WHAT a difference 20 months make. For the first time in its 108-year history, the Chelsea Flower Show will be a September event, signing off the season, as it were, instead of ushering in the freshness of May.
After the necessary cancellations of spring 2020 and again in 2021, the RHS made the brave and interesting decision to host its most prestigious show next week, still in the Royal Hospital grounds. This means there will be a few adjustments—and several new exhibitors. For some familiar nurseries and growers, the late season could not work with their ranges of plants; others have bowed out after a long and distinguished innings—notably, Hillier Nurseries has called time on its appearances, having exhibited for half a century.
But change is good and an autumn show is inevitably interesting. As it turns out, the four-month delay this year has been helpful, after one of the chilliest spring seasons on record. Despite its sunshine, the crucial month of April was the coldest for a century and many plants remained hunkered down, unable to unfurl new leaves and buds in a spring that for months continued to feel very much like winter. Notwithstanding modern glasshouse technology, a May show would have been somewhat lean this year.
Esta historia es de la edición September 15, 2021 de 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.
