Anyone who knows the quietly spoken Mr Connolly will know he loves using seasonal British natives to create displays that combine an artless and natural simplicity with awe-inducing results. This year, at the request of COUNTRY LIFE, he put up the decorations at Wardington Manor in Oxfordshire, where The Land Gardeners, Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld, are based. In the cutting gardens, the pair grow flowers, shrubby and woodland stems, as well as planting up containers of living bulbs for customers.
A regular visitor to the manor, Mr Connolly created decorations that enhance the ‘Jacobean meets Arts-and-Crafts’ architecture and the romantic atmosphere of the 16th-century, Grade II*-listed house. The Land Gardeners were up early, picking in the winter garden, before Mr Connolly arrived bearing gifts— a whole ball of mistletoe from his home.
Feast of flowers
Mr Connolly’s style is relaxed and versatile. To dress the manor’s dining room, he decorated tables with tarnished silverware vessels in assorted shapes and sizes, spilling with white hellebores and perfumed winter honeysuckle. Smaller containers hold individual flower stems and large ones were planted with living hellebores.
‘It’s the abundance of less, using the most beautiful seasonal flowers and making them shine,’ says Mr Connolly, who used only three bunches (20 stems each) of hellebores and snippets of honeysuckle from the garden of Wardington.
Denne historien er fra November 27, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra November 27, 2019-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.
