The chequered path to the kitchen is lined with Persicaria affinis ‘Donald Lowndes', Gillenia trifoliata and Alchemilla mollis
RECENTLY, there have been quite fanciful ideas circulating about rewilding. If you believe some people, in the not-too-distant future, tracts of the British countryside could look like a mixture of the western US and the African savannah, with wolves, lynx and bison emerging from dense forests, rivers dammed into lakes by families of beavers and swathes of grassland and scrub bush populated with bustards, cranes and wild boar. At Ready Token House in Gloucestershire, Mark and Tabitha Mayall have introduced an altogether gentler style of rewilding, creating the perfect habitat for a host of native wildflowers andаrange of small creatures—many endangered—in particular butterflies.
When they bought the property in 2015, to one side of the house and garden was some 60 acres of sheep pasture. They negotiated with the tenant farmer to stop the sheep grazing and returned the whole area to permanent meadow, where a rich array of wildflowers has rapidly established itself.
The junction of the terrace and the lawn, with beech pyramids, Veronicastrum virginicum and Verbena hastata f. rosea 'Pink Spires'.
Ready Token's elevated position is confirmed by the spectacular views to the southeast, which, on a clear day, reveal White Horse Hill 30 miles away. It also means that the not-too-fertile soil over underlying Cotswold Jurassic limestone is an ideal base for wildflower meadows, naturally limiting grass density and allowing for a wide variety of both grasses and wildflowers to get established and thrive. The hands-off management regime of recent years has brought spectacular results, with both the variety of plants and insects, and the quantities of individual ones increasing dramatically.
Esta historia es de la edición May 04, 2022 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 May 04, 2022 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
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.
