WHEN the elderflower starts frothing in the hedgerows in late May, it is the cue for those in the know to grab their baskets and walking sticks and go foraging. They’ll head for the glades and corners colonised by the elder, where its great white soup plates of blossom give out the headiest Muscat scent. (The best spots are closely guarded secrets.) At the end of the day, entire families line up outside the Belvoir drinks factory in Leicestershire with their spoils, so the sacks of flowers can be weighed and exchanged for cash.
These bucolic scenes could hail from time immemorial, like something from the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel. We can almost see Tess Durbeyfield brushing the yellow pollen from her lips—and yet, this hedgerow harvest is a relatively recent tradition. ‘In the early days, it was mum and dad and me each driving a car with a bunch of local school kids we could persuade to skive off school,’ admits Belvoir’s managing director, Pev Manners.
It all began in 1984, when Mr Manners’s mother, Lady Mary, was overwhelmed by demand from friends for her delicious cordial. Her husband, Lord John [the 10th Duke of Rutland’s brother], encouraged her to make 100 cases to sell commercially.
‘My mother got the recipe from Lady Astor when they were staying at Cliveden,’ Mr Manners divulges. ‘Lady Astor always had it on her drinks tray and mum asked for the recipe.’ Lady Mary’s handwritten instructions (with a couple of tweaks for the factory) are still used today—although, with about 10 million bottles of Belvoir’s elderflower cordial now sold worldwide (with growing demand from Japan, France and America), the harvest has had to be ramped up from those original three car-loads.
Denne historien er fra May 19, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra May 19, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
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.
