SOME people garden in the same place all their adult lives. Others are restricted by their careers, but have gardening in their blood and are constantly planning for the time when they will settle and put down gardening roots. Chris Dodd and Liz Jolley are such a couple. As geologists, they spent 30 years travelling the world working in oil and gas before settling in 2016 at Low Crag, where the house and two-acre garden sit perched on a slope overlooking the Lyth Valley.
When they were students, the pair had acquired a copy of Violet Stevenson's book The Wild Garden, first published in 1985. It accompanied them on all their travels and its central proposition, that a garden has a responsibility to accommodate wild plants, insects, and other creatures, became gently embedded in their own gardening philosophy. Added to this, their encyclopedic knowledge of geology has given them a particular love for and understanding of the land.
The Lake District is one of England's most iconic natural landscapes. Some of its most beautiful parts are around the edges-mostly in what was the county of Westmorland: an unspoilt patchwork of small stone-walled sheep pastures and gentle rounded foothills with pockets of woodland. The Lyth Valley, which runs past Kendal and down to the coast at Morecambe Bay, is just such an area and it provides the enviable setting in which the garden of Low Crag has evolved.
If a garden is sustainable by virtue of being in close bond with its surrounding landscape, both physically and in its management, then Low Crag is a good example. The gabled house was carefully sited, in the lee of a curving bank that gives protection from prevailing westerlies, with views to the south and east along a broad sweep of the Lyth Valley and up to neighbouring fells. The garden itself merges into the surrounding sheep meadows.
Denne historien er fra June 29, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra June 29, 2022-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.
