FOXGLOVES, with their towering spires of bee-friendly flowers, are one of our most imposing wildflowers and one of the few to have jumped from the woodland edge and the verges of country lanes into our gardens. At the beginning of the 20th century, Gertrude Jekyll was enthusiastic about their use in herbaceous borders and recommended them to create a link between the order of the garden and the wildness of the countryside. Today, they are comfortably at home in cottage-style gardens, in perennial meadows and even in minimalist modern gardens.
In the wild, the common foxglove has purple flowers with little variation, save the occasional plant with white flowers, but nurseries and plant breeders have introduced numerous cultivars that encompass a range of colours, often with speckled flowers. These cultivars are produced from seed and the colour of the flowers is not always as advertised, but ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ is reliable, with warm apricot buds that fade to pastel pink as the flower ages. The Excelsior group is another dependable strain that ranges through pale to dark pink with purple spots and with flowers that are much larger than those of the species.
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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.
