Innholdsfortegnelse for September 11, 2024 i Country Life

Quiz of the week 1) What term can be used to describe both a setback and a punch in boxing? 2) Which airport is near the town of Bishop’s Stortford? 3) Which monarch was the intended victim of the Gunpowder Plot? 4) Rough-stalked feather, common haircap and sphagnum are all types of what? 5) Which old English measure of distance, also called a perch or a pole, was equal to 16½ft? 1) Blow 2) Stansted 3) James I 4) Moss 5) Rod. Riddle me this: The match Riddle me this You walk into a room containing a match, a kerosene lamp, a fireplace and a candle. What do you light first? Time to buy On this day… September 11, 1980 The Marlborough diamond (shown set in a necklace, left), worth…

NEVER trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums.’ Garden writer Beverley Nichols’s typically tongue-in-cheek, overblown remark hides a truth: how can anyone not be captivated by the exuberance of blowsy red geraniums tumbling down the facades of public houses, adorning terraces in terracotta pots or lined out in spectacular bedding schemes? These are plants that make us happy, bringing a smile to even the most curmudgeonly. Nichols was writing in 1951, when a generation emerging from a world war welcomed the pizzazz of bright red geraniums. These are flowers that have never really gone out of fashion, but, as with all plants, the extent of their popularity has ebbed and flowed. In recent years, the focus of many gardeners and garden designers has been…

AT the risk of sounding unpatriotic—our Scottish waters have been unusually kind to me this summer—I reckon if you want to be sure of casting over pools full of Atlantic salmon, then Iceland is the place to go (it boasts almost 100 salmon rivers; not bad for a country with the same population as Stoke-on-Trent.) Of course, there is nothing new in this. Wellheeled sportsmen have been visiting ‘the land of ice and fire’ since Victorian times; the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould, author of some 240 books, noted that most of the Englishmen he met there in 1859 were anglers (he enjoyed the local whimbrel stew, too). Ultima Thule has long had a reputation for being distinctly different; in the 1870s, Matthías Jochumsson noted that his homeland had ‘no army, no…

Co Durham, £1.35 million With 40 apple, pear, plum and cherry trees in the mature orchard, there should be plenty to go around at Derwent Hill, even with people in all eight bedrooms. Georgian, dating to about 1820 and overlooking the Derwent valley, near Ebchester, the accommodation, characterised by shuttered sash windows and parquet flooring, is split into a four-bedroom main house with a three-bedroom apartment in the west wing and a one-bedroom garden flat on the lower-ground floor—a useful set up for multi-generational living or holiday lets. Within three acres of gardens and grounds there’s also a tennis court, vegetable garden, outbuildings and two private drives. Durham, Hexham and Newcastle are each about 15 miles away. Sanderson Young (0191–223 3500) Staffordshire, £795,000 ‘Enchanting’ timber-frame Bumble Cottage, in the little…

THE Chinese guarded their secrets well. Porcelain, so pristinely white, so fine that it was translucent, had fascinated medieval Europeans ever since Marco Polo chanced upon it in his travels, but no craftsman this side of Cathay had managed to re-create it. ‘They thought that porcelain had magic properties, that you could drink from it and it would cure you from poison—and the mere fact that it was this shell-like material that you could see through made it incredibly special,’ says ceramics dealer Justin Raccanello. ‘They spent a good 200 years trying to imitate it.’ It would be the 18th century before European potters worked out that it was a matter of kiln temperature, but their medieval predecessors eventually discovered that ‘if you add tin to the glaze, you can…

IT’S a long way from the corner of a 1970s British living room to a mobile music-app playlist in 2024. Yet there is one image that has, with peculiar stubbornness, crossed that analogue-to-digital rubicon. If you were home from school with chicken-pox in the era before This Morning and Countdown, then, should you have switched on your parents’ wood-encased, steamer-trunk-weight television before hiding under an eiderdown on the sofa, the image presented to you would be that of a girl playing a game of noughts and crosses on a blackboard with a predictably sinister-looking clown. That clown was called Bubbles and that girl was eight-year-old Carole Hersee. She would go on to become the person who, to date, has clocked up the most screen time of any individual in UK…

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Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk AS ripened conkers burst from their prickly shells and hawthorn berries paint the roadsides with streaks of crimson, squirrels and jays—two of Nature’s most visible autumn preppers—are busy, busy, busy, burying nutty treasures to retrieve in the leaner times to come. The old saying ‘September blow soft till the fruit’s in the loft’ might almost have been written with them in mind. Despite spring’s slow start, it has been a good year for certain fruits, so the ‘loft’ may be well stocked. In particular, apples are enjoying their moment. Fruit & Vine, a trade journal for British producers, predicts a good harvest for apples, with larger individual fruits than last year’s and, likewise, plenty for cider-makers.…

Roll over SURELY Lt Percy Pilcher—recognised as England’s pioneer aviator and killed at Stanford in 1899—was the first Briton to die in an aeronautical accident, not Charles Rolls (The Legacy, August 28)? Dermot O’Keeffe, Warwickshire Mr O’Keefe is quite right, the distinction being that Rolls was the first to die in a powered aircraft. Pilcher met his end in a glider—Ed. Holding it together YOUR wish for a washing machine that matches socks into correct pairs might have been found in 1849 (Leader, August 14). I stumbled across it in 1962 at boarding school—the house matron insisted we pinned each pair of socks together with a safety pin before putting them into the laundry basket. They came back cleaned, still pinned and were readily sorted. I pin my socks together…

PART of the pleasure of gardening lies in the anticipation of future delights. At this time of year, as the garden is beginning to hunker down for autumn and before the descent into the dark days of winter, gardeners can console themselves by planting spring-flowering bulbs, envisaging the colour and cheer they will bring when the bleak days are done. The enchantment of most kinds of spring bulbs is ephemeral, sometimes lasting only a couple of weeks, but each is a waymarker that leads the garden out of the winter and towards summer. Long-awaited snowdrops are quickly joined by aconites, which give way to crocus, before waves of daffodils and hyacinths and an explosion of tulips and alliums. Each bulb bounds into flower and then falls back, withdrawing into itself…

St Mary’s Guildhall, CoventryA property of Coventry City Council ON May 20, 1340, Edward III issued a royal licence authorising ‘the men of Coventry to have a guild merchant with a fraternity of brothers and sisters’. In this licence are to be traced the origins of the great medieval Guildhall that almost miraculously survives next to the great spire and ruins of the former parish church of St Michael’s in the heart of the city. The Guildhall has recently undergone a £6 million restoration project that highlights the interest of this building and its outstanding collections. Brotherhoods that drew together individuals in a shared trade were a commonplace of late medieval urban life and Coventry’s ‘guild merchant’, dedicated to St Mary, was conventional in form. Its membership, the licence continues,…

THE map on the deeds to 400-year-old Moat House in Wattisfield, Suffolk, features a tiny italicised w, small enough that Olivia Munro and her husband, Jack, missed it when they purchased the property in May 2023. It was only when they began digging trenches in the garden to manage tree roots that a concrete pad revealed itself beneath the scuffed grass. After some determined drilling and with the aid of a powerful torch, they learnt that they were in possession of a 4ft-wide well. It was the latest surprise in the renovation of a dilapidated property documented by Mrs Munro on her Instagram page, @lifeatmoathouse. ‘It’s really bizarre, because we had no idea that there was this 70ft hole beneath where the children were playing,’ she remembers, clearly still shocked.…

Pleasing panorama To mark its 20th anniversary, Zardi & Zardi is launching six new colourways of its Chinoiserie Panorama wallpaper, £405.23 per panel, shown here in Garden Tiger (01452 814777; www.zardiandzardi.co.uk) Pop up Birdie Fortescue is among the Focus ‘house guests’. Shown here, Upholstered three-seater sofa, £4,500, Bordered Knitted throw, £155, Beehive ceramic lamp, from £195, French 1970s brass and glass tiered coffee table, £1,450, and Handwoven Rattan tray, £54 (01328 851651; www.birdiefortescue.co.uk) Wall flower Made in Stoke-on-Trent, the Blossom wall light, £449, features a fluted bone-china shade on a powder-coated ‘stem’ and back plate, from Original BTC (020–7351 2130; www.originalbtc.com) La dolce vita Inspired by Italy’s Amalfi coast, the Limone table lamp features hand-painted lemons and their pretty green leaves in an ornate pedestal bowl, £354, shown with a…

IT’S the smell that grabs you first, softly vegetal with a thick edge of char. Cutting through the fag smoke and diesel fumes, the scent of warm tortillas and faint whiff of drain, it draws one, unthinkingly, towards the elotero, selling elotes (or corn on the cob) from a stall or cart. But this is no mere butter-smeared bite, rather a baroque symphony of the hot and the cool, the sharp and sweet, the spicy and the sublime. Found all across Mexico, this humble ear, boiled as well as grilled, is transformed into pure handheld heaven. First, the base is pierced with a wooden stick, for ease of eating, before being slicked in mayonnaise, doused in lime juice, sprinkled with chilli powder and slathered in a variety of hot sauces…

ALTHOUGH in the opening lines of the Book of Genesis God separates the sky and the sea, the first colour to be called by name in the Bible is not blue, but green. Man cannot live on air and salt water, so the Almighty sent a colour clue: ‘To every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.’ Green signified life. The Greeks understood this and charmingly called pure green prasinos, ‘the colour of leeks’. The Egyptians saw it as a sacred hue, denoting rebirth and fertility. For the Roman encyclopaedist Varro in the 1st century BC, ‘green is that which has strength’. Pliny hailed the…

IT was one of the few perfect days of this summer. Agromenes was in the garden listening to the bees gorging themselves on the lavender. Of course, we should have cut it all back by then, but we hadn’t the heart—the bees were enjoying it all so much. Where I was sitting, a large bumblebee was making its portly way through the grass. It was a worthwhile reminder of a threat of which we have only recently become aware. Not only are bumblebees in danger because of habitat loss and chemical misuse, but recent research has shown that they are very much affected by the rise in temperature. Heat significantly reduces their sense of smell and, therefore, their ability to forage effectively for food. This is yet another example of…

SEPTEMBER brings a strange surge of energy, gleaming cosmos and dahlias and all those rusty, dry, hairy plants: echinacea, rudbeckia, zinnias. Although we think of hedging and topiary as a winter benefit, during this year of almost continual deluge I realise they have come to count for more: their sharp-clipped, shadow-bearing forms have come into focus, throwing shapes early, noon and night. Having relished the flossy shag of the yew’s greenest new growth in June, I dread the grand tidy up that comes with July; yet, when it is done, we smile with satisfaction at the rewarding new look. A firmer garden emerges, bronze Henry Moore curves, bold when the border plants are getting flopsome. September is rich in moonlight, when hedges and clipped forms come almost to life, moving…

THE essential requirements of a national park are that it should have great natural beauty, a high value for open-air recreation and substantial continuous extent,’ wrote Arthur Hobhouse in his criteria for national parks, which came about by law in 1949. Hobhouse, whose report followed that of civil servant and campaigner John Dower, added that at least one should be easily accessible from a city. Public demand for access to beautiful, wild places had been gathering steam for some decades—Wordsworth described the Lake District as ‘a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’—and it came to a head with the Mass Trespass on the Duke of Devonshire’s Kinder Scout in the Peak District…

AMIR HAMADAMIN should never have been on the A46 near Dyrham, Gloucestershire, in the early hours of a Sunday morning in March 2022. A taxi driver from Newport, he accepted a fare to Bath, way out of his usual orbit and, as a result, he almost certainly saved an old lady’s life. What he thought was a bonfire behind a café turned out to be the house next door on fire, the flames reaching the roof. After screeching to a halt, he had to run around the back after failing to gain entry by the front door and broke in using a discarded fence post to rescue a confused old lady, who spoke little English and refused to leave as she thought he was an intruder. She kept trying to…

ONE day in January 1938, Christopher Hussey, then Editor of COUNTRY LIFE, went to visit Birchens Spring near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, a newly built country house in the Chilterns designed for C. Rissik by John Campbell, a little-known English architect, and built by Messrs William Hartley of Slough. Writing in COUNTRY LIFE (January 29 and February 5, 1938), Hussey was greatly impressed by the originality and maturity of Birchens Spring’s design, which combines ‘something of the provincial Roman villa, something of the English manor house, and something, too, of “modern”’. Why, he wondered, had we never heard of Campbell before? The answer was simple—‘because he was not here’. At least, not that often, his life story reveals. John Archibald Campbell (1878–1948) was born in Wolverhampton, where he studied and later taught…

NEXT year will see the 37th edition of the TEFAF joint art and antiques fair at Maastricht and the 50th anniversary of Pictura, the pictures-only event from which it grew. For a while, paintings and antiques dealers had offered their wares in alternate years, but, by 1985, it had become obvious that they should combine their operations. The first discussions took place in Clemens and Neeltje van der Ven’s beautiful home in ’s-Hertogenbosch, followed by what the London Old Master dealer Johnny van Haeften describes as a ‘memorable’ lunch with Clemens at Overtons. The result was the first TEFAF with more than 90 dealers in March 1988. In 2024, 10 years after Clemens’s death, the Maastricht fair is generally considered the world’s best and has settled at about 270 exhibitors.…

Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin Sue Prideaux (Faber, £30) AS I teenager, I was transfixed by a poster I’d bought after visiting a blockbuster Gauguin exhibition sometime in the 1970s, but, other than an intense rapport with the mood and colours of that Tahitian painting of a girl on a beach, I’ve never known much about the life of Paul Gauguin. As becomes apparent, it was the most extraordinary life of intense experience. Sue Prideaux, who is drawn to such complex subjects (her biographies of Munch, Strindberg and Nietzsche are award winning), takes us on a rollercoaster ride. This is unputdownable stuff—not only for the rollicking tale that starts with his adored grandmother, the radical Flora Tristan, who called for international workers’ rights four years before her great…