FOR creating a Gold Medal-winning Chelsea show garden, the designer receives all the credit, but they would be at a distinct disadvantage without good suppliers. It is plants of the highest quality, as well as eye-catching new introductions, that separate the Best in Show from the also-rans.
Mark Straver of Hortus Loci in Hampshire is the plant wizard responsible for turning many a designer’s plant list into reality and, for next week’s delayed show, he has been sourcing plants for Tom Massey, Robert Myers, Arit Anderson and Marie-Louise Agius. If you snapped him in half, the word plantsman would run right through his core. His Dutch grandfather was a nurseryman and his father sold shrubs, wholesale, in the Woking area of Surrey. Add in a French grandmother and a Scottish grandfather, for extra hybrid vigour, and you’ll get an insight into his energy levels.
Mr Straver started his own successful nursery business at the age of 19. By the time he reached 30, he was working seven days a week and realised that he hadn’t been anywhere. ‘I sold my share to my business partner and went travelling for a year.’ He became a personal trainer, but soon realised that he couldn’t walk past a flower shop, nursery or garden centre without going in. ‘I couldn’t get over plants, however hard I tried,’ he admits. ‘I applied to Crocus at the beginning of its internet plant business— although I knew nothing about computers or the internet. Founders Peter Clay and Mark Fane, who were businessmen with a love of plants, let me have a free hand and I spent 12 happy years there.’
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 15, 2021-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 15, 2021-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.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
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.
