A Questionable Home-Made Liqueur
THERE are two types of sorbs. One is the delightful Slavonic people who live in Germany’s beautiful Spreewald and press the seeds of common blue flax to make a salad dressing. And the other is a species of rowan known as the service tree—or Sorbus domestica by botanists.
It turns up very occasionally in the woodlands of southern England and Wales where tremendous efforts are made to conserve the few remaining specimens, which is rather unnecessary since the trees are not native to the British Isles but probably just escapees from medieval monastery gardens.
A service tree in full autumn beauty is a staggering sight. The fruits hang down in clusters, rather like its cousin, the common mountain ash or rowan, but the individual fruits are much bigger—the size of a large cherry—and they usually ripen to red on their sunny side. The species is native to Mediterranean hills, especially Italy and Greece, but you also see it inland throughout the Balkans and much of south-west France. The leaves look like any other rowan—long and pinnate—and produce a bit of autumn colour, but not much. Anyway, it’s the fruits for which people grow it.
Esta historia es de la edición October 04,2017 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición October 04,2017 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Give it some stick
Galloping through the imagination, competitive hobby-horsing is a gymnastic sport on the rise in Britain, discovers Sybilla Hart
Paper escapes
Steven King selects his best travel books of 2024
For love, not money
This year may have marked the end of brag-art’, bought merely to show off one’s wealth. It’s time for a return to looking for connoisseurship, beauty and taste
Mary I: more bruised than bloody
Cast as a sanguinary tyrant, our first Queen Regnant may not deserve her brutal reputation, believes Geoffrey Munn
A love supreme
Art brought together 19th-century Norwich couple Joseph and Emily Stannard, who shared a passion for painting, but their destiny would be dramatically different
Private views
One of the best ways-often the only way-to visit the finest privately owned gardens in the country is by joining an exclusive tour. Non Morris does exactly that
Shhhhhh...
THERE is great delight to be had poring over the front pages of COUNTRY LIFE each week, dreaming of what life would be like in a Scottish castle (so reasonably priced, but do bear in mind the midges) or a townhouse in London’s Eaton Square (worth a king’s ransom, but, oh dear, the traffic) or perhaps that cottage in the Cotswolds (if you don’t mind standing next to Hollywood A-listers in the queue at Daylesford). The estate agent’s particulars will give you details of acreage, proximity to schools and railway stations, but never—no, never—an indication of noise levels.
Mission impossible
Rubble and ruin were all that remained of the early-19th-century Villa Frere and its gardens, planted by the English diplomat John Hookham Frere, until a group of dedicated volunteers came to its rescue. Josephine Tyndale-Biscoe tells the story
When a perfect storm hits
Weather, wars, elections and financial uncertainty all conspired against high-end house sales this year, but there were still some spectacular deals
Give the dog a bone
Man's best friend still needs to eat like its Lupus forebears, believes Jonathan Self, when it's not guarding food, greeting us or destroying our upholstery, of course
