Innholdsfortegnelse for March 5, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk ONE should expect a certain wildness on Dartmoor, but it must have been alarming for the walker who last week encountered a couple of wild boar, one of which charged his dog. It is not yet known whether the whiskery beasts were escapees, had migrated west naturally or had been released by an ardent rewilder. Seeing wild boar in the British countryside can be a thrilling, otherworldly experience—their stripey young (‘humbugs’) are enchanting—but although the creatures have their fans, others will testify to the mess they make of the land, their destruction of wildlife habitat (and some wildlife) and the risk of spreading disease to domestic pigs, not to mention the injury their tusks can cause…

Toad patrol YOU detail it was a ‘good week’ for ‘toads on the roads’ (Town & Country, February 19). I am the greatest supporter of saving our often-declining wildlife, but please may we have practical and economic solutions. As a recently retired architect, my clients were often charged exorbitant sums in order to save bats and newts, which sometimes put the development in jeopardy. In a locally completed road improvement, a dormouse crossing was erected in the form of a rope bridge supported by poles across the road. Why can’t large plastic pipes be laid under roads on known amphibian migratory routes? Jim Bell, Herefordshire Kinetic sculpture AS a sculptor, I perceive wind turbines as positive, modern sculptural installations. Their elegance and grace make them far less intrusive than the…

Sir Edward Herbert, later 1st Lord Herbert of Cherbury by Isaac Oliver ‘It might seem idiosyncratic for the director of a modern-art museum to select a 17th-century miniature as his favourite painting, but there is something intensely beguiling and modern about Isaac Oliver’s portrait of the poet Sir Edward Herbert reclining beside a woodland stream. Although epitomising the sensibility of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for me, it sits at the start of a pastoral tradition in British art that encompasses Samuel Palmer and modern artists such as David Jones, John Minton and John Craxton. It succinctly expresses an inner life and connection to Nature and, if we look closely, in tiny letters we see the powers of “Magica” and “Sympathia” evoked on his shield. But what also fascinates me…

ACKNOWLEDGED as the ‘prince of showmen’ by the late-19th-century world of dog fanciers and, later, as ‘the Napoleon of dog shows’, Charles Cruft (1852–1938) had a phenomenal capacity for hard graft and, importantly, a mind for marketing—he understood consumer behaviour and he knew how to weaponise ‘the hype’. Cruft eschewed the family jewellery business in 1876 to work for James Spratt, who had devised a way of turning Navy-surplus ships’ biscuits into ‘dog cakes’—a patent poised to capitalise on the burgeoning pet-food market. Spratt would become a household name and Cruft, a travelling salesman, would visit the kennels of country estates, schmoozing the wealthy and influential while simultaneously peddling the dog food. It was the Duchess of Newcastle who first suggested: ‘Why not try your hand at organising a national…

THE ultimate accolade to a bygone Cheltenham equine hero is a statue—which also provides a handy landmark at which to meet your friends in the Festival crowds. Golden Miller, whose five consecutive Cheltenham Gold Cup triumphs in the 1930s were epochal, has one, as does the great mare Dawn Run, the only winner of both the Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup, in 1984 and 1986 respectively. Arkle and Best Mate, both triple Gold Cup victors, are also immortalised in statues, but where better to raise a glass to festival champions than in the bars named after them? Cottage Rake (Bar) Great as he was, the Festival hardly existed when ‘The Miller’ (Golden Miller) was in full sweep in those pre-Second World War days. It was subsequent Irish participation that lifted…

A FEW short years ago, if you lived within spitting distance of a branch of Waitrose, the value of your house went up; nowadays, it’s all about how close you live to a Gail’s or, better still, an independent bakery. Even Greggs is in on the action and its vegan sausage roll continues to make headlines. With so much choice, it can be tricky to know where to go when in search of your favourite pastry, so we asked the best people in the know for some recommendations. Who? Emma Hughes What? A blood-orange, chocolate and coffee Danish pastry from August Bakery, SW11 Queues maketh the London It-bakery: Jolene, Toad, Fortitude and The Dusty Knuckle have all built their reputations on fearsome ones. The phenomenon has now reached Clapham in…

ST VALENTINE, patron saint of chilli sowing is—I hope—overseeing my work this mid February. Early as it may be, I find this time of year the perfect gamble on light and heat levels, giving me a long season for chillis to mature. Any earlier and they might well fail; any later and the summer might run out of gas before my fruit ripen. For too long, I’ve grown the same old varieties, presiding over a soft decline in rewards. It feels as if it’s been a decade since I last enjoyed a hot surprise in the Russian roulette of Padron peppers, for example. Although the unpredictable UK growing season—with its impact on ripening—doesn’t help, I can’t help think that it’s time to change things up. Chillis are best thought of…

Small, but mighty To avoid the mass-market cruise-ship circuit means downsizing and going remote—which is exactly what these new small ships and off-the-beaten track itineraries have in common. Mid 2025, Abercrombie & Kent will launch the 12-cabin Pure Amazon in northern Peru’s vast Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve (the country’s largest protected area, it’s about the size of Wales). Activities include skiff excursions, jungle walks, kayaking, bird spotting and visits to riverside local villages (www.abercrombiekent.com). The riverboat is available for private charter, too, as is Rascal Voyages’s fleet, which has just added Wakatobi National Park, in south-east Sulawesi, to its roster of destinations (future by-the-cabin journeys include September 14–21, 2026). Snorkelling, diving—it’s in the Coral Triangle that has the highest coral diversity in the world—and meeting the nomadic, freediving Bajo people are…

LAST month, COUNTRY LIFE hosted a dinner at New York’s James Beard Foundation in partnership with The Beaumont Mayfair. The reason? To celebrate all things British food and culture, not to mention Britain itself and the magazine’s long-standing relationship with the US. Before supper—Orkney scallops and venison, masterfully cooked by The Beaumont’s executive chef, Brendan Fyldes—guests were entertained by a lively panel discussion chaired by CEO of Perowne International Jules Perowne, who appeared on the Frontispiece on October 12, 2022. Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges, The Beaumont CEO Stuart Procter and food writer, author and COUNTRY LIFE contributor Tom Parker Bowles all took part. Fittingly, James Beard (1903–85) pioneered television cooking shows and mentored generations of chefs. His home in Greenwich Village is now the heart of the foundation that was set…

POLICY for the countryside seems a no-go area for most of the media. That perhaps explains why there was so little coverage of the rural impact of last week’s announcements from the Climate Change Committee (CCC). Its Seventh Carbon Budget charts the route by which the UK will reach its legally binding goal of net zero by 2050. All six of the previous five-year budgets have been agreed by Parliament and, so far, the targets set have been made. The Confederation of British Industry recently produced a well-researched report that shows it is this commitment to net zero that is a success story for British industry; it calls it ‘a powerhouse of job creation and economic expansion with 10.1% growth in the total economic value supported by the net-zero economy…

WHAT is the countryside for? Right now, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s only there to meet everyone’s needs, everywhere. Growing more food, planting more trees, restoring ‘Nature’, providing access to green spaces, storing water, managing flood risk, reducing the carbon footprint and building houses, new transport links and energy projects, from solar and wind farms to power lines—all these are high on the Government’s agenda. The need for them all seems overwhelming, especially when there’s no way of working out what should go where, setting priorities or reconciling conflicts. The problem is land. To coin a phrase, they just ain’t making it any more. When the Land Use Framework was launched, by Defra Secretary Steve Reed on January 31, people in attendance said: ‘Hurrah!’ It’s an idea whose time…

‘The poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shadeAnd the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives’William Cowper, from ‘The Poplar Field’ (1784) THE leaning trunk of a native black poplar (Populus nigra subsp. betulifolia) cuts a lonely silhouette against the winter skyline. Sometimes known as ‘ballerina poplars’ for their acrobatically angled limbs, these towering trees were once common throughout the country and are immortalised in Constable’s The Hay Wain. Their distinctive shape was used to delineate field and boundary markers, but their natural home is on floodplains and alongside rivers, where they have a curious habit of bending over like Narcissus to gaze into the water. Today, apart from a few strong-holds in Shropshire, Cheshire,…

Pick of the crop Pot fillers Pick of the crop Stock pots…

What the Dickens ON June 9, 1925, No 48, Doughty Street, London WC1, opened as a museum for the first time. The Bloomsbury property was home to Charles Dickens from March 1837 until December 1839 and is his only surviving London house. It was here that he completed The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), wrote Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) and worked on Barnaby Rudge (1840–41). To mark the centenary, a special exhibition of 100 treasures, including recent acquisitions that have never before been displayed, will celebrate the life and celebrated work of the author, as well as the museum’s role in preserving his legacy. There are unseen manuscripts and rare first editions, handwritten letters, original portraits and photographs to pore over, as well as personal items such as Dickens’s…

WHEN should I prune my roses? The answer depends on when you feel like it, when it suits the roses and, indeed, why you want to prune them in the first place. Pruning shrubs—and that includes roses—is not compulsory. We’ve all seen gardens where no one has done any pruning for years and yet the bushes never fail to produce a copious crop of roses. The same is true of camellias, magnolias, buddlejas or any other shrub we grow for its flowers. Pruning, however, may improve the quality or quantity of what they offer us. Roses are shrubs and the best time to prune all shrubs is immediately after they bloom. Take rambler roses, all those once-flowering varieties such as ‘American Pillar’ and ‘Dorothy Perkins’. When their petals fall at…

AS the ship sets sail out of the port of Nice and a lounge singer sang French standards on the deck under a billowing tricolore flag, a member of staff explained to me that their company, Ponant, does not talk about ‘cruising’. It talks about ‘travel’. We are not, this cruise company would have us believe, on a cruise. Ponant knows that ‘cruise’ can be a dirty word. It evokes gigantic, impersonal ships, tacky entertainment, hordes of tourists moving cattle-like through port towns, buffet plates and organised fun, places where guest numbers run into their thousands. Fine, if that is your bag, but that is not the bag of the people targeted by Le Ponant, the ship on which I am about to spend three days sailing around the South…

IN contemplating the imminent approach of a rather large and unwanted birthday, I keep reminding myself of the time when birthdays were exciting: those landmark moments of becoming a teenager or an adult, of being allowed to drive, to vote or to buy a drink in a pub. Or, further back still, of turning 10; ‘double figs’ as my mother-in-law called it. At some point in their early years, I made a rash deal with my three children that for their 10th birthdays they could choose an overseas trip with only me—a proposition that, I suspected, might not hold quite the same appeal for their later, bigger birthdays, when they would probably groan with embarrassment at the idea of having to holiday alone with their mother. First up was my…

SOME time in the early 1490s, a fight broke out in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, Italy, among a group of teenage boys who were copying the famous frescos by Masaccio as part of their training to be artists. One had gone too far with his mocking banter about the others’ abilities and provoked an older boy to punch him in the face, breaking his nose. It was the most famous punch in the history of art. The younger boy was Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and his assailant was Pietro Torrigiani (who later worked in England). When describing the incident to another Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, Torrigiani laughed that he had felt Michelangelo’s ‘bone and cartilage crush like a biscuit. So that fellow will carry my signature…

Restoration House, Rochester, KentThe home of Robert Tucker and Jonathan Wilmot EARLY on May 29, 1660, ‘betwixt four and five in the morning, the militia forces of Kent lining the ways, and maidens strewing herbs and flowers, and the several towns hanging out white sheets’, Charles II set out in triumph from Rochester to London on the final leg of his journey from Continental exile to Restoration. It was his 30th birthday. According to the published account in the newspaper Mercurius Publicus, he had dined and lodged the previous night with his two brothers, the Dukes of York and Gloucester, in the house of a senior officer in the New Model Army, Col Robert Gibbon. The building, known after this event since at least the early 19th century as Restoration…

Shop of the month Pockets, No 367, Mentmore Terrace, E8 FROM a takeaway shopfront in a converted railway arch in Hackney, Pockets sells one item: a cantaloupe-sized falafel pitta. The assembly begins with a pitta pocket, baked that morning and hotted up in a steamer, then layered with houmous, cabbage salad, zhoug, tahini, ambra, just-fried falafel, a pickled chilli, a fried potato slice and a sprinkling of fresh parsley. You eat it with your hands, ideally on a bench in London Fields, a few minutes away on foot. ‘We decided to focus on doing only one thing so we could do it really well,’ explains Itamar Grinberg, who co-founded Pockets in late 2020, initially as a food stall in nearby Netil Market. ‘Falafel is a widely beloved street food that…

THE trouble with forsythias is that we take them for granted. They are ubiquitous at this time of the year, flaunting their cheerful yellow colour in suburban parks and gardens from Penzance to Thurso. From a distance, they all look very similar, apart from the dwarf cultivars that too few of us grow. Large or small, forsythias make invaluable companions for garden daffodils, although, all too often, one sees them nudging up incongruously to pinky-purple flowering currants. Forsythias are members of the olive family, the Oleaceae, as are ash trees, lilacs, jasmines, privets and olive trees themselves. It is difficult to imagine what all these genera may have in common, although botanists tell us that one distinctive feature is that they have only two stamens. Forsythias have a further peculiarity,…

Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea Matt Ridley (Fourth Estate, £25) IT is neither a sneeze nor a hiss, neither a squawk nor a screech, but somewhere in between… Then, more softly but continuously, a new sound begins: “Hoo-doodle-woo-doodle-WOO-hoo”… somewhere between humming and crooning, bubbling and cooing… It’s the mating call: “Please God, bring me a mating opportunity today!”… They expand the bright red, swollen, fleshy combs over their eyes, covered with hundreds of tiny tentacles like vermillion sea anemones.’ The black-grouse lek, as described here by Matt Ridley in his fascinating new book, is one of Nature’s most captivating spectacles. It was my good fortune to be taken to see one by Viscount Ridley several years ago—and here I should declare an interest—an…

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