OF all the trees that are in the wood, perhaps the hawthorn is the queen—the overlooked jewel in the crown. It’s not up there in the sylvan pantheon of oak, ash, and beech, but is it possible that it’s more important?
David Hockney, a more acknowledged national treasure, thinks so. His retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2012 featured a room frothing with coral-crusted hedgerows. Stanley Spencer’s Marsh Meadows, Cookham depicts thick, curded, heavy-skirted May trees centre stage; Samuel Palmer’s thorns are cauliflower-thick with bloom. These three most English of English landscape painters know their onions and their work records the visual importance of the humble hawthorn.
The hawthorn is the mainstay of the British hedge. Blackthorn, despite its sloes, is simply too thorny. Beech is somehow too suburban and the others—field maple, holly, ash, and the rest—have more fulfilled lives elsewhere. The May, however, is the doyenne of hedge trees. It bends to the hedge layer, thickens like a thorny Hydra when trimmed, and is fast-growing, hence its third name of quickthorn.
It’s adaptable, surviving pollution in urban conditions and thriving on acid moorland, alkaline downlands or limestone uplands. The Derbyshire thorn, native to the Pennine peaks, flowers pink and in its double form is characteristic of city-park planting. The Crataegus family has many more cousins, with berries bigger, in smaller panicles or with leaves simpler or more serrated. All share the desirable property of turning brightly and dramatically early in the autumn.
Denne historien er fra April 29, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra April 29, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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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.
