January is the time to be gloomy. The days may be getting longer, but the frosts are getting harder. Snow disfigures everything it touches. Sixty years ago, we had 14ft snowdrifts along our mile-long drive in Northumberland and there were still unmelted piles of snow at Winchester when I returned to school after the Easter holidays. Don’t be fooled by climate change —bad winters are certainly not a thing of the past. Another one may be lurking just around the corner.
But one learns from them. I made a big mistake 40 years ago when I found an extraordinary clump of snowdrops in a rook-infested woodland in Wiltshire. The flowers were split down the middle, so that each of its two pedicels carried 2½ petals. Schizoid it may have been, but it also had a distinctive delicacy. The farmer said I could dig it up, so I did so. Then I took it home and potted it up. Soft, refreshing rain watered it nicely. A week later, we had a heavy frost, followed by snow. By the time it had melted and the pot had unfrozen, the snowdrops were reduced to slimy mush. Not one bulb survived. I had learned that plants are much hardier in the ground than in pots.
Snow protects the plants that lie beneath it in alpine meadows. It keeps them dry, too, so, when the great thaw begins and snow turns to water, they have several months of accumulated precipitation to start them into growth. The equation doesn’t work in our climate because it is rain, not snow, that pounds our flower borders from November to March. Except in the big freeze of 1963, of course.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 11, 2023-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 11, 2023-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.
