The garden is small and wildly inclined, so, rather than dive into the challenge, I did what you are always told to do with a garden: leave it be for a year to see what it does, what hidden gems (or otherwise) might lie temporarily unseen, waiting to spring forth.
Accordingly, I left the beds alone. Instead, I filled pots with compost and trowels of grit and planted herbs. I may not have grown any vegetables or fruit, but that rectangle near the back door made my summer and changed so many meals for the better.
It refreshed my belief that there is nothing better you can grow than herbs: they dress up the staples in delicious clothes, look beautiful, draw beneficial insects into your garden and for a large part—especially if you favour perennials—they are straightforward to care for.
Having sat on my hands and observed the wonderful and the less so appear, I will be creating a herb garden in the months ahead. I’ve done this many times for clients, but it’s been a while since I’ve done it for myself. This led me to ponder what I should choose. What have I learned over the decades of doing this?
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 09, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 09, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
