of wallpapers for Andrew Martin includes this glorious Songbird design in Sunset, £710 per pack of one x 18m roll (020–3887 6113; www.andrewmartin.co.uk) Antique inspiration Inspired by a 19th-century woven antique document, Fontenoy is a new fabric design rich in textural effects and detailed patterns, £116m from Colefax and Fowler (020–8877 6440; www.colefax.com) Romantic collection Nina Campbell’s new Sudbury fabric, £155m, features large decorative acanthus flowers and leaves embroidered on a herringbone ground, part of a charming collection named after the market towns of Suffolk and available to view in the new Osborne & Little showroom at Chelsea Harbour’s Design Centre, (020–8812…

Hampshire, £549,950 A beautiful period home on the outskirts of the hamlet of West Stratton, Spinney Cottage is all the evidence you’ll ever need that good things come in small packages. This two-bedroom home, listed Grade II, is exceptionally well presented and includes a superb kitchen/dining room, spacious living room, and two en-suite bedrooms on the first floor. Approached via a path through the cottage garden to the front of the house, the real magic lies to the rear, where a rose-filled oasis awaits. The large terrace provides great space for entertaining and, at the far end of the garden, a raised deck offers expansive views. Savills (01962 841842) Gloucestershire, £1.25 million Frocester Cottage is anything but, offering five bedrooms and more than enough room for the largest of…

THE dahlias, rudbeckias, tagetes, sunflowers, salvias and grasses are still going strong, so we’re still busy picking in the cutting garden where we grow flowers for florists and weddings. Somehow, however, I’ve got to find time to get in my seed orders and we have to fit in clearing out the greenhouse to make space for the seed trays, which need to be sown before the days start to shorten. Put in the seed and bulb orders Almost all our seeds come from Chiltern Seeds, which has an excellent website and catalogue with easy-to-follow sowing instructions for each variety—and the germination rates are excellent. I always order seeds for sowing this autumn and next spring now, before the best varieties sell out. Hopefully, I’ve anticipated next year’s trends—peach everywhere!—but…

DEVON’S indigenous cows, known as Red Rubies, are a perfect blend with the eponymous county’s rich red earth and make a glorious sight when grazing amid the bright-green bracken and purple heather of the moors in summer. The first herd book was published in 1851, by Lt-Col John Tanner Davey of South Molton, Devon, by which time the cattle had been admired by the commentators of the Agricultural Revolution. In 1805, John Lawrence wrote in A General Treatise on Cattle: ‘Robert Bakewell [the great Leicestershire agriculturist and longhorn breeder] paid them the highest compliment they could receive, by declaring to an enquirer that the Devons could not be improved by any alien cross.’ Credit for today’s healthy herd must go to Francis Quartly, who farmed at Great Champson in the…

THE late, great humourist Miles Kington had a list of things in Britain no one ever says a bad word about—steam engines, Morecambe and Wise, the Settle-Carlisle Railway among them. Were he around today, Kington would surely have added the names Wallace and Gromit to his list. The hapless Plasticine heroes are so universal it surprised nobody when The Queen told schoolchildren that the cheese-fixated duo are her husband’s ‘favourite people in the world’. ‘Wallace and Gromit have been around all my life, they give everyone a lovely warm, nostalgic feeling,’ enthuses Emma Stirling-Middleton, the curator of an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, London W1, devoted to the dynamic duo’s second screen outing, The Wrong Trousers. Regarded by critics as one of the pinnacles of British cinema, the film is…

WHAT does sustainability mean to interior designers, architects and the brands they work with? What are the expectations of their clients? And how can they be met? Three leading experts in their fields will demystify the subject, offering advice and highlighting the environmental and social benefits, as well as explaining how businesses gain from successful engagement with this fascinating and fast-moving area. The panel will include Hugh Petter of Adam Architecture, Maria Mallalieu of leading interior-design and architecture practice Hyatt Hotels and Mirry Christie of sustainability consultants B/Able, who will be in conversation with COUNTRY LIFE’s Executive Editor, Giles Kime. From thermal efficiency and repurposing materials to responsible sourcing and minimising waste, they will explore a huge array of subjects relating to this multifaceted subject. The event takes place from…

Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish Francesca Peacock(Head of Zeus, £27.99) IN an all too familiar story, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623–73), although celebrated during her lifetime, is now far from a household name. Yet a quick search online will reveal that, 350 years since her death, Cavendish’s writings continue to be admired and republished. In 1994, she was considered of sufficient consequence to join that literary pantheon Penguin Classics and, in 2019, she was included in the New York Review Books Poets series. This new biography, timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Cavendish’s birth, is a well-researched, engagingly written and assured debut by Francesca Peacock, a regular contributor to The Spectator and The Telegraph. In the introduction, she rightly states that her…

YOU might think that visiting Hadrian’s Wall in an English August would be a mild, balmy affair, but not this year. In the midst of heavy rain, mist and strong winds, we pity the farmers still desperately trying to get the hay and harvest in. Nothing diminishes our visit to Northumberland, however, as we are taking my mother, in her 90th year, to see her 94-year-old brother (whom she hasn’t seen since before covid) and revisit the places of her childhood. She grew up in Haydon Bridge and lived for some years in Alston, where I and two of my sisters were born. We’re staying at a Landmark Trust cottage, Causeway House, just south of the wall. It’s one of very few buildings still thatched with heather and its…

GSTUART RAHAM THOMAS—perhaps the greatest gardener ever—was for many years gardens adviser to the National Trust. It was not his only career, because he started his working life as a nurseryman and ended it as the author of many of our most influential books about plants and gardens. But his work for the Trust established the principles by which some 120 gardens were planted, managed and enjoyed. He would have been thrilled to learn that the Trust recently acquired Munstead Wood. Thomas left home in Cambridge in 1931 to work for a nurseryman in Chobham. One weekend, soon after his arrival in Surrey, he cycled over to Munstead Wood, near Godalming, to visit Gertrude Jekyll, who had for more than 30 years been England’s best-known gardener. Enthusiasm, knowledge and energy…

THE late-17th-century discovery of the sexual nature of plants came as a terrible shock to puritanical sensitivities, with many rejecting the idea outright on the pious grounds that God would not condone, let alone instigate, such unseemly behaviour in such beautiful creations. The 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus later twisted the knife with his guide to classification and identification, which relied on counting floral pistils (female) and stamens (male) and expressing the numbers in matrimonial metaphors; ‘one wife with four husbands’, for example. Never one to leave things alone, he also called the calyx ‘the bride’s bed’. However, even today, we can be startled by the thought that when we admire or sniff our garden roses, it is their sexual organs that delight us. When we admire or sniff our…

IN Philip Larkin’s poem The Mower, in which a hedgehog is fatally caught in the machine’s blades, the poet writes of his shock and remorse. ‘I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world unmendably.’ Larkin captures the essence of our relationship with hedgehogs. They exist, innocent and prehistoric, on the fringes of our world, between gardens and open country; and our contact with them is often clumsy harm—the census of hedgehogs is based on roadkill. Yet they are consistently voted the nation’s favourite mammal and are embedded in children’s literature. These days, few youngsters will see hedgehogs, as their numbers plummet. Our relationship with them is really a question of our responsibility towards the natural world. The demise of the creatures…

NAMED after the Old Norse word floi meaning ‘wet or marshy land’, the Flow Country is a vast rolling expanse of peatland and wetland covering some 1,500 square miles of Caithness and Sutherland, Scotland’s most northerly counties. The largest stretch of blanket bog in Europe, the Flow Country is an area of deep peat, a type of peatland formed over thousands of years as mosses grow, die and accumulate in layers, eventually forming peat. When peatlands are damaged or degraded due to drainage or peat extraction, stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to greenhouse-gas emissions. Peatlands such as the Flow Country act as a carbon sink, trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now, thanks to a series of dedicated peatland-restoration projects, the Flow Country has embarked…