INSPIRED by COUNTRY LIFE’s Lutyens celebrations (March 20), I’ve been re-reading Gertrude Jekyll’s Wood and Garden of 1899.
My copy brings me strangely close to her. It was a gift from my friend and colleague Edward Wilson, the preeminent scholar of English, who made Worcester College’s gardens the finest in Oxford. It came to him from his great-uncle Dick, who received it from the author herself, his neighbour in Surrey.
Whenever his wife and daughters went up to town, Dick liked nothing better than to wander over to Munstead Wood to see Miss Jekyll. ‘They used to make pictures from seashells together,’ Edward tells me, ‘and before they settled down to their work, they’d gleefully chorus “Another happy day with loved ones far away”.’
It’s tempting to peruse this classic wistfully, as a guide to paradise lost, to a peak of artistic perfection not scaled before or since. Read critically, however, it brings one to a very different realisation: British gardening is vastly richer, wider and deeper than it was in Miss Jekyll’s day, embracing ever more followers, styles, techniques and materials.
The most vivid evidence of this progress is the increase in our range of cultivated plants.
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin April 24, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin April 24, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds