Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IF we think about the air around us at all these days, it is usually in the context of current environmental woes, such as the parts per million of carbon dioxide that are driving climate change or the particulates from heavy traffic that affect residents of some of our busiest cities. Although we might seldom think about the atmosphere or ever actually see it, it is the precondition for all of our lives. Every schoolchild learns that it bears the oxygen essential to respiration of almost every kind of terrestrial organism, from bacteria to giant sequoias. We might acknowledge the facts, but we tend to give much of the credit for this to photosynthesis in trees,…

Was it five years ago already? THE pandemic was a period we’re told we’d all rather forget. Yet half a decade after the end of the first lockdown (July 2020), many look back on those eerie times with an odd sense of nostalgia. For those living in the countryside, especially, quarantine allowed us to rekindle the pastoral idyll and rediscover the quiet joys of a smaller, homelier life before a summer of staycations. Although the sight of a deserted Trafalgar Square might have inspired a kind of post-apocalyptic malaise, that of empty rolling hills under cloudless skies felt—and still feels—irresistibly peaceful. In the current political climate, I daresay it sounds rather inviting. Still, as partygoers journey home from Glastonbury this week, a sense that ‘people need people’—pervasive by the end…

ON January 11, 1841, James Clark Ross and his expeditionary team saw land ‘of so extensive a coastline and attaining such an altitude as to justify the appellation of a Great New Southern Continent’. The order to command an expedition for ‘magnetic research and geographical study’ in the Southern Hemisphere had come in 1839, by which time Ross was considered the most experienced (and handsome) polar officer in the world. Two warships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were assigned, proving useful when, blocked by a pack edge, Ross used a ship to ram the ice until it gave way, allowing passage to unexplored waters. He sailed what became the Ross Sea, discovered the Transantarctic Mountains, volcanoes, later named Mount Erebus and Mount Terror after each ship, and islands, including Franklin…

EAGLES may have a near-monopoly in raw power and hunting ospreys own the franchise for pure drama, but no other flying bird of prey possesses the languid eloquence of the red kite (Milvus milvus). No matter the circumstances, the bird seems unable to hurry. Its wings, proportionate to its weight, are the longest of any British raptor and the full span rises and falls with a slow, measured, deeply rhythmic beat. The forked tail is equally long—even longer by itself, in fact, than most male sparrowhawks. All these parts combine in perfect harmony to create the bird’s aerial impression of leisured grace. At one time, the only part of Britain where you could enjoy this spectacle was central Wales, an area that eventually advertised itself as ‘kite country’. It still…

Shop of the month Bennison Fabrics, No 16, Holbein Place, SW1 THE Bennison storeroom, which stretches across two mews houses south of Sloane Square, still has the remnants of stables protruding from the back wall. Behind the grilles, rolls of hand-printed new cloth are organised from floor to ceiling; original antique specimens, many from the 18th and 19th centuries, are folded into cubbies nearby. A more refined showroom is around the corner at No 16, Holbein Place. ‘People come in and we chat,’ says Louise Richards, head of sales for the UK and Europe. ‘We often start with some-thing quite basic, such as their favourite colour, and we go from there.’ Bennison is named for the renowned antiques dealer Geoffrey Bennison, who began reprinting fabrics he discovered in the course…

EGYPTIAN walking onions sound almost too good to be true: from one plant, four harvests and, if you do it properly, you can pick them year after year after year. You may be wondering about their name. Walking onions are thought to originate from India and Pakistan, where they’ve been grown for more than 5,000 years. It was, however, the Egyptians who really adopted them, believing that their smell would protect and keep diseases at bay. They thought that these onions had the power to awaken the dead and they are even featured in tomb paintings from as far back as 3000BC. What of the ‘walking’ part of their name? Read on. Every part of an Egyptian walking onion is edible and—being so robust and trouble free—success is largely about…

IT was a beautiful, sunny day in late April when I set off for the Hermitage of St Anthony, in the Spanish Pyrenees, following not one of the two well-marked trails from town, but the detailed walking notes I had been given, along a less-trodden path. Up I climbed, along a narrow, stony track, the rush of the El Freser river below me growing ever fainter, the drop ever more vertiginous and confidence in my map-reading fast dwindling. I sniffed the air and inhaled a wonderful perfume of pine mixed with musty earth. ‘Rain,’ I thought… and then the heavens opened. With considerable relief, I reached a mountain road, where two cars passed me, wind-screen wipers at a metronomic 120 ticks-per-minute, kindly offering lifts. ‘Persevere,’ I told myself, ‘how much…

THE verdant scene in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), art’s best-known evocation of the delights of picnicking, contrasts with the smothering crowds at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. A naked woman—perhaps fresh from a dip in the river—lounges in a glade with two fully dressed men, as another woman, wrapped in diaphanous cloth, bathes in the background and an upset food basket in the foreground hints at moral transgression. The shock value of this scenario—a female nude was perfectly acceptable in mythological scenes, yet scandalous in a modern context, especially when her nakedness was underscored by clothed men—together with the picture’s monumental proportions (it measures nearly 82in by 104in), made it an instant talking point. The Foursome, Manet’s nickname for his painting, would go on to inspire Claude Monet’s…

Getting away with murder ICAN offer a witness account of the decline of the small-bird population (Town & Country, June 4). Having moved from an old property surrounded by woodland to a semi-rural new-build, I immediately set about planting trees, shrubs, enticing plants and nesting boxes. For four years, I was delighted to welcome nesting blue tits, pied wagtails, a robin and a blackbird. Then the magpies rolled up. They stalked the parent birds, as many as eight at a time cackling sentinel on the walls and fence. Fledged babies were slaughtered. Although one can admire the magpies’ intelligence and smart dress code, as if for an Agatha Christie dining-room scene, to quote Poirot: ‘I do not approve of murder.’ Vivien Finch, Derbyshire Memorable shots YOUR feature on duels (‘En…

La Pietà by Michelangelo ‘In 2005, I visited the Vatican and saw La Madonna della Pietà in person. It was breathtaking, hypnotic, tortured, but somehow peaceful and accepting of the immense sorrow of loss. And ultimately alive. I could swear the draping wrapping the Virgin Mary moved–infinitely delicate cloth, not stone surely. Veins and muscle so real they defied belief. The complexity of emotions that La Pietà provoked 20 years ago still stirs in me. Michelangelo carved it out of a single piece of marble. I suppose I could add panic to this multitude of emotions. That’s what a common mortal like me would be feeling from the first to the last stroke of the chisel. It is truly otherworldly’ Charlotte Mullins comments on La Pietà IN the recent Vatican…

IF you want to find a heartening and positive story about Nature, look to your local churchyard. There, between the lychgate and the porch, a quiet revolution is going on. The seeds of this ferment can be found, literally, among the headstones, where ancient turf has lain undisturbed for centuries. Untouched by agricultural improvements, such as ploughing, pesticides and fertilisers, the ground may hold a genetic seedbank dating back 800 years. There is a widespread and growing movement to understand, appreciate and preserve churchyards as valuable and biodiverse patches of land where, against the general run of things, many plants and creatures are thriving. ‘Churchyards are a Noah’s Ark of species,’ declares Harriet Carty, director of Caring for God’s Acre, a conservation charity for burial grounds. ‘As the wider countryside…

THE renovation of this Grade II-listed property involved close collaboration with the client, who, having grown up there, already knew which aspects worked well and which needed revising. The house is part of a crescent, so one of the most challenging aspects of this project was its unusual footprint: the curved plot means it is wider at the rear than at the front. As a result, a series of adjustments was made, including an L-shaped sofa built bespoke on site to cater for the dimensions of the sitting room. In the next-door kitchen, the island was configured to ensure ease of circulation for the young family. To create a good-sized dining space, the old television room was combined with the kitchen in the most transformative architectural intervention of the whole…

LAST month saw Yinka Ilori unveil his latest public artwork: a collection of discarded relics excavated from the banks of the Thames. You won’t find 100 Found Objects in London’s Soho or St James’s, the W1 neighbourhoods that have long had a chokehold on contemporary art, nor in one of the sleek, cutting-edge galleries near Old Street, EC2. No: Ilori’s work is at the heart of a new riverside development in a London postcode that’s long been synonymous with the red-trouser brigade. It is in Fulham, SW6, that the man behind the Colour Palace at Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21—who’s staged installations at Piccadilly Circus, designed bespoke exteriors for McLaren supercars and whose work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain—is beginning his next chapter. The site of 100…

TWICE in the past year I have found myself on Hergest Ridge atop a panoramic stretch of Offa’s Dyke where England rolls scenically into Wales. Crowning the ridge is a circle of nine monkey puzzle trees, planted there in the 1990s by Richard Banks. Dick, as he was known—part of the long line of Banks plantsmen and gardeners who continue to oversee the wonderful gardens at nearby Hergest Croft—had realised on a trip to Chile that monkey puzzles thrive in high, windswept places, so he thought he would plant a few back home. These days, some 30 years on, the trees are 60ft high and have become a distinguishing landmark for the pretty Herefordshire town of Kington. My first trip to the monkey puzzles was on foot with a group…

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Quiz of the week 1) Name the silk-producing organs in a spider’s abdomen 2) Which fruit gave its name to The Beatles’s record label? 3) Bucephalus was the charger of which great leader? 4) Name the Englishman who translated the Bible into English? 5) Delia Smith is associated with which football club? Riddle me this I’m fuzzy and round and bounce on the ground. I can be served, but not eaten. What am I? 1) Spinnerets 2) Apple 3) Alexander the Great 4) William Tyndale 5) Norwich City. Riddle me this: A tennis ball Time to buy On this day… July 2, 2005 Broadcaster Jonathan Ross welcomed the world to the Live 8 concert in London’s Hyde Park. Organised by singer-songwriter and political activist Bob Geldof (left), Live 8 was…

ON the farm, the heritage wheat is coming on remarkably well. The rain arrived just in time and the hot weather since seems to have suited it. We can now see the field of wheat as our grandfathers knew it—tall and constantly moving with every little breeze. This is a field that makes it much easier to understand those words from that favourite Victorian hymn ‘Fair waved the golden corn…’. Modern wheat doesn’t wave like this heritage crop. It’s much shorter and thicker. We easily forget how much has changed in our fields through modern breeding techniques. They have made an enormous difference to almost everything we grow. This old crop will take longer to ripen than new strains and stands so tall that it’s constantly at the mercy of…

THE UK’s only triangular lido is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, still very much in use. Opened in May 1935, Jubilee Pool (Fig 5) at Penzance in Cornwall was named to mark the 25th year of George V’s reign. It was the culmination of a slum clearance and town-improvement programme, the like of which had never been seen in the ancient Cornish borough and the mayor looked forward to it being a ‘source of health, strength and pleasure’ for locals and visitors alike. Swimming saw a huge surge in popularity between the wars as leisure and physical fitness became social and economic priorities. This was the era when sunbathing became fashionable, hiking in the fresh air became a pastime and the Youth Hostels Association was founded. Open-air pools sprang…

WHEN news broke that the Sycamore Gap tree, scenically located in a dip in the Northumberland stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, had been felled by a couple of chainsaw-wielding hoodlums in 2023, reactions ranged from outright anger to puzzled dismay. Was there ever a more pointless act of environmental vandalism? At least the discovery of young shoots sprouting from the base last summer was a reminder of Nature’s ability slowly to heal itself. Given the sycamore had been reduced to a low stump, it doesn’t qualify as a ‘phoenix tree’ as yet; but, in decades to come, it may well do so. Generally, however, we apply the term phoenix tree to specimens that were blown down in a storm and written off as dead, but which recovered to take on the…

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By all means, party, but protect our parks IT’S shaping up to be a big summer for live music in the capital. June saw Lido Festival take over Victoria Park, as well as concerts by Dua Lipa and Beyoncé. This month, Oasis, Diana Ross and Billie Eilish take to stages across town, before festivals such as British Summer Time and All Points East unfold in Hyde Park and Victoria Park. Classical-music lovers flock to Kenwood and Hyde Park, too. London’s parks have, indeed, become favourite sites for live music. No fewer than four festivals took place at Brockwell Park in May, prompting a legal challenge from frustrated locals, who alleged the events were spoiling things for residents. Living in a city occasionally means having to put up with noise and…

The garden of Knowle House, East Sussex GARDEN restorations often reveal unexpected stories and surprises. This has certainly been the case for Mr and Mrs Mansfield at Knowle House, just outside a picturesque village in East Sussex, who acquired most of the house in 2017 and immediately began to learn about Knowle’s complicated, but intriguing past. During their painstaking and exemplary work—in house and garden—they have found family stories that bring to life the past of their home. Perhaps most relevant for this article, they discovered the involvement of a distinguished, but little-known garden designer and plantsman of the mid 20th century, George Dillistone. He is so little known, indeed, that he does not even feature in British Gardeners, a Biographical Dictionary, compiled by Miles Hadfield and others in 1980.…

No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One Andrew Lambert (Yale, £25) When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,As every child can tell,The House of Peers, throughout the war,Did nothing in particular,And did it very well… LORD MOUNTARARAT was not entirely correct in his paean to fellow peers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Lord Liverpool was secretary for war and then prime minister from 1809. More importantly, argues Andrew Lambert, in the decade after Waterloo, Liverpool, with the Duke of Wellington and the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh (Irish peer), put in place the elements of a grand strategy that prevented any recurrence of Napoleon-like imperialism disturbing the peace. ‘History should be more than an explanation of what happened, and why’ In order to leave ‘Global Britain’ free to…