IF you’re an Englishwoman at 50, you either get God or gardening—I got gardening’ is Patricia Elkington’s characteristically self-deprecating explanation for the garden she has created over the past four decades. Yet behind the breezy humour lies a story that mixes chance and good fortune, as well as the development of a particular talent common to so many British women gardeners. Mrs Elkington creates gentle, understated and inherently domestic gardens, where plants are the personalities and encouraged to give of their best and in which everything is included, from the trees that provide shade to the wildlife and the countryside beyond.
It was pure chance that the opportunity to create the garden at Little Court arose at all. In the early 1950s, Patricia’s father spotted that the house was coming up for sale at a local auction. ‘I’ll just go and see what it goes for,’ he reassured his wife, who, not surprisingly, was rather unprepared when he returned home its proud owner. Patricia’s mother was a flower arranger and began the garden, but its creation really dates from 1975, when Patricia and her husband, Andrew, a distinguished opthalmologist, succeeded her parents and moved into Little Court.
The garden is arranged in seven adjoining areas, some of them divided by old flint walls —mostly low, but higher around the walled kitchen garden—all of which appear on a map of 1837. Other than the kitchen garden, however, there is no real sense of division from one area to another and part of Little Court’s charm is the glimpses one gets of one area from another, especially early in the year before the trees have come into leaf.
Denne historien er fra February 05, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra February 05, 2020-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.
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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.
