IT is the middle of May, in the middle of England. The sky is a simple blue and the fields are edged with ridiculously radiant clouds of hawthorn. As the road with its story-book cottages approaches the handsome, early-12th-century church, a flash of bobbing tulip heads in the long grass catches the eye. Beyond is the house, a pretty, late-18th-century vicarage with a Gothic porch, gabled dormer windows and welcoming cinnamon-coloured render. Most importantly, there is a 2½-acre garden with views out onto the Dassett Hills and, on a day like this, to the Malvern Hills beyond. This is the home of Ben and Angel Collins.
Garden designer Angel Collins has been creating generous, comfortable gardens for 25 years. COUNTRY LIFE’s list of the Best Garden Designers in Britain (March 4) praises her ‘billowing and romantic borders… punctuated by strong, architectural planting’. Mrs Collins had already made an idyllic garden of her own at her childhood home in Mixbury, Oxfordshire, a garden renowned for its mix of roses, sky-rocketing Eremurus and lawns edged with rosebay willowherb. Eight years ago, however, she found herself in a new house, with a new garden (‘it was mostly paddock when we arrived’), and had to dig deep to find the heart to start again on a family garden.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 20, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 20, 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.
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.
