Innholdsfortegnelse for March 12, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IN 1986, Alvilde Lees-Milne wrote The Englishman’s Room, featuring photographs by Derry Moore of various artistic, literary and theatrical luminaries of the day, including Hardy Amies, Teddy Millington-Drake and Gavin Stamp. Four decades later, the spaces in which they posed look as freshly relevant to the early 21st century as they did to the late 20th. Back then, tastes in interior design evolved at a more glacial pace than they do now. Choices of furniture, fabric and paint colours were much more limited; there were no websites, no Instagram or Pinterest flooded with images and fewer than half a dozen interiors magazines, compared with well over 20 today. With this proliferation of ever-evolving choice there emerged…

International relations IT is a sad and shameful time to be an American. I watched in disbelief as Donald Trump and J. D. Vance berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House. I do not believe that the vast majority of Americans side with President Trump in his lack of support for the Ukrainian people and their President. On May 8, the 80th anniversary of VE Day, I, together with my wife and another couple, are scheduled to land in London. Previously, I was excited to be in England for such a momentous celebration. Now, I’m feeling a sense of embarrassment to be there following the debacle in Washington DC. Jack Martin, by email Worth their weight DURING my 10-year tenure as head teacher at Kilgraston School…

THE name Jacqueline du Pré is synonymous with the cello, yet her performing career—an intense burst of brilliance—was over by the time she was 28, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). Du Pré, who died aged 42 in 1987, would have been 80 on January 26 this year. ‘I am quite breathless when I think about her and it’s hard not to become emotional,’ said the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie in Radio 4’s Great Lives. ‘The music belonged to her, the cello belonged to her and there was no holding back.’ Aged four, du Pré heard the cello being played on Children’s Hour and asked her mother for one. She left school at 15 and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with the distinguished cellist…

AS part of the research for her book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (2004), Kate Fox set herself the unenviable task of deliberately bumping into unsuspecting members of the public to compare their reactions. ‘The English lived up to their reputation,’ she reports. ‘About 80% of my victims said “sorry” when I lurched into them, although the collisions were clearly my fault.’ We are a nation of over-apologisers—or, as Max Davidson writes in Sorry: The Hardest Word and How to Use It (2010): ‘If there were Olympic medals for saying sorry, we English would win gold, silver and bronze.’ We apologise when we make a request or a complaint, when something is spoken too softly for us to hear and even—as we’ve seen—when something unfortunate happens…

THE enduring appeal of the design of architecture, interiors, gardens and landscapes—as well as the skills that bring the ideas to life—is that it constantly evolves as new ideas meet the changing demands of successive generations. With this evolution comes fresh talent, of which we have plenty in Britain. A measure of this is the 14 new names on the 2025 COUNTRY LIFE Top 100 list. Although our selection can never be definitive, it can celebrate those with a track record of excellence, from businesses built up over generations to those that are a few years old. Together, this cohort, many of whom are often featured in these pages, is building on Britain’s impressive heritage and bringing to their craft a spirit of innovation and professionalism that is a vital…

PRIMULAS are amazing. No genus of ornamental plants has so many species of such diverse origins. Consider tiny Primula egaliksensis. It lives in soggy hollows above the Arctic permafrost. Then, ponder P. verticillata, which is a yellow giant at home on mountainous cliffs in Saudi Arabia. Such different habitats, such different plants, but both of them primulas. There are more than 500 Primula species, but only four are native to the British Isles—primroses, cowslips, oxlips and P. scotica, our own bird’s-eye primula, endemic to the far north of Scotland. Mainland Europe has another 29 species, most of them true Alpines. But it is to eastern Asia that we must look for the most spectacular garden plants—the candelabra primulas, whose flowers are tiered up around a slender stem, whorl after whorl,…

AS March dawns and the sun returns, even our most urban friends recognise how deeply the weather affects us all. This year, when the short, dark days have been particularly grey and miserable, the longing for even a glimpse of the sun has been overwhelming. Despite the snowdrops, aconites and primroses and the green shoots of the daffodils to come, spring has seemed a very long way off. Then came the relief of the past fortnight. It was as if the planet had adjusted to the late Easter and held back the promise of better weather until the beginning of Lent. After all, the peculiarly English word ‘Lent’ comes from our own local word for ‘lengthening days’. Our dependence on the weather is not only about our mood, however. The…

‘The ducks grow wildAnd from the muddy pond fly up and wheelA circle round the village and soon, tiredPlunge in the pond again’John Clare, from ‘Signs of Winter’ (1820) DUCK ponds, together with village greens, pubs, churches and red telephone boxes, are one of the quintessential elements of the picture-postcard English village. Visited by generations of children and waterfowl, their mirrored calm belies a noisy past when they were an indispensable part of daily life. Typically situated near the centre of a village, ponds are usually found on common land where they were a watering hole for cattle grazing on the green, as well as the itinerant drovers on the way to market. During the Middle Ages, some village ponds were used for pisciculture and nearly all would have seen…

I ORDERED a box of Seville oranges from Antonio Bottiglieri, a member of the Frutti del Sole cooperative in Calabria, Italy. The fruit was available when I contacted him late last year—the season runs from November to March—but I told Signor Bottiglieri I didn’t want it until January when Christmas and New Year was over and I could make marmalade in peace. That meant my oranges stayed on the tree until the day before our agreed shipping date and arrived on my doorstep in Herefordshire two or three days later. This suited me—I knew they would be organic, unwaxed and box fresh—and it suited Signor Bottiglieri, who could plan his picking and packing schedule. As I did, his customers place orders via the online platform CrowdFarming (www.crowdfarming.com), which links consumers…

ONE morning, two men sat, tired yet satisfied, at the top of a steep climb. They surveyed the landscape and nibbled on Kendal Mint Cake. It is a scene that has been played out on hilltops across the world over the past 150 years—but here, the two eating the confectionery were Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, perched on the summit of Mount Everest. That Kendal Mint Cake—in this case, the brown variety made by Romney’s—should have become the first sweet to reach the top of the world’s highest peak was not so surprising. After all, the Lakeland treat had been carried on the first European expedition to attempt the climb in 1922, on that occasion produced by Wiper’s. The confectionery’s ascent to becoming the world’s first energy bar began…

IN 1892, an exhibition in Berlin, Germany, was shut down in outrage, causing instant notoriety for the 28-year-old artist whose work was on show: Edvard Munch. ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to me,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘a better advertisement I couldn’t have wished for.’ German audiences didn’t know what to make of the Norwegian’s wild, hallucinatory paintings that expressed intense emotions. ‘Art is in danger!’ headlined the Frankfurter Zeitung: only a ‘demented character’ could have painted such ‘poison’. ‘Die Affaire Munch’ all but canonised the Nordic painter as a pioneer of Modernism. He has been subsequently revered by Symbolists and Surrealists, Expressionists and neo-Expressionists, pop artists and situationists and on into the present day, when Peter Doig considers him a major inspiration and the…

Allerton Castle, North Yorkshire A property of the Gerald Arthur Rolph Foundation for Historic Preservation and Education IN the early 1980s, a businessman from Florida, Gerald Rolph, was in search of a castle in Ireland to use as a summer house. After a fruitless search of many months, he was persuaded to visit Allerton in North Yorkshire in October 1983. The house—in its present form largely rebuilt from 1848—had been in institutional use for the best part of 20 years and was in urgent need of far-reaching repair. Most people would have been intimidated, but Dr Rolph was delighted by the building, which he offered to buy the very next day, and determined to restore ‘as part of English and world heritage’. Over the following years, the roof of the…

IF you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise if you sit on one of those comfortable-looking mounds on the south-facing edge of a sunlit glade. It seems an ideal place for you and your teddy bears to picnic. However, the spot is already taken. Compounded of leaf litter, pine needles and forest debris, these mounds are multistorey homes to wood ants. The largest heap may rise 6ft in height and contain interconnected colonies seething with as many as half a million workers and 100 queens. Southern or red wood ants are the largest of the 51 native ant species in Britain, workers measuring one-third of an inch and the queens almost half an inch. They are inclined to bite and spray acid to protect…

Spring: The Story of a Season Michael Morpurgo (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) Spring is the Only Season: How it Works, What it Does and Why it Matters Simon Barnes (Bloomsbury, £18.99) MORE than 50 years ago, Michael and Clare Morpurgo bought a farm cottage where there had once been one front door for the humans and another for the pigs. The celebrated children’s author and his family may not have co-habited with livestock on quite the same levels of intimacy, but, nevertheless, the couple so loved their interactions with Nature that they sought to share them with as many as they could accommodate, especially schoolchildren. To date, their charity has enabled more than 100,000 young people to experience the delights of land-based living. Here, the former Children’s Laureate takes us…

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