Innholdsfortegnelse for May 15, 2024 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IT is no coincidence that what we now know as the Chelsea Flower Show, probably the greatest such event in the world, was, from the beginning, held in the third week of May, when spring can almost certainly be said to have sprung. That first show took place in Chiswick, where it was originally going to be called a Horticultural Breakfast (which sounds like something of a dog’s dinner). Wisely, the Horticultural Society (as the RHS was then) plumped for the easier-to-swallow Horticultural Fête, which attracted just under 3,000 visitors. Seven miles from central London, Chiswick remains more rural today and thus might be considered a more suitable spot for the 150,000-plus crowd that will squeeze…

Taking swift action LAST year, you published a story about the Swift Project started by Harbury Parish Council in Warwickshire (Town & Country, May 17, 2023). I was inspired by this to start our own project, Save our Clare Swifts, supported by Clare Town Council. It has been taken up enthusiastically by the local people. More than 50 swift boxes have been installed with callers and the birds can now be heard throughout the town. The first swifts were spotted this weekend, screaming through the air like little Spitfires. Thank you for your inspiring article. Antonia Brandes, Suffolk Lost in translation I HAVE a suggestion that David Profumo might like to add to his list of badly chosen product names (Notebook, May 1). The Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow would have been…

London from Greenwich Park by J. M. W. Turner Where burthen’dThames reflectsthe crowded sail,Commercial care andbusy toil prevail,Whose murky veil,aspiring to theskies,Obscures thy beauty,and thy formdenies,Save where thyspires pierce thedoubtful air,As gleams of hopeamidst a worldof care ‘London was on the verge of becoming the largest city in the world when Turner painted this. It could be nowhere else, with Greenwich Hospital in the centre, the River Thames leading the viewer towards the City and St Paul’s Cathedral. The painting was exhibited with lines from a poem Turner had written himself (above right). This was the London that inspired Dickens. Where Turner presented a pastoral idyll, the author delved into London at street level and riverside, charting the lives, his own and others, that were drawn to the Thames to…

THIS year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show sees the return of garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith with his first show garden in 14 years. A Gold medallist eight times and winner of three Bests in Show, he was drawn back by the chance to create a show garden for the National Garden Scheme (NGS), the largely volunteer-run organisation that opens private gardens for charity. Sponsored by Project Giving Back, this is only the second Chelsea garden in the history of the NGS. It will occupy the significant corner site on Main Avenue. Mr Stuart-Smith’s design is based on a grove of hazels with spreading boughs and wizened trunks that promises to be as magical as anything painted by Arthur Rackham. As he says: ‘There’s nothing like a woodland for making you feel…

THIS is our busiest month, as we are still sowing seeds, pricking out/potting up, harvesting, delivering and—perhaps most importantly—planting. The annual beds By now, hopefully all our annual beds have been thoroughly weeded, hoed and raked down ready for the seedlings. We lay two rows of irrigation tape per bed and roll out the pre-burned weed fabric (‘Spring’, March 20). Posts are pounded in every 10ft, but we hold off stretching the netting between them until after planting. The hardened-off annuals are watered one final time in their pots and planted according to the plan. There’s so much urgency during this time, as we don’t want the plants to become pot-bound and they all seem to be ready to go in at once. Provided there are no frosts forecast, we…

AH, the Great British Weather. Discussing it is a national obsession, but then we have so much of it in these exposed, sea surrounded isles. The divination of the weather, before the science of meteorology, was often based on ancient folklore and proverbs concerning the behaviour of the animals in the field or in the wild. Now that we have the Met Office—other weather forecasters are available—all the silly old saws can be dumped in the bin of superstition. Or can they? Animal-science research has come back to bite the sceptics. Some animals do seem to be weather forecasters. If they can predict the weather, should you stop watching the weather person on television and start watching the birds in the sky instead? ‘A standing Shorthorn could arguably mean a…

THE countryside came to town last month for a reception at Fortnum & Mason, London W1, supported by COUNTRY LIFE in honour of The Royal Countryside Fund (RCF), a charity launched in 2010 by The King (as Prince of Wales) that aims to support family farms and rural businesses. RCF chair Heather Hancock, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, announced the RCF’s four-year plan, which is to invest a further £3 million in rural, community led projects and develop a network of 6,000-plus farm businesses by 2028. ‘Support for farming families has surged five-fold over the past three years,’ she noted, observing that food security is now back on the national agenda, ‘but our job is far from done. The voice of the countryside remains faint and the realities of…

Buckinghamshire, £2.9 million Grymsdyke Manor, in the Chilterns village of Lacey Green near Princes Risborough, not only has a terrace overlooking its expansive, private 4½-acre garden, but a swimming pool and floodlit tennis court—everything for summer. Another plus for some is that the seven-bedroom, six-bathroom, early-18th-century manor house with Victorian Gothic additions and seven reception rooms is not listed. Further delights include a wine cellar, orangery, rose garden and fruit cages; there is a wing that would work as a self-contained annexe and about eight acres of paddocks. Savills (020–7016 3780) Savills (020–7016 3780) Essex, £850,000 Watts Folly, a timber-frame, thatched cottage in the centre of the pretty village of Arkesden, five miles from Saffron Walden and only 18 from Cambridge, has as its USP an atmospheric cedarwood garden pavilion…

Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect? Clive Aslet (Triglyph Books, £20) FOLLOWING his death in 1944, Sir Edwin Lutyens seemed an anachronism. Architectural fashion was against the designer of the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi and a multitude of country houses for Edwardian plutocrats. A major Arts Council exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1981, however, turned a small cult following into a mainstream craze. The outstanding figure of a talented generation of architects, Lutyens showed an alternative to then-prevailing Modernism; the theatrical transformation of the Brutalist bunker on the South Bank by Piers Gough blew the dust off this Edwardian colossus. Lutyens was suddenly everywhere and, inevitably, this pitch of excitement gradually faded. There are compelling reasons for revisiting Lutyens, however, and nobody could do it better than Clive…

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TEN years ago, the inaugural publication of the Tall Buildings Survey at the ‘London’s Growing Up!’ exhibition staged by New London Architecture, EC2, predicted the imminent arrival of 236 tower blocks (20 storeys or more). That figure has mushroomed to more than 500. Architect Barbara Weiss, who launched the Skyline Campaign in 2014 to combat the capital’s ‘surge in poor-quality skyscrapers’, accuses the construction industry’s PR machine of ‘milking the anniversary’ and has restated her call for planners and politicians ‘to come up with a sensitive city-wide skyline vision’. She continues: ‘What is disappointing is that none of these Tall Buildings aficionados is brave or honest enough to look up at this new London skyline. It’s impossible to describe any of the chaotic clusters as an architectural improvement on what…

LAST week, the local-election results dominated the headlines and, dramatic as they were, they over shadowed the result of a court case that may well influence British politics even more fundamentally. It all started more than two years ago, when campaigners became alarmed at the failure of the Government to explain how it was going to deliver its climate change programme—particularly when they looked at its plans for the countryside. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) had already warned that there was a big gap between what the Government had promised and what it was actually doing. Boris Johnson had committed the UK to tough targets at the Glasgow summit and Parliament, by a huge cross-party majority, had set a legal requirement for us to reduce our emissions to net…

ELIZABETH TALBOT, Countess of Shrewsbury was a shrewd operator of the 16th century who was considered the second most important English woman of her day after Elizabeth I. She created one of Britain’s best-loved and most gracious country houses, Chatsworth in Derbyshire, seat of the Dukes of Devonshire and set in a beautiful 1,822-acre parkland and 105-acre gardens. She also built nearby, magnificent Hardwick Hall—hence the sobriquet—after the breakdown of her fourth marriage. Bess, daughter of an impoverished landowner, began life in service and ended up enormously wealthy. The second of her four husbands—she outlived them all, dying in 1608, aged over 80—was Sir William Cavendish (Cavendish is the family name of the Devonshires). She persuaded him to sell the considerable monastic lands he had accrued as a commissioner for…

The garden of Pusey House, Oxfordshire The home of Mr and Mrs Richard Perlhagen WHEN Pusey House came to the market in 2010, the selling agent called it ‘one of England’s most beautiful houses’. Even allowing for the well-known enthusiasm of estate agents, if you stand on the broad terrace admiring the house’s sublimely elegant mid-18th-century stone façade, then turn to the view south across tree-framed lawns and lake to the far ridge of the Berkshire Downs, it is hard not to agree. It would seem that the elegance of the house has always been the inspiration for its setting; from the original 18th-century landscape to the garden that was substantially created by Michael and Nicolette Hornby after they purchased Pusey in 1935, as well as the garden that has…

GARDENERS have been at war with slugs since the dawn of time (or, rather, the dawn of gardening). They munch our prize plants and offer little mitigation to make such crimes forgivable, lacking beauty, grace or other charming attributes. The best we can do is to remind ourselves that some other delightful (and declining) animals, such as hedgehogs and thrushes, might come along and eat them. ‘The radula bears a conveyor belt of tiny, saw-like teeth’ Slugs may be unprepossessing, but they have a noble heritage. The phylum Mollusca is mostly marine and includes an array of bivalves and snails, the brainy octopuses and their kin, plus the nudibranchs or sea slugs in their myriad colourful and strangely shaped forms. Slugs don’t form a clear-cut taxonomic group and are best…

THE spectacular show-house event at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, kicks off on June 4 and runs until July 4. Now in its third year, it will feature 19 extraordinary spaces, created by some of the world’s most admired interior designers, working in collaboration with design brands to produce a feast of decorative inspiration and delight. The Colefax & Fowler Morning Room by Lucy Hammond Giles This year marks the 90th anniversary of the totemic Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler (020–7493 2231; www.sibylcolefax.com). ‘I was keen to create a room that pays homage to our past, as well as reflecting today’s taste and sensibilities,’ explains decorator Lucy Hammond Giles, who has worked at the firm since 2004. ‘It has been a glorious experience digging through the collections.’ She continues: ‘My…

IT was a matter of life and death, a fight for the survival of the standards of French art, so Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) put his foot down and his pen to paper. Vehemently opposed to Gustave Caillebotte’s bequest of Impressionist paintings to the nation, he wrote in Journal des Artistes on April 8, 1894: ‘When the state accepts that sort of muck, then we know we are in the grip of a real moral decline… It’s the end of the country, the end of France.’ He had similarly resisted a retrospective on Édouard Manet in 1883 and would go on to protest against dealer Ambroise Vollard’s decision to hold an exhibition of Cézanne’s work in 1895. ‘Classicists complained the thumb signal had “no warrant in history”’ Gérôme was a professor…

I HAVE just been listening to one of the most charming dealer interviews that I remember and I would recommend it to anyone who is nervous about buying from galleries or shops, whether or not they are interested in rugs and textiles. Ulrike Montigel has been running Galerie Arabesque in Stuttgart, Germany, for 40 years, before which she was a collector of Caucasian rugs. In the interview, which was filmed in connection with the 2018 San Francisco Arts Rugs Show (galerie-arabesque.de/en/#interview at 7.02 minutes), she tells us that her first buy was a wedding present for her fiancé, a knowledgeable collector, who showed her, one hopes gently, that the dyes were unfortunately chemical. She also notes that ‘coming from Germany to England for our fairs made us realise tremendous cultural…

I HAVE long argued that the two parts of Henry IV are Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. Although I yearn to see the works played in their entirety, I admit that Robert Icke has done a skilful job in condensing them into a single evening in Player Kings at the Noël Coward Theatre, WC2. The glory of the production—and its powerful drawing card—is inevitably the performance of Sir Ian McKellen as Falstaff. Like Hamlet, Falstaff is so multi-dimensional that each actor who plays him brings something original to the role. With Sir Robert Stephens, it was an awareness of Falstaff’s essential solitude; in the case of Sir Antony Sher, it was a stress on the character’s predatory ruthlessness. What Sir Ian does is to make us rethink the whole idea that the…

WOODPECKERS are drumming. A blackbird runs through his repertoire from the highest branches, as the trees unfurl brand-new leaves in translucent, luminous greens. The flowers of hedge bank and woodland edge—alkanet, campion, Queen Anne’s lace—beckon butterflies and bees. Take this as a keynote for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2024: the unfolding freshness and energy of deciduous woods in May, interpreted in numerous interesting ways in the show gardens. The National Garden Scheme (NGS) Garden, by Tom Stuart-Smith (page 92), sets out its woodland credentials with an impressive grove of large, coppiced hazels, spreading broad canopies of fresh foliage. Slender footpaths create serpentine routes between them, to reach a cleft-oak hut for tea and cake, celebrating the time-honoured tradition of the NGS. ‘Lemon drizzle or Victoria sponge?’ This is…

ARE you sitting comfortably? The answer to this, in most gardens, will be no. Or not very, unless you have come armed with a battery of cushions to soften the unforgiving wood, metal or plastic that, given 10 minutes or so, will be digging into your spine or numbing your bottom. Yet, surely, the very first thing a designer should consider when making a garden seat—somewhere to lounge all afternoon reading a book, chatting over a lazy lunch or simply dozing in the warmth—is to ensure that it is a pleasure to sit on. That said, seats do have a purpose beyond offering somewhere comfortable to sit. They ought to be inviting and draw you into a garden. Some of the benches opposite do this brilliantly, acting almost as a…

THE burden of designing the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand was too much for the architect George Edmund Street: according to his son, Arthur Edmund Street, he died from overwork. However, at least he is remembered in the cavernous great hall of that building. A committee to erect a memorial to him met the year after his death, adopting a motion by the Prince of Wales that it should take the form of a statue. Made by H. H. Armstead and occupying a bay of the hall, it is one of the greatest of Victorian monuments (Fig 3). Street appears as he was in life, bearded, dynamic, stern, with a pair of dividers in one hand and a drawing spread, rather impractically, across his knees—a drawing board would…

YOU may associate horsehair with the stuffing inside old mattresses and padded chairs, but a more visible and prestigious use lies in the woven upholstery of antique furniture. Today, this hardwearing textile with its pearlescent sheen attracts contemporary designers, who order it in zesty hues and patterns for a variety of projects, from large acoustic wall panels and minibar coverings to smaller fire fenders, lampshades, handbags and even Nike footwear. Indigestible to moths, as well as pet proof (cats tend to leave it alone), sustainable and inherently flame-retardant, horsehair fabric has a good deal to recommend it. It is subtly textured and striated, the weaving of it is a heritage craft requiring specialist skills and it is rare: only two horsehair-fabric manufacturers remain in operation today: John Boyd Textiles in…

FOR more than 1,000 years, people have shaped the natural beauty of the High Weald, a medieval landscape of wooded rolling hills and scattered farmsteads spread over 564 square miles across the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. The ancient village of Horsted Keynes, six miles north-east of the commuter hub of Haywards Heath, stands in some 5,000 acres of heavily forested, mostly rural land, once part of the ancient forest of Anderida. First mentioned in the Domesday Book as Horsted de Cahaignes, the village takes its name from Sir William de Cahaignes, a Norman knight who fought with William the Conqueror and was awarded land at Horstede (‘the place of the horses’) in West Sussex and Milton in Buckinghamshire. At the north end of the village, the Grade I-listed…

CATHERINE MACDONALD was hopelessly lost. She had been wandering around the National Gallery, zigzagging from room to room, so absorbed in the artworks that she no longer knew where she was. ‘I had to go and find a map to get myself out,’ she laughs. Her confusion was more than understandable, however. Dr MacDonald, the principal landscape designer at Landform Consultants, had been touring the National Gallery for more than three hours and hadn’t merely been admiring the paintings. She had been studying them closely to draw inspiration for her latest project: a commission by jeweller Boodles to design a garden for the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show that would mark the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary. Dr MacDonald decided early on that she didn’t simply want to bring one painting…

IT seems strange now to think that oxygen required discovery, so perhaps ‘identifying’ or ‘isolating’ would sit better. Whichever, I suspect that those who have experienced intense pain relieved by gas and air or the panic of gasping for breath calmed by an oxygen mask are immensely grateful to Dr Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). For seven years, Priestley was employed by William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne (1737–1805), as his librarian, which gave a way for the Earl to support Priestley’s scientific work. Lord Shelburne, who became the Marquess of Lansdowne after serving as Prime Minister and securing peace with America, surrounded himself with a group of intellectuals passionate about political and economic reform, science, philosophy and non-conformist religion. They were called the Bowood Circle—for Bowood House, the Earl’s Wiltshire seat—and…

WITH its pristine white petals grouped around a yolky heart, chamomile adds cheer to our verges, cliffs and meadows in summer and releases a fruity fragrance when trodden underfoot. It’s this sweet scent that explains its name, taken from the Greek word chamaimēlon, meaning earth apple. Beneath the dainty bonnet is a rather unkempt plant: a scrawny member of the daisy family with ragged leaves that goes from tiny tot to teenager in the blink of an eye, blossoming after only 10 weeks. Yet, with blooms that last all summer, chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile) brings a little sunshine to terrace containers or formal borders and also mixes in well with wildflowers in uncultivated areas of the garden. The German variety is taller and more aromatic than the English (often called Roman)…

I’VE been a fan of Mrs Temple’s Binham Blue cheese (Norfolk’s only cow’s-milk blue cheese) for some time and often pass her Brown Swiss and Holstein Friesian cows on the way to the beach. She replied to my email almost instantly. It would be a pleasure, she confirmed, to talk cheese. Catherine Temple and her husband, Stephen, had been working abroad and they realised, on returning to Stephen’s family farm some 20 years ago, that things were going to be difficult. They had plenty of land, plenty of cattle and plenty of milk, but there was no money in it and the future was uncertain. Mrs Temple, who is originally from Nottinghamshire—‘Colwick country,’ she said proudly—felt that Britain is broken up not into counties, but into patches associated with certain…