IN 1898, the famous gardener and contributor to COUNTRY LIFE William Robinson built an elliptical walled kitchen garden for his home at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. The perfect ellipse has rounded corners to trap the sun and, protected by massive walls of local Weald stone quarried from the estate, the acre and a half of ground would have supplied everything that its vegetarian bachelor owner could have desired. But, after two World Wars and with labour costs rising, the place echoed many such productive gardens and fell into disrepair. Robinson died in 1935 and, in the late 1950s, Gravetye was turned into a country-house hotel, but the renaissance of the walled enclosure as a rare survival of a fully working estate kitchen garden only came in 2010. This was the date that saw the new ownership of Jeremy Hosking and the appointment of Tom Coward as head gardener.
It’s bigger than a hobby garden and smaller than a commercial one
Mr Coward is one of England’s best and most experienced gardeners. He studied commercial horticulture at Pershore College in Worcestershire, trained at Kew and then worked at a tree nursery. He spent time at a hotel in New Zealand, before a spell at Great Dixter, East Sussex, and says he has always grown vegetables at home ‘because I am greedy’, so he was the ideal choice to plan the restoration of the gardens at Gravetye Manor hotel. ‘It’s on an interesting scale,’ he says. ‘Bigger than a hobby garden and smaller than a commercial one.’
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Denne historien er fra March 08, 2023-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.
