Innholdsfortegnelse for January 21, 2026 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IN the stripped-back, leafless January landscape—the sort that might inspire a snow-flecked Ravilious wood engraving—things normally overlooked come into sharp focus. Nothing enhances a bare skyline more than trees, their branches silhouetted by the rising sun or showing black against a leaden sky; oaks with their improbably heavy limbs; the twiggy ash pocked with rooks’ nests and, in the growing dusk, the figures of blasted trunks bent under the weight of their ivy greatcoats. Capability Brown knew a trick or two when it came to manipulating landscapes. He planted simple groups of trees to draw attention to a view. He also cut down woodland to create clearings and so transformed a rural muddle into pleasing artifice.…

Say ‘I do’ to winter nuptials NAME one person whose summer wardrobe is better than their winter one. Go on, it’ll be fun. Harder than it sounds, isn’t it? Now, try the same exercise with something else. Food: better in winter. Fireplaces: better in winter. Spooning: better in winter. Let us consider, then, the virtues of the winter wedding, with its faint promise of snow and the gumption required to swan through it in heels. I’m far from the only person with a soft spot for the genre: 20% of British weddings now take place in the colder months, and that figure is growing. ‘We’ve seen a notable spike in the number of winter weddings this past year,’ says Pink Squire, a publicist and co-founder of a wedding-planning firm with…

LONG before anyone dreamt up the slogan No Mow May, the Irish-born Victorian gardener, writer and publisher William Robinson was urging gardeners to let the grass grow. In The Wild Garden Or Our Groves and Gardens made Beautiful by the Naturalisation of the Hardy Exotic (1870), he declared that ‘mowing the grass once a fortnight in pleasure grounds, as now practised, is a great and costly mistake’. It was far better to mimic Nature and plant things where they would be happy and become naturalised: turkscap lilies along a woodland walk, wild roses up old trees, little alpines in rocky ruins, herbaceous peonies in long grass. If this sounds thoroughly modern, that is because we have come full circle and are rediscovering what Robinson knew more than 150 years ago.…

FARMING life is pretty rough on the wild Atlantic fringe. For ancient Celtic people, it made perfect sense to move around during the course of the year, following the flush of summer grass into the hills, then retreating to milder, coastal grazing for the winter. This seasonal process of transhumance used to be common throughout western Europe, but, faced with modern pressures, most of these systems have fallen apart over the past 100 years. In terms of modern agriculture, many of the old traditions around cattle management and summer grazing are so far lost in the mists of time that they almost feel like a dream nowadays. Visiting Co Clare in 2023 with fellow farmer Richard Lockett, we weren’t prepared for the level of interest and enthusiasm around cattle cultures…

IN Ancient China, rice was not only eaten, but also mixed with sand, water and limestone. ‘The stickiness of rice holds the Great Wall together,’ writes Jonathan Drori, whose latest book, The Stuff That Stuff Is Made Of, shines the spotlight on 30 different plants that have had a profound, and often surprising, impact on human existence. A board member of both the Oxford and Cambridge Botanic Gardens, Prof Drori’s own interest in plants began in childhood. ‘I grew up in Kew,’ he explains. ‘My father had trained as a botanist before becoming an engineer and my mother was fascinated by plants, too—especially by the things she could make from them. ‘Our regular visits to Kew Gardens were enlivened by my parents’ stories about the plants; we’d eat bits of…

Original thinking THANK you so much for the inspiring profile of Portmeirion (‘A peculiar genius’, January 7). I well recall exploring its cliff walks and quirky buildings as a child in the 1960s, when every new vista and unexpected juxtaposition elicited not only smiles, but delighted laughter—surely as Sir Clough Williams-Ellis intended. It would have been nice to have a photograph of him in his bright yellow stockings and plus-fours (above) to grace your article. He was a true one-off, exactly like hiscreation. Dr Mark Bellis, Essex Core values FOLLOWING your piece on the history of the Bramley apple (Town & Country Notebook, December 31, 2025), your readers might be interested to learn that Southwell Minster has a beautiful window in the North Transept dedicated to the fruit (right), installed…

The Family of Henry VIII, British school ‘This is a very famous portrait of Henry VIII: it shows him sitting next to Jane Seymour, by then dead many years–almost a decade–with an arm around his son, Edward, his two daughters on either side and, beyond them, glimpses of the Great Garden of Whitehall with the King’s heraldic beasts mounted on columns. We can also see some royal servants. The man on the right is the King’s fool, Will Somers, and on the other side is Princess Mary’s resident fool–a woman–and that’s a unique sighting, as she’s hardly ever mentioned in history. So, in the background you have these extraordinary characters, then in the foreground the Royal Family. The portrait is thought to have been painted at the time when Henry…

EACH month, 20 tons of raw clay (much of it from a pit seven miles away) is delivered to Whichford Pottery near Shipston-on-Stour in Warwickshire. Before it can be thrown onto a wheel, the clay will be put through an obstacle course of processes to ensure the resulting terracotta flowerpots will be of the right porosity for the plants and, crucially, that they will be frost proof. It’s this attention to detail that has made Whichford—founded in 1976 by Jim Keeling, together with his wife, Dominique—the only surviving pottery in the country producing hand-thrown flowerpots at scale. Whichford, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, will be a familiar name to many gardeners who return again and again to buy its pot and planters: once you have noticed the texture…

Kendra Wilson Benton End, Suffolk Benton irises, bred by the artist Sir Cedric Morris in the mid 20th century, have been the height of chic for the past decade and, from this summer, they will be given context with the restoration of Morris’s garden at Benton End in Suffolk. When the 16th-century house was being run as an art school, the informal garden was filled with the many plants (as well as irises) that Morris collected from his travels, and bred with an artist’s eye. Miraculously, in 2021, the Garden Museum was given Benton End as a donation. Morris’s floral paintings have offered the most clues about what grew there and this is what I’m excited about—seeing a contemporary invocation of a place that was ahead of its time. Plus,…

THE wonderful tawny probably supplies our default image of all British owls. It is our most abundant and widespread species, with only the mountainous Scottish Highlands and the largely treeless Hebrides beyond the bird’s limits. Yet we must also acknowledge tawny owls are in decline; their redesignation as an amber-listed species due to a 10% contraction in range. Britain has become a rather impoverished place for this family of owls; one factor might be the overlooked matter of light pollution. Another concern for several species is secondary poisoning from rodenticides. With a current British total of 50,000 pairs, the tawny is still the one owl that many of us are likely to have seen—perhaps as a silhouette perched momentarily on a rooftop or a broad-winged, brown shape floating silently through…

Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness Megan Eaves-Egenes (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) THE author chooses ‘nyctophobia’ as a noun for the human fear of the dark. She could equally have picked achluophobia, lygophobia, myctophobia or scotophobia. The richness of the lexicon is a perverse acknowledgement of our night dread. It’s an evolutionary thing, Homo sapiens’s scarediness of the hours ’twixt dusk and dawn. Long ago, out on the African savannah, we were not the apex predator that we are today, courtesy of technology. Humans rely primarily on the sense of sight, hence our affirmation of truth being ‘I see’. Our vision is a poor thing at night. We exist today because our hairy, knuckle-dragging ancestors, disadvantaged in darkness, hid pathetically, shivering, up a tree or craven down a burrow…

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Quiz of the week 1) What does the acronym SCUBA stand for? 2) Which native British breed is also known as the ‘orchard pig’? 3) The Fields Medal is awarded to scholars under the age of 40 in which discipline? 4) A satirical print by which English artist depicts the horrors of London’s 18th-century ‘gin craze’? 5) In which sitcom does Jennifer Saunders play a public relations consultant called Edina Monsoon? 1) Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus 2) Gloucester Old Spot 3) Mathematics 4) William Hogarth 5) ‘Absolutely Fabulous’. Riddle me this: A yardstick Riddle me this I have three feet, but no arms or legs. What am I? Time to buy On this day… January 21, 1976 Concorde’s first passenger services took to the skies, with British Airways (BA) flying…

EVERYONE is thrilled when they find a village pub that provides good unpretentious food: no deep-frozen microwaved products, but the real thing, produced on the premises, from local produce, by a proper chef. It’s a place to which, once discovered, we’ll come back again and again. It is exactly the kind of village pub that Agromenes had in mind when he highlighted the damage done by Rachel Reeves’s taxes. However, in researching that issue he discovered another plague afflicting hospitality businesses. In a pub where everything is made on the spot, people with allergies have to have their food prepared wholly separately in a part of the kitchen that has been specially washed down for each customer. That is not easy, but most are happy to help, not only because…

A domestic bestiary EMMA BARNARD stands in the Great Hall of Parham House, begun in 1577. In the background are some of the familiar treasures in the Parham collection, including the 1610 portrait of Henry, Prince of Wales. On the table, however, is a more modest, but delightful object, a shell lion thought to have been made in the 17th century. It was collected by her great-grandmother Alicia Pearson, who restored the property with her husband, Clive, from 1922. ‘He has a huge Cheshire Cat grin,’ she observes, ‘because he has caught some sort of goat, which he has firmly under his paw. He lives under the State Saddle of James II in a glass case in the Long Gallery, with his back to the room. There’s a window seat…

THE world of specialist plant nurseries, treasure troves of unusual varieties and expert advice, has always been a fragile one, but the past few years have seen these havens of expertise more threatened than ever before. A combination of rising costs, retirement and brutal competition from large-scale producers has resulted in the closure of many of our cherished plant centres. This makes for disheartening times for those of us who love being introduced to new plants by passionate nurserymen and who stand in awe of the immense knowledge of these expert growers and breeders. No garden centre or commercial producer can ever know as much about the plants they sell, nor can they match the diversity of plants produced by specialist growers. Grim as the situation may often seem, a…

Repton Priory, DerbyshireWithin the curtilage of Repton School ANNOUNCED from afar by the soaring 15th-century spire that crowns the parish church of St Wystan, the south Derbyshire village of Repton stands on a bluff above an old course of the River Trent. For many, Repton commands attention for the celebrated crypt that sits beneath the chancel of St Wystan’s, widely acknowledged as one of the great jewels of Anglo-Saxon architecture. There again, for many generations of Old Reptonians, the village will always be inextricably linked to their school and to the wonderful ensemble of historic buildings at its heart. Importantly, these two village landmarks enjoy a common thread of connection: a vanished medieval priory of Augustinian canons, which is the subject of this article. Introduced during the third quarter of…

INDIGNATION flared in 1921, when two 7in by 5in etchings included in the Royal Academy (RA) Summer Exhibition turned out to be the work of a 15-year-old girl. The umbrage was dismissed. ‘We judge the work, not the persons,’ declared jury member Claude Shepperson. ‘We do not know the painter’s name, and it does not matter if the artist is three or 300. Looking at the work from an artistic standpoint we had no hesitation in accepting it. It is no fault of ours that Miss Soper, aged 15, can hold her own with the giants of old age. We are proud of the girl.’ In time, the art of Eileen Alice Soper would find a place in millions of homes, for she would illustrate the covers of all 21…

THEY are terrific, really.’ Matthew Haley, the managing director of Bonhams Knightsbridge, is gushing about sardines. Not the edible kind: he’s talking about three fish resting over what looks like a bed of leaves, or perhaps grass, on the lid of a late-19th-century majolica box by George Jones & Sons. ‘You have to see it to believe it, to understand how completely bonkers it is. It is an extraordinary piece of Victoriana.’ The box is an unexpected find in the collection of a man who dresses like a Savile Row mannequin and is a specialist in antique books and manuscripts. Although he has an unbridled passion for all Victorian design, particularly the heavily carved drama of Gothic Revival furniture—a trait he feels must come with the job: ‘my predecessor as…