NOW, botany,’ said my host, ‘I reckon it would be first-class cover. Good excuse for being in bad places. Get the act right and the locals would think you were just another barking gringo or gweilo obsessed with their stupid weeds.’ I was tempted to point out that several of his fellow professionals, far from acting, had been serious devotees of botany, but it seemed uncivil to cloud what my host plainly thought was his blue-sky thinking. We were at his club, after all, and he was paying for my pre- Christmas lunch. So I mentioned none of these men who’d taken advantage of their careers in diplomacy and espionage to travel in search of plants—not even the American whose great botanical coup was doing its best at that very moment to bring seasonal cheer to the drab dining room.
His name was Joel Roberts Poinsett and each of his foreign postings was an opportunity to explore a new flora and collect plants for his garden in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1825, at the age of 46, he was appointed the first US ambassador to Mexico. It was in the third winter of this five-year mission that he encountered a species that would make its breeders rich and his name immortal.
He’d gone to Taxco in the southern mountains to investigate the local silver mines that had raised this fine city to glory. There, he found a different treasure. It was a shrub with slender, sparsely branched stems to about 8ft tall. At their summits, golden bead-like florets were encircled by large leafy bracts of a texture more luxurious and a scarlet more vivid than he’d ever witnessed before in Nature.
Denne historien er fra December 11-18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra December 11-18, 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.
