LAST week's RHS Chelsea Flower Show was much better than I expected. The emphasis was upon plants and how to grow them. You may think that growing plants is what the RHS is all about, but far too much attention has been paid in recent years to overdesigned gardens from which we learn little or nothing. Of course, every show garden should have something to tell us-something we can copy (or avoid) for ourselves but, until this year, I would have said that most of these showpieces-those advertisements for sponsors and designers are not only wickedly expensive to make, but also perfectly hideous.
Not now. This year's show gardens had a minimum of hard structure and a maximum of plants softly coloured herbaceous plants, British natives (me weeds, but nicely worked in), and countryside trees (hawthorns, willows and hornbeams), and shapely ferns and grasses. Journalists like to speculate about which garden will be judged Best in Show. I fancied the chances of a spectacular tourde-force designed by Sarah Eberle fed by very high waterfalls and embellished by amazing sculptures and dense, bold-but-green plantings. Yet my ability to spot a winner is no better with gardens than with horses and Mrs Eberle's masterpiece was beaten by a jumble of rewilding and beaver dams. I am not alone in thinking that the judges got it wrong.
Denne historien er fra June 01, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra June 01, 2022-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.
