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PPA MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2019

EVERY WEEK | JANUARY 15, 2020

Why you need a cutting garden How to train roses to perfection

Heseltine: my mistakes became my masterpiece Lady Godiva and King Arthur’s dog Swing low, sweet chandeliers

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STANTON ST BERNARD, WILTSHIRE

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n impressive country house in the Pewsey Vale with spectacular views towards the White Horse. The property is in immaculate condition with high ceilings and is surrounded by undulating downland.

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Guide price ÂŁ2,900,000 Knight Frank London & Hungerford edward.cunningham@knightfrank.com 020 7861 1080 rob.wightman@knightfrank.com 01488 688 547 Ref: HNG130203

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FOR SALE St Lawrence, Jersey Price on application

FOR SALE Nr Llandovery, Carmarthenshire Guide £775,000

A Place in the Country

FOR SALE Cressage, Shrewsbury Guide £1.15 million

Geri O’Brien Savills Jersey 01534 870 143 gobrien@savills.com

Tony Morris-Eyton Savills Telford 01952 899 133 tmeyton@savills.com

Clive Moon Savills Farnham 01252 751 740 cmoon@savills.com

Matthew Pegler Savills Bath 01225 685 479 mpegler@savills.com

Daniel Rees Savills Cardiff 029 2000 5866 drees@savills.com

FOR SALE Nr Frome, Somerset Guide £565,000

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FOR SALE Chawton, Hampshire Guide £1.595 million

FOR SALE Nr Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire Guide £1.25 million

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Bodaioch Hall Trefeglwys, Caersws, SY17 5PN

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Drawing of St Dunstan-in-the-West by SPAB Scholar Ptolomy Dean

the SPAB protects the historic environment from decay, damage and demolition. It responds to threats to old buildings, trains building professionals, craftspeople, homeowners and volunteers and gives advice about maintenance and repairs.

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www.spab.org.uk 020 7377 1644 A charitable company limited by guarantee registered in England & Wales. Company no: 5743962 Charity no: 1113753 37 Spital Square, London E1 6DY

A collection of sixteen views of Norfolk and Suffolk by Edward Seago, offered at reduced prices exclusively for the duration of the exhibition

Detail: Pin Mill Signed lower left: Edward Seago; titled on the reverse: PIN MILL Oil on board: 26 × 36 in / 66 × 91.4 cm

Exhibition opens Wednesday 15th January

www.richardgreen.com Email: paintings@richardgreen.com

A fully illustrated catalogue is available for £10 Enquiries are welcome

On view for sale at 147 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1S 2TS TELEPHONE: +44 (0)20 7493 3939

THOMAS BLINKS English pointers Signed lower right: TBlinks Oil on canvas: 14 × 18 in / 35.6 × 45.7 cm £38,000

THOMAS BLINKS English setters Signed lower left: TBlinks Oil on canvas: 14 × 18 in / 35.6 × 45.7 cm £38,000

DOROTHEA SHARP The sand castle Signed lower right: DOROTHEA SHARP Oil on canvas: 14 ¼ × 18 ⅛ in / 36.2 × 46 cm £38,000 + ARR

JULES NOEL Avant le coup de vent au Tréport Signed, inscribed and dated lower right: Jules Noël / Tréport 1868 Oil on canvas: 10 ½ × 15 in / 26.7 × 38.1 cm £35,000

Exhibition opens Wednesday 15th January

www.richardgreen.com Email: paintings@richardgreen.com

A fully illustrated catalogue is available for £10 Enquiries are welcome

On view for sale at 147 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1S 2TS TELEPHONE: +44 (0)20 7493 3939

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EDWARD SEAGO 23 JANUARY–14 FEBRUARY 2020

Park Lane, Early February Morning

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COUNTRY LIFE VOL CCXIV NO 3, JANUARY 15, 2020

Mrs James Neale Katie is married to James Neale and runs BGB Property, a bespoke residential-property search agency.

A keen shot, she breeds Gloucester Old Spot pigs at home in Walkern, Hertfordshire, and is training for her second ultra marathon, in Uganda, in May. Photographed by Mike Garrard

Alamy

Contents January 15, 2020

‘Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring’: the diamond-bright petals of early snowdrops are appearing around the country

80 Swing low Chandeliers to covet, chosen

by Amelia Thorpe

This week

Broadwoodside, East Lothian (Andrea Jones/Garden Exposures Photo Library)

Cover stories 42 Who needs a master plan?

Lord Heseltine on the errors that turned to success at Thenford 44 A year of cut flowers Juliet Roberts reveals the secrets of Chatsworth’s cutting garden 52 Daring to grasp the thorn The roses of Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, owe their splendour to training, discovers Val Bourne 72 Land of myth and legend: heroes and monsters Amy Jeffs tells the tales of great champions, from Gawain to King Arthur’s dog and Lady Godiva 26 Country Life, January 15, 2020

38 Kim Wilkie’s favourite painting The landscape architect picks a sun-soaked Arcadian homage 40 Separating the sheep from the geese Greedy geese graze across the country, says Jamie Blackett 50 The hellebore list Pick your favourites of these varied plants now, advises Val Bourne 56 Outdoor attractions Amelia Thorpe picks ornaments 58 Letters from Hillside Plantsman-designer Dan Pearson shares his ideas for landscape design in the first of a new series from his Somerset home 62 The forgotten Brontë sister Charlotte Cory celebrates Anne Brontë on her 200th birthday

66 ‘For the use of schollars and those affected’ Steven Brindle visits medieval Chetham’s School, Manchester, a remarkable survival and Britain’s oldest remaining public library 78 Interiors Updating a traditional kitchen 82 Kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson gets creative with nutty delights 92 Farewell to the greats Michael Billington pays tribute to giants of the theatre who died in 2019, from actors to directors

Every week 28 Town & Country 32 Notebook 34 Letters 35 Agromenes 36 Athena 84 Property market 88 Art market 90 Exhibition 94 Books 96 Bridge and crossword 97 Classified advertisements 102 Spectator 102 Tottering-by-Gently

COUNTRY LIFE

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Let’s get physical I

T’S tempting to look out of the window at the leafless trees and dormant flower borders and think that this is the quiet time in the garden, but that would be quite wrong. Midwinter is exactly the right time to pull on sturdy boots and head outdoors.

Without the distractions of petal and leaf, the bones of the garden are clearly visible.

As the cold air clears the mind, memories return of last summer and all those plants you meant to move because they were in the wrong place—those spreading clumps of Dutch iris that you cursed because you had forgotten to divide them are now limp, their spear-like foliage flattened on the dark soil, just waiting to be dug up.

Don’t let anyone tell you this is not the time to get physical. There’s none better.

Heel a sharp spade into the ground, lift the whole lot and remove it to that bare spot you’d been wondering how to fill.

Ten minutes of slicing into hard roots and

digging new planting holes will have hats and jackets hurled away. Gardening is hot work even in January.

Chances are that, when bending low to examine the marbled verdigris cyclamen leaves you’d forgotten about, other thoughts occur. The lower boughs of the holly could do with lifting, bringing more light to the

It’s not so much mindfulness that we need more of, but happy mindlessness woodlanders below. Perhaps the penstemon might benefit from being shifted to a place where its blooms are visible.

Heading for the barn to search for the old bread knife that cuts through tough roots better than anything, the fern fronds catch

the eye; last spring, this area was alight with fresh croziers, but there was one fern that never really settled. Time to find it a new spot where it can properly spread.

Ideas emerge as you let your mind wander.

In among the blackcurrants, searching for old stems to prune, wonderfully random suggestions pop up. Some will be about the garden, others not. It’s not so much mindfulness that we need more of, but the happy mindlessness that comes with a day spent rootling around in the garden, getting mud under the fingernails and smeared across a hastily wiped cheek.

Do lots of buying, too—from catalogues and online suppliers of course, but do check local nurseries and garden centres—many slash their prices after the Christmas poinsettia rush. And now is exactly the right time to plant new trees and shrubs. By the time spring arrives, your footprints will have disappeared and everything will be putting on soft new growth.

PPA Magazine Brand of the Year 2019 PPA Front Cover of the Year 2018 British Society of Magazine Editors Scoop of the Year 2015/16 PPA Specialist Consumer Magazine of the Year 2014/15 British Society of Magazine Editors Innovation of the Year 2014/15 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year (Special Interest) 2016 Editor Mark Hedges Editor’s PA/Travel Rosie Paterson 555062 Editorial Assistant Phoebe Bath 555046 Telephone numbers are prefixed by 01252 Emails are name.surname@ti-media.com Editorial enquiries 555046 DeputyEditor Kate Green 555063 Managing & Features Editor Paula Lester 555068 Architectural Editor John Goodall 555064 Gardens Editor Tiffany Daneff 555067 Fine Arts & Books Editor Mary Miers 555066 ExecutiveEditorandInteriorsGilesKime555083 DeputyFeaturesEditorVictoriaMarston 555079 News & Property Editor Annunciata Elwes 555078 Luxury Editor Hetty Lintell 555071

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Group Art Director Dean Usher Art Editor Emma Earnshaw Deputy Art Editor Heather Clark Designer Ben Harris 555245 Picture Editor Lucy Ford 555075 Acting Deputy Picture Editor Storm Johnson 555076 Senior Sub-Editor James Fisher 555089 Senior Sub-Editor Octavia Pollock 555082 Digital Editor Toby Keel 555086 Property Correspondent Penny Churchill GroupManagingDirectorAndreaDavies ManagingDirector StevePrentice AssistantBusinessDirectorKirstySetchell551111 Photographic Library Manager Melanie Bryan 555090 Photographic Library Assistant

Paula Fahey 555092 Marketing Manager Nicola McClure 555115 Antiques & Fine Arts Manager Jonathan Hearn 555318 CommercialDirectorProperty Paul Ward 0800 316 5450 Country Steve Earley 07961 783432; Oliver Pearson 07961 800887; Emma Lewis 07984180061 Head of Market: Country & Gardening Kate Barnfield 07817 629935

Lucy Hall 07950 188233 Classified Advertising Sophie Bailey 555316 AdvertisingandClassifiedProduction StephenTurner 020–31482681 Inserts Canopy Media 020–7611 8151; lindsay@canopymedia.co.uk Subscription enquiries 0330 333 1120 Backissues 01795662976;support@mags-uk.com

Interiors & Gardening Advertising Chloe Lummis 555345 LuxuryAdvertising Jade Bousfield 07583 672665; Katie Ruocco 07929 364909;

Country Life, January 15, 2020 27

Town & Country

Edited by Annunciata Elwes

‘Will you have our backs?’

A

S Defra Secretary Theresa Villiers attempted to provide reassurance at the Oxford Farming Conference that the Government would protect British farming standards against overseas competition in EU trade negotiations, one farmer baldly asked: ‘Will you have our backs?’ She pledged to support livestock farming against what she agreed was ‘the simplistic labelling of meat-eating as being a negative factor in climate change’ and to be ‘always guided by the science’, confirming that badger culls will remain integral to controlling bovine TB. Farmers complained about the influence of the rewilding lobby, including from within Defra. They requested better control over Government departments, such as the Environment Agency, and more reliable statistics to stop farming being ‘a soft target’ in the climate-change debate.

Mrs Villiers promised to relay concerns to Cabinet. ‘This Government has been re-elected with a substantial majority, but that is on the basis of a manifesto with much more far-reaching commitments on the

The Government has promised to ‘be guided by the science’ as regards the badger cull and avoid villifying meat-eating

28 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Keeping up standards: Theresa Villiers said Britain can walk away from negotiations and use the ‘powerful tools’ of the WTO to allow tariffs on imports that do not meet our requirements— but this works both ways, with high tariffs on exports

environment than any predecessors.

Our new approach to farm support is going to play a central role in achieving those crucial twin goals of protecting climate and protecting Nature.’

NFU president Minette Batters pressed her to commit to a food standards commission to scrutinise trade deals. ‘Will this Government work with us to drive forward our vision for net-zero emissions by 2040?

Will you use the powers in the Agriculture Bill to improve the stability of our supply chains and will Government pull together a council on food standards? This will test the moral compass of some in Government, but failure to deliver is not an option.’

‘Trade trumps everything,’ added Craig Bennett of Friends of the Earth.

‘We can have the best systems here, but if we do deals with countries that undercut standards, it will undermine everything farmers do here.’

Mrs Villiers conceded that agriculture ‘was the last piece of the jigsaw’ in exiting the EU, but said: ‘The high standards of British farming are the backbone of our biggest manufacturing sector (food and drink) that exports £22 billion’s worth to more than 200 countries. We will not dilute our strong environmental protection

or our high standards of food safety and animal welfare. Let’s face it, even limited access to our £47 billion market for food is a big prize for any country.’

As ‘Veganuary’ entered its second week, Mrs Batters advocated that it’s ‘time to move on from the divisive plant-versus-meat debate. The carbon footprint of our cattle is already 2½ times lower than the global average —if the 287 million dairy cows in the world were all as efficient as ours, we might get somewhere’.

Mr Bennett, who supports moderate meat-eating, pointed out that ‘agriculture is not the biggest driver [of emissions], not by a long way. Fossil fuels is. The problem has never really been farmers, but agriculture policy.

The public goods [for which farmers will be paid under new schemes] needs to be a good list’.

Mrs Villiers urged farmers to apply for new, individually tailored Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. CLA president Mark Bridgeman described these as a ‘oncein-a-lifetime opportunity’, but cautioned: ‘The Secretary of State must allow proper time for members of the rural community to adjust, which might mean delaying the transition.

The rural economy has immense potential, but we need the right policies to unleash it.’ KG

www.countrylife.co.uk

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk

Good week for Spouses of snorers A South Korean company has designed a pillow with sensors that connect to a ‘solution box’; as snoring accelerates, it inflates the pillow until the culprit turns over

One, two, three, pull!

Sky’s the limit

Alamy; Getty; John Laing Photographic Collection; Tate, London 2019

F

OR the past three months, the workshops at Dumfries House, Ayrshire—which was saved for the nation by The Prince of Wales in 2007 and is now the headquarters of The Prince’s Foundation—have resounded with the clangings of students creating a new 33ft-tall obelisk (above) for Poundbury to a design by Ben Pentreath. Stonemasons and carvers perfected 20 separate blocks, which were then assembled in the Dorset town using traditional sand-casting techniques and unveiled earlier this month.

Traditional building skills are among many causes championed by the Foundation, which, this year, will launch Building Arts, a new programme for teaching that will help secure the future of heritage glasswork, ceramics, painting, carving, metalwork, sculpture and textiles.

‘Through our courses focused on traditional building skills, we hope to inspire a future generation of designers, artists and makers to create a built environment that draws on a vast array of different methods and celebrates the physical, temporal and even symbolic connections that can be realised through our buildings and places,’ explains The Prince’s Foundation’s Michael Goodger.

Visit www.princes-foundation.org for further information. www.countrylife.co.uk

T

HE release of some 10,000 extraordinary digitised images depicting 20th-century Britain—from the John Laing Photographic Collection, held by the Historic England Archive—has begun. A major construction company, John Laing was responsible for projects such as the London Central Mosque, the M1, the Second Severn Bridge and rebuilding Coventry Cathedral (one image shows the spire being hoisted back on by helicopter).

The ‘Breaking New Ground’ collection, which was launched on Monday with the first 2,000 images, also includes rare and fascinating images of Laing staff days out. All 10,000 photographs should be available at www. historicengland.org.uk by the autumn. Above, a rapt crowd watches a tug-of-war at the opening of a new sports ground at Elstree, Hertfordshire (May 21, 1949).

Merry Men Nottinghamshire’s royal Sherwood Forest—famous haunt of men in tights messing about with bows and arro named t Instagra the worl to Germ Forest a Amazon Rainfore UK property After a year of uncertainty, the fog has lifted; prices in prime regional markets will rise by 1% in 2020 and 11% over the next five years, says Knight Frank Fresh northern air Within the next three years, York will become the first UK city to ban private cars to its medieval centre; only buses and disabled drivers will be exempt

Bad week for Wild swimming Those fond of taking a dip won’t be thrilled to hear water companies are polluting our loveliest rivers, such as the Windrush, Aire and Itchen Fresh meat Farming communities are dis appointed at th lack of balance in a Channel 4 programme, in which George Monbiot claime farmers should grow trees and the public eat cultured meat and protein flour derived from bacteria instead

The works of leading contemporary artists will be exhibited alongside 13 Turner paintings—including Norham Castle, on the River Tweed (above, about 1822–23)—at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, North York-shire, from January 18 to April 19. This is the final pit stop for the touring exhibition ‘Turner: Northern Exposure’, which has followed the route the artist took through Yorkshire in 1797, when he was only 22, and also includes his sketchbooks

Keeping it in the family Christmas arguments have led to a 114% spike in will rewrites and disinheritances, says a law firm.

Lawyers are bracing themselves Cornish sheep A flock of 100 has been stolen from a farmer’s field in the village of Trerulefoot; as police investigate, the Countryside Alliance is urging farmers to install CCTV, security fences and internal trackers

Country Life, January 15, 2020 29

Town & Country

Huntcliff and Saltburn Beach, North Yorkshire, on the England Coast Path

F

OR the first time, Natural England has collected and released data on the popularity of our coastal paths and found that 29.1 million trips were made over a six-month period (July 2017 to January 2018), boosting local economy by £350 million and providing nearly 6,000 jobs. Unsurprisingly, 97% of visitors found the paths ‘invigorating’.

The organisation’s flagship England Coast Path, currently in the making and set to cover 2,700 miles around our shores, will be the longest managed and waymarked coastal walking route in the world once complete later this year.

It will connect well-known trails, such as the 630-mile South West Coast Path, with new sections, including the 58-mile stretch between Minehead and Brean Down in Somerset. The most recent part of the path, a 10-mile route on the Tees Valley coast, was opened by Natural England chair Tony Juniper in September 2019 and takes in seal spotting at Greatham Creek, RSPB Saltholme and Teesmouth nature reserves and the striking Tees Transporter Bridge.

‘As a nation of islanders, our coastline holds a special place in many of our hearts. We know people seek out coastal areas —to experience the beautiful landscape, as somewhere peaceful to pause, or simply to spend time with family and friends,’ notes National Trust director-general Hilary McGrady. Gemma Cantelo of the Ramblers adds: ‘This report highlights the difference National Trails can make in enabling more people to connect to Nature... [and] demonstrates that investment in walking is money well-spent’.

Visit www.nationaltrail.co.uk/england-coast-path 30 Country Life, January 15, 2020

A

PLAN is afoot to reduce the number of grey squirrels in the UK by making some of them infertile through gene editing. They arrived from America in the 19th century and have become about as popular as Japanese knotweed; the grey invaders tear up the nests of songbirds, stop oaks and beeches from growing by stripping bark and carry a deadly virus that could see their red cousins wiped out by 2030. There are between three and six million grey squirrels in the UK, compared with only 140,000 reds.

Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, perhaps best known for Dolly the Sheep, would like to create gene-edited male squirrels and then release them into the wild. When they breed, their female offspring will be infertile and male offspring will spread the DNA further. Researchers say the approach could also be used to target other problem species, both in the UK (for example, mink and muntjac) and abroad. ‘We want to reverse the invasion,’ says Andrew Kendall of the European Squirrel Initiative, which is part-funding the project. ‘It is very humane—there is no need for trapping or shooting—they will simply stop reproducing.’

Sir Harry Studholme, chairman of the Forestry Commission, is also in favour, explaining that ‘we want to regrow England’s broadleaf forests with oak and other species, but we can’t do it while these animals are around’. www.countrylife.co.uk

Alamy; Getty; English Heritage

Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside

A grey area

Country Mouse A spring in my step

I

Not so stuck in the mud

M

ANY of our readers will have been on tenterhooks last autumn when tickets for Glastonbury 2020 were released—and promptly sold out within 34 minutes. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Somerset festival, whose inaugural event was attended by 1,500 hippies, five dogs and a goat, but which now attracts 200,000 revellers to a site the size of Oxford city centre.

Founded by a dairy farmer with a dream and a sizable overdraft—Michael Eavis—it was initially called the Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival; entry was £1 (it’s about £250 today) and came with a free carton of milk. ‘The festival comprised one scaffold-constructed stage, with a tarpaulin roof at the end of one hedged field,’ remembers Mutter Slater of Stackridge, the first live performers. ‘Security was a bobby standing at a five-bar gate.’ DJ Mad Mick added: ‘It was like an English country fête with longer hair and no green teas.’

The second festival (above) used a pyramid stage for the first time.

Throughout the event’s history, Mr Eavis and now his daughter, Emily, have stuck to their green credentials; most of the profits go to charities such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, electricity comes from green generators and plastic is banned. Glastonbury 2020 takes place on June 24–28 and headliners include Taylor Swift and Sir Paul McCartney; visit www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk

Northumbrian landowner Jennifer du Cane has gifted Carrawburgh Roman Fort—one of 16 on the 73-mile-long Hadrian’s Wall—to English Heritage. Most of its structure lies below the turf and the charity is excited that so little archaeological investigation has been carried out there so far. It lies near the temple to the Roman god Mithras, which was built by Carrawburgh-based soldiers, and is open to visitors www.countrylife.co.uk

SEEK the heralds of spring. I yearn for lighter evenings and I know I’m guilty of getting ahead of myself in anticipating the season’s arrival. However, all is well. The snowdrops that proved such a balm in a difficult period of my life two years ago are nodding gently beneath the beech hedge at the cottage. They’re a symbol of a new dawn, the new year’s resurrection. Nature is waking up.

In Barnes, the delightful pair of Egyptian geese has been proudly showing off its nine goslings that hatched last week. I find it extraordinary that, once again, the young have arrived so early in the year. For some weeks, the gander has been fussing around the edge of the pond—they’re usually inseparable—as the goose has been sitting somewhere.

Unusually for the geese, Egyptians (which originally hail from south of the Sahara and the Nile valley) often nest in trees and, sometimes, we see them early in the morning roosting at the top of one when we walk Tiger around the park.

The eggs must have been laid in early December, so, clearly, these birds do not share my gloom at the darkening days. I will try to harness their optimism later this year, for they anticipate spring even more strongly than I do. MH

Town Mouse The search for peace

I

HAVE a special hatred for electric toys that make noises. I find something intensely irritating about their endless repetition of notes or tunes, not to mention the tinny quality of the sound they produce. Well aware of my dislike, the children have occasionally enjoyed torturing me with them. One of them, for example, long delighted in a hat badge that played Jingle Bells and was impossible to silence. But they are growing up and when, one day last summer, the badge gave a final strangled croak and died, I thought I might enjoy peace at last. How wrong I was.

Last week, our eldest child unexpectedly produced a belated Christmas present for their sibling.

I thought the idea rather charming, until the wrapping paper came off and revealed what is euphemistically labelled a ‘noise machine’ that produces ‘six momentous fart sound effects’.

It’s proved unbelievably popular around the house and, despite the extremely limited nature of the joke, continues to provoke wild and prolonged hilarity. So much so, that I begin to wonder whether the hat badge was better. Happily, however, it uses batteries. I console myself that, sooner or later, it will either run out of power or I will manage surreptitiously to remove them. JG Country Life, January 15, 2020 31

Town & Country Notebook Quiz of the week 1) Which popular keep-fit class was created by Colombian dancer Alberto Perez?

2) Uther Pendragon was the father of which leader from British and Celtic legend?

3) Which was the first city to host three Summer Olympic Games?

4) Who played James Bond in the 1967 film Casino Royale?

5) Blotched emerald, grey dagger and Mother Shipton are all species of what?

Riddle me this I sound like one letter, but am made of three. You’ll see things if you open me.

What am I?

Edited by Victoria Marston

Oh, the agony!

Resident agony uncle Kit Hesketh-Harvey solves your dilemmas

Just hold on

Q

My husband is in the army and he’s going away again. I know I should be used to it by now, but somehow it actually seems to get harder.

Not only do I have two young children, I’m also pregnant. I have no idea how I’m going to cope without him and am sinking into despair.

K. J., Hampshire

A

Knowing that our hearts ache for you is hollow comfort. Knowing that he is earning a degree of respect accorded to very few isn’t much help. The raising of the next generation is hard under any circumstances—as hard as it is to defend them.

Advertisers’ images of familial togetherness are cruelly at odds with reality, not only in the service professions. Until Christina Schmid, widow of my friend and fallen hero Olaf, made her astonishing speech over his coffin, recognition of the brave contribution made by partners had become shamefully neglected.

However, counselling is marginally more available than within the civilian population. Contact SSAFA, the charity giving support to services families. To those readers who have been as moved as I, its webpage has a donate button (0800 731 4880; www.ssafa.org.uk).

Time to buy Spade Bottle Opener, £17.25, Joanna Wood (020–7730 5064; www.joannawood.co.uk)

100 years ago in

COUNTRY LIFE January 17, 1920

Avenida Home Puddin’ Head Octopus Wooden Serving Tray, £36, Hurn & Hurn (01603 559250; www.hurnandhurn.com)

Emma, Jane Austen

A

FEW days ago a friend showed me a most interesting tinder lighter which was used by his father during the Indian Mutiny Campaign. The contrivance is shaped like a pistol and has a tube several inches long which curves round in the rear into the shape of a fat little butt.

Underneath the upper tube is a short tube open at both ends.

This lower tube is attached close up to the upper one just like the magazine of a Winchester rifle.

The little machine is made of German silver or something similar in appearance, and the rounded butt has a lid and serves as a reservoir to keep the caps in.

On the front of the gate is stamped ‘Jean & le François, Breveté… S. G.’ —Fleur-de-Lys

1) Zumba 2) King Arthur 3) London (1908, 1948 and 2012) 4) David Niven 5) Moth Riddle me this: An eye

32 Country Life, January 15, 2020

‘Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable’

Watering Can Salt and Pepper Set, £34.95, Annabel James (0345 548 0210; www.annabeljames.co.uk)

Hortus quarterly gardening journal 12-month subscription, £38, Hortus (01544 260001; www.hortus.co.uk) www.countrylife.co.uk

Another log on the fire By Oliver Preston

What to drink this week 2018 white Burgundy

The reds might be the stars, but these whites aren’t far behind, says Harry Eyres 2018 was a record-breaking year for white Burgundy, but not necessarily in the way winegrowers would have wished. The harvest began very early, in the last days of August, after a torrid summer, and acidity levels—often seen as crucial for quality—were quite low in many cases. The best of the wines, however, appear to have great tension and elegance, as well as richness.

Unmissable events Exhibition Until February 23 ‘The Show Goes On: A Theatre of Portraits

by The Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ (below), The Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey. See artists’ representations of the likes of Sammy Davis Jr, Ken Dodd, John Osborne, Celia Imrie and Oliver Ford Davies (01483 810235; www.wattsgallery. org.uk)

Simon Davis; Country Life Picture Library

Until February 8 ‘Martin Laurance: From Land to Sea’, Mandells Gallery, Norwich, Norfolk. Landscapes of Norfolk, Yorkshire, Cornwall and the Suffolk coast in mixed media and oil, with a focus on where the land, sea and sky meet (www.mandellsgallery.co.uk; 01603 626892) Until February 9 ‘Play, Protest and Pelicans: A People’s History of London’s Royal Parks’, Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1.

Paintings, drawings, photographs and memorabilia telling the tales of our capital’s green spaces, from royal hunting grounds to wartime training venues, scenes of political protest and debauched pleasure gardens (020–7401 8865; www.gardenmuseum.org.uk) www.countrylife.co.uk

Gardens January 25–February 2 Heralding Spring, Chelsea Physic Garden, Royal Hospital Road, London SW3. The garden reopens after winter with walks, talks and workshops, plus a snowdrop trail.

Guided tours available each day.

Tickets from £8.50 (020–7352 5646; www.chelseaphysicgarden. co.uk)

February 6 Rose Pruning Workshop: Cotswolds, Daylesford Farmshop, Kingham, Gloucestershire. Learn how to easily maintain shrubs, climbers and ramblers with Michael Marriott, with demonstrations of key theories in the Cutting Garden (weather permitting). 9.30am–1pm, £75pp (01608 731712; www.daylesford.com) Music January 24 Tom Poster: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire. The chamber ensemble will perform works by Beethoven, Clara Schumann, Mendelssohn, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Amy Beach and Cole Porter.

From 7.30pm, tickets £19 (www.wiltshiremusic.org.uk; 01225 860110) Book now June 19–20 Garden Museum Literary Festival, Helmingham Hall, Stowmarket, Suffolk. An exploration of 500 years of garden history, including talks from garden designers, gardeners, novelists and artists.

Adult tickets from £110 (020–7401 8865; www. gardenmuseum.org.uk)

Why you should be drinking them It was undoubtedly a warm year, but at a couple of tastings of 2018 cask samples before Christmas, I found many whites had lovely freshness and better balance than I associate with other hot years, such as 2015, 2009 and 2005. The reds have been seen as the stars of 2018, but some of the whites won’t be far behind.

What to buy The 44-acre Domaine Ferret in Pouilly-Fuissé is owned by Louis Jadot, but run independently, with winemaking in the hands of the talented Audrey Braccini. A number of parcels are vinified and bottled separately. 2018 wasn’t so straightforward in the Mâconnais as further north, with a very long-drawn-out harvest, but Mme Braccini professes herself surprised by the ‘elegance, tension and generosity of the wines’.

Pouilly-Fuissé Les Perrières 2018 Domaine Ferret (below, £165 per six IB; www.richardkihl.ltd.uk) is lemony and fine—or ‘delicate and refined’, in Braccini’s words—and reminded me of a Puligny-Montrachet.

Pouilly-Fuissé Tournant de Pouilly 2018 Domaine Ferret (£215 per six IB; www.richardkihl.ltd.uk), on the other hand, has a richness and power reminiscent of Meursault.

From the Côte d’Or, and offering exceptional value, I was impressed by the delicate and citrusy Pernand-Vergelesses Les Combottes Louis Jadot 2018 (£130 per six IB; www. richardkihl.ltd.uk).

Country Life, January 15, 2020 33

Letters to the Editor The good, the bad and the ugly

I

SMILED when I came across the coverline ‘How to bring Nature into your garden’ (September 25).

Nature is all around us here, although it sometimes wears a grim visage. We are surrounded by gnarled eucalyptus, black pines, cedars, oaks and elms, but many are falling victim to one of the most severe and prolonged droughts in modern Australian history. The air is full of smoke from bush fires and we haven’t had the luxury of rain for is morning, I saw a wedgegle soaring on barn-door hadowed in a copse stood f kangaroos, one with a tiny sands of white corellas shriek for food. Yes, Nature is, ll around us. annard, Moss Vale, Australia

The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne

Leading from the Frontis

H

OW delighted I was to open the pages of COUNTRY LIFE to see a very glamorous lady with the name of Mrs Desmond Langford (Frontispiece, December 11/18, 2019), instead of the usual classic, debutante type. How amazed I was to see that Mrs Langford had reached the very young age of 100—there is hope for us all yet.

Pamela Magill, Devon

W

HAT an inspiration to girls to feature Mrs Connor Speed (very apt name) on the Frontispiece (January 8). Perhaps it will be girls aspiring to be train drivers now, not only boys, as in my day. Well done.

Ann Archer, by email

Pretty Chitty Bang Bang

I

GREATLY enjoyed and agreed with Charles RangeleyWilson’s tirade against needless automobile automation (In the driving seat, December 11/18, 2019). Take my 1913 Sigma (right). It has no battery to go flat (it starts on a handle), no windscreen wipers (no windscreen), no hood (a trilby does the job), no horn (I shout), no window winders (no windows), no heater (a thick coat will do), no indicators (God gave me arms), no audio system (the engine purrs beautifully enough) and no satnav (Jennie sits beside me with a map). The fact that it has almost no brakes I take as a minor hindrance. I get better smiles-per-gallon out of it than any faceless German Autobahn cruiser would. Would that motoring could return to such simplicity and fun. Cally Callomon, Suffolk

A spoonful of sugar

R

ESOLVING to be ruthless with my New Year tidying, I came upon a pile of issues of COUNTRY LIFE and delivered them to a local hospital. The receptionist was delighted and said they would be enjoyed by patients in recovery. As time spent outdoors is recommended for our health and wellbeing, what better way to lift the spirits of those confined to bed than to be immersed in the bucolic pages of your magazine? Perhaps it should be available on prescription. Anna Cornell, Surrey

A matter of taste

I

VERY much enjoyed Charles Quest-Ritson’s ‘Fruity language’ (In the garden, December 4). The author asserts that ‘we have no vocabulary of taste to describe the flavour of apples’. However, I beg to disagree. A word in use among rural folk in Cambridgeshire (I believe it may

be East Anglian in origin) to describe apples that have a bland, disappointing flavour and a soft interior texture is ‘pluffy’. I recommend this word to your readership, in the hope that it may be more widely used—it sounds exactly like the experience it describes.

Elizabeth Eddy-Mulcahy, Cambridgeshire

Contactus (photographs welcome) Email: countrylife_letters@ti-media.com Post: Letters to the Editor, COUNTRY LIFE Editorial, Pinehurst II, Pinehurst Road, Farnborough Business Park, Hampshire GU14 7BF (with a daytime telephone number, please) TI Media Limited reserves the right to edit and to reuse in any format or medium submissions to the letters page of COUNTRY LIFE N.B. If you wish to contact us about your subscription, including regarding changes of address, please ring Magazines Direct on 0330 333 1120

COUNTRY LIFE, ISSN 0045-8856, is published weekly by TI Media Limited, 3rd Floor, 161, Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP, United Kingdom. COUNTRY LIFE Subscriptions: For enquiries and orders, please email: help@magazinesdirect.com, alternatively from the UK call: 0330 333 1120, overseas call: + 44 330 333 1120 (Lines are open Monday–Saturday, 8am- 6pm GMT excluding Bank Holidays). One year full subscription rates: 1 Year (51) issues. UK £213.70; Europe/Eire € 380 (delivery 3–5 days); USA $460 (delivery 5–12 days); Rest of World £359 (delivery 5–7 days). Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica NY 11431. US Postmaster: Send address changes to COUNTRY LIFE, Airfreight and mailing in the USA by agent named Air Business, c/o Liberty Express Distributions USA LLC, Suite 201, 153–63 Rockaway Blvd, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Subscription records are maintained at TI Media Ltd, Rockwood House, 9–16, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, RH16 3DH. Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent. BACK NUMBERS Subject to availability, issues from the past three years are £6 a copy (£8 in the EU, £10 overseas): 01795 662976; www.mags-uk.com. Subscriptions queries: 0844 848 0848. If you have difficulty in obtaining COUNTRY LIFE from your newsagent, please contact us on 020–3148 3300. We regret we cannot be liable for the safe custody or return of any solicited or unsolicited material, whether typescripts, photographs, transparencies, artwork or computer discs. COUNTRY LIFE PICTURE LIBRARY: Articles and images published in this and previous issues are available, subject to copyright, from the COUNTRY LIFE Picture Library: 01252 555090/2/3. INDEX: The COUNTRY LIFE Cumulative Index, in PDF format and updated annually, which lists all articles on country houses and gardens published since 1897, is priced at £42.50 plus VAT and is available from Paula Fahey (clpicturelibrary@ti-media.com) Editorial Complaints We work hard to achieve the highest standards of editorial content and we are committed to complying with the Editors’ Code of Practice (https://www.ipso.co.uk/IPSO/cop.html) as enforced by IPSO.If you have a complaint about our editorial content, you can email us at complaints@ti-media.com or write to Complaints Manager, TI Media Limited Legal Department, 3rd Floor, Marsh Wall, London E14 9AP. Please provide details of the material you are complaining about and explain your complaint by reference to the Editors’ Code. We will try to acknowledge your complaint within 5 working days and we aim to correct substantial errors as soon as possible.

34 Country Life, January 15, 2020

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Alamy; Richard Greenly

Letter of the week

Mark Hedges

Our goose is cooked

I

N ‘What’s sauce for the goose’ (December 11/18, 2019), the writer seems to say that greylag geese and, therefore, all wild geese are best minced with sausage meat and eaten as a burger. I can only assume that he has never eaten a properly cooked wild goose. They don’t have as much meat as a farmed goose, but the flavour is superior in every way. The flesh is dense, but not as much needs to be consumed. Like all game, the meat is low in fat and cholesterol, making it better for you than the majority of farmed meat. Given the choice of a wild or a farmed bird, I know which my family prefers.

Yvette Allen, West Yorkshire

It’s never too late

Y

OUR reference to the ‘late’ Alfred Brendel is premature (‘Roll on, Beethoven’, January 8). Not only has Mr Brendel just celebrated his 89th birthday (January 5), but, last month, he appeared hale and hearty at the debut recital at Wigmore Hall of Eric Lu, the especially talented winner of the 2018 Leeds Piano Competition.

David Atterbury Thomas, London

COUNTRY LIFE JANUARY 22

The Roaring Twenties: ooking forward and looking back; great British philistines; we Spy Vanity Fair; aving our songbirds; plus ain’s legends and travel e someone’s k, every week, with a COUNTRY LIFE subscription 0330 333 1120 www.countrylife.co.uk

Slaves to the power of the peat

A

TOTAL of 500 bulbs potted—all sale bargains, put in re-used plastic pots ready for planting out in the spring. The only real enemy now, apart from truly terrible weather, is the mice.

Those little varmints have a love of tulip bulbs that makes them seriously enterprising in their efforts to overcome any protection.

I used to blame the moles as well, but it turns out that I was wrong. Moles don’t like any bulbs at all and even those dratted mice turn out to be a bit picky. They spurn daffodils, snowdrops, fritillaries and alliums, yet go for tulips, crocuses and gladioli. Nonetheless, I’m not having my flower choices dictated by rodents.

Chicken wire helps, but the more determined mice seem to find ways under it. This year, I’m going for blood. The advice is that blood meal will do the trick and it will add nutrients to the soil at the same time. Vegan visitors will have to avert their eyes from my fine display of tulips.

Actually, I’m much more concerned about the compost I’ve used. Next year, we’ll be making all our own in the smart new wooden bins I’ve installed, so this is the last time I shall still be dependent on bought-in bags. I thought I’d looked carefully at the labels to make sure they didn’t contain peat, but I fear I’ve been bamboozled.

The bags proclaimed their environmental credentials by citing the huge volume of recycled material the company collects and turns into compost. It was only when filling my pots that I discovered that the products into which the green recycling went did not include the ones I had bought. They were chockful of peat.

This is a serious matter because, as do the majority of gardeners, I take environmental

concerns seriously and peat extraction is a major menace.

The plain fact is that peat absorbs more carbon than trees. When we dig it up, we not only lose that sequestration, but what we leave behind creates emissions rather than absorbing them.

It’s a lose-lose situation yet, despite the damage it causes, British gardeners are buying three billion litres a year and that figure is rising.

At the same time, the nation is spending money on restoring peatlands because of the need to fight climate change. It’s nonsense!

While we’re busy making matters considerably worse, we pathetically try to clean up a bit on the side. We have widely available and effective alternatives to peat, which have the added advantage of using much recycled material: a winwin outcome.

The experts recognise this. National Trust gardens are entirely peat free and the RHS is very close to it. As the substitutes aren’t any more expensive and the use of peat does so much harm, why isn’t it banned? Back in 2010, Labour’s Defra Secretary Hilary Benn announced a target to phase the stuff out by 2020. Here we are in 2020, we’ve used nigh on 30 billion litres of peat in the meantime and there’s no end in sight.

The Government has an Environment Bill that will come before Parliament this year. It must contain an outright ban on the sale and use of horticultural peat and with no delay.

The industry needs no more than two years to make the change, so an announcement now would mean no more peat use from 2022.

Boris Johnson’s large majority notwithstanding, surely all MPs would agree with that.

Hilary Benn’s target was to phase the stuff out by 2020; here we are and we’ve used nigh on 30 billion litres

Follow @agromenes on Twitter

Country Life, January 15, 2020 35

Athena

Cultural Crusader

A

Heritage and history has no place in war

THENA is not usually moved to comment on matters of international politics, but the recent threat by the President of the United States to target cultural sites in the ongoing crisis in the Middle East is impossible to ignore. Writing on Twitter last week, he warned that America had ‘targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level and important to Iran and the Iranian culture’. These, he promised, would ‘be hit very fast and very hard’ in retaliation for any Iranian attacks on Americans or American assets.

The implied judgement behind this threat is that cultural heritage is too valuable to lose, yet less sacred than

human life. Challenge me—the President seems to say—and I will keep my hands clean of your blood, but obliterate the things that define you, your history and your country. The list of reasons as to why this kind of threat should never be issued—and in particular by anyone who claims to be civilised, let alone the ‘Leader of the Free World’—might furnish an entire book. And even if the arguments didn’t move you, the most recent precedents for cultural destruction in such

This threat fails to comprehend what a dangerous enemy heritage can be to those who assault it places as China, Syria and Afghanistan are chilling in the extreme. Why put yourself in such company? Or even threaten to do so?

In Athena’s mind, it also fails to acknowledge that cultural monuments are not simply national chattels. Rather, to some degree, they are shared inheritances.

Their loss, therefore, would not simply be a loss to Iran, but to us all. That was a point powerfully made, for example, in the fire that engulfed Notre Dame last year.

As the reaction made clear, that was a tragedy not only for Paris or France, but for everyone who knew or loved them.

This threat also fails to comprehend what a dangerous enemy heritage can be to those who assault it. That’s not only because its destruction can shock even the most divided nation into unity, but because culture and its meanings actively mutate in response to attack. Smashing up an archaeological site may destroy a great deal, but it also revivifies the ruins, often in direct proportion to the efforts taken to destroy them. Indeed, however lifeless and obscure it may previously have been, the wreckage automatically assumes powerful contemporary resonance and meaning. That will be particularly welcome to those elements of the Iranian regime who had no previous interest in the past anyway.

Sober heads in American officialdom already seem to be putting paid to the idea that the President’s threat could ever be carried out. Athena fervently hopes that in this fast-moving situation they prevail.

The way we were Photographs from the COUNTRY LIFE archive

January 3 Dressed in her traditional red cloak, complete with Howard coat-of-arms and pointed hat, an inhabitant of one of the Jacobean almshouses at Castle Rising, Norfolk, poses for a photograph. To be eligible for admission to the social housing, a Sister was expected to be ‘a single woman, 56 years of age at least, no common beggar, harlot, scold, drunkard or haunter of taverns’ The COUNTRY LIFE Picture Library contains 120 years’ worth of photography and articles from the world’s leading architectural and gardens experts. Many are available to license or purchase in print form from £28 plus VAT. Please email enquiries to clpicturelib @ti-media.

36 Country Life, January 15, 2020

www.countrylife.co.uk

F. Sleigh/Country Life Picture Library; Fred van Deelen

1920

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My favourite painting Kim Wilkie Two Figures and Setting Sun by John Craxton

Two Figures and Setting Sun, 1952–67, 48in by 96in, by John Craxton (1922–2009), John Craxton Estate

Landscape, for me, is more about light, sound and stories than appearance.

You really can hear, smell and taste this painting. The vibrating patterns are mesmerising; they root a fleeting moment in a timeless place. The setting sun pulses, the motion in the waves and figures is slowly rhythmic and the mountains float on the horizon.

I have stared at the painting for hours and it draws you in deeper.

It drifts into your imagination 38 Country Life, January 15, 2020

OHN CRAXTON first came to prominence in the early 1940s as a neo-Romantic painter in the pastoral tradition of the 19thcentury Samuel Palmer. Craxton disliked being labelled, but, to his friend and collector Sir David Attenborough, he ‘grudgingly admitted’ he would accept ‘Arcadian’ (John Craxton by Ian Collins, 2011).

John Leith Craxton was born into a musical family. His father was a pianist, musicologist and professor at the Royal College of Music and his mother, a descendant of Benjamin West, the second president of the Royal Academy, gave up a career as a violinist to mother her family of five sons (John was the fourth) and one daughter, the future oboist Janet Craxton. John was brought up in St John’s Wood, where his parents kept open house to young and old

in an atmosphere of benign bohemian disorder. That spirit prevailed when, in old age, he presided over his parents’ later Hampstead home, the music room of which is still used by professional musicians.

For much of his life, Craxton lived and worked in Greece, latterly in Crete—suitably for an Arcadian, as Arcadia was originally a region of southern Greece. He was the artist counterpart of his friend, the Greek-based travel writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor, whose book jackets he illustrated.

Craxton took 15 years to paint this Arcadian homage to his adopted land, due to much revision, including the loss of a figure. A boy flings an octopus onto the quay: ‘The subject is Greek in its bones but what amuses me is the old romantic English love of mood coming out in me,’ he wrote.

www.countrylife.co.uk

Estate of John Craxton. All rights reserved, DACS 2019; Charlie Hopkinson

Kim Wilkie is a landscape architect.

His book Led by the Land: Landscapes was published by Pimpernel Press in November

J

John McEwen comments on Two Figures and Setting Sun

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Farming life

Jamie Blackett

Separating the sheep from the geese The avian visitors are a nuisance when they eat all the grass, but winters would be bleaker without their music

T

HE winter routine on the farm includes a game of ‘sheep-orgeese’. This involves trying to ensure the lambs eat the grass, thus earning me the princely sum of 70p per hogget per week, rather than the visiting geese, which make me diddly-squat. It says something for the state of agriculture that this is currently our most profitable enterprise.

I expect the usual suspects will send me hate mail for chasing the geese off ‘land they no longer own’ to make way for their bêtes noirs (and not only the black ones).

Sheep have been around these parts since God was a boy, but not since God was a baby, so they are proscribed by certain environmentalists who consider that sheep have no place in the British countryside.

Their presence is a source of delight, pride, frustration and depression They can say this with smug solemnity —particularly in the month of Sanctimonuary—because the only cutlets that pass their lips are plant-based (albeit jetfresh, industrially farmed, processed soya from former rainforests). I suspect some would rather farmers were proscribed, too, but there’s a bit of inconsistency in this.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if we removed the sheep and ‘wilded’ our farm, it would revert to thick scrub, which the geese wouldn’t like one bit—a factor in the rise in the goose population is that they winter so well off the rich grass, with side orders of potatoes and winter cereals grown

by British farming plc, that they return to the Arctic Circle in top condition to breed.

Actually, deep down, I have a sneaking sympathy with the goose lobby, but please don’t tell its members that. Winters here in the drizzle would be depressing indeed without the magic of goose music; the dawn chorus and evensong would be thin gruel without the joyful honking of skeins

40 Country Life, January 15, 2020

of geese going inland to feed with the rising sun at their backs, then out again in the gloaming to the mudflats to roost. Seeing their flocks grazing our fields is as calmly satisfying as watching over the woolly-backed variety, but needs must and, in any case, the geese are well able to look after themselves.

The writer and naturalist BB understood geese perfectly when he entitled his seminal novel about them Manka the Sky Gypsy.

The title captures the essential quality of a goose, which is that it has evolved to go where it pleases and eat what it fancies, with highly effective reflexes to defend itself against its main predator, Homo sapiens.

There was a convenient theory—as most theories seem to be these days—that the grey geese were hefted to one particular area for the winter and only moved if forced to by bad weather. If the nasty farmer was too hard on them, they would go hungry. However, one year, I helped the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust trap some pink-footed geese here and fix electronic trackers to them, so we are able to see the whereabouts of ‘our geese’ online.

The experiment has nailed a number of myths. For one thing, they don’t stay in the same family groups, but rather change flocks at will. They also treat the whole of the UK as one big farmers’ market. One day, they’re munching our grass, the next

they’ve hopped over to Lincolnshire for a spot of veg. It makes sense they would go where food is available and keep their flight muscles in shape for the marathon journey back to their breeding grounds.

Not so the barnacle goose: the entire population of the Svalbard barnacle spends the winter on the Solway Firth, mainly in the parish of Kirkbean on the west bank of the Nith or the parish of Glencaple on the east. Their presence is a source of delight, pride, frustration and depression in equal measure to the farmers who host them.

They are protected, so their numbers swell every year—official estimates put their current population at 40,000, which has the same impact on the land as 7,000 sheep. Probably, their numbers are higher.

They have been known to chase the sheep into a corner. When I go and scare them off the grass, they merely laugh at me and fly off to the other side of the field.

The only solution is to try and ensure that the goose fields are grazed first, so it was very irritating to find the other morning that the sheep have found a hole in the hedge and are tucking into the nextdoor stubble. That’s sheep for you.

Jamie Blackett farms in Dumfriesshire and is the author of ‘Red Rag to a Bull: Rural Life in an Urban Age’

www.countrylife.co.uk

Tim Graham/Alamy

Off to Farmers’ Market UK: pink-footed geese range all over the country for their food

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In the garden

Michael Heseltine

Who needs a master plan?

Mistakes worth making: Thenford is now a gardeners’ delight

consignment of trees and shrubs arrived, with perhaps seven different oaks, 10 chestnuts and half a dozen limes. We had, unwittingly, become collectors.

Today, we have more than 4,000 different trees and shrubs.

In the months leading to the annual autumn planting, we sow seeds, take cuttings, search the RHS Plant Finder and receive many rare gifts. In the autumn, we set off with our list. ‘You mean you just plonk a plant?’ commented a friend the other day.

At first, indeed, we were not so much designing a garden as fitting a growing variety of plants into suitable locations. The pressure built up when gardeners began to give us collections with which they could no longer cope —300 different roses, 280 epimediums, 60 box and countless

Horticultural aide memoire Prune blackcurrants The blackcurrant bush is a large object that produces shoots from ground level. To keep it productive, the oldest third of these shoots shoul be removed each year. Now is a goo time. Take secateurs, and perhaps lop and look over the bush. Single out the thickest and hoariest of the shoots and cut each cleanly to the base, pausing to inspect between strikes. As you work, remove any spindly shoots, too.

Once the job is done, you will be left with productive growth and can look forward to a new crop coming up to carry on the rotation. SCD 42 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Our sculpture garden began with purchasing 15 yews in Italy following a NATO conference hellebores. Our 800 different snowdrops are less of a problem because you can only see them for a small part of the year.

It is not that there was no design at all. We had ideas and concepts, but their execution demanded professional skill. We visited great gardens—Hidcote, Kiftsgate and Thorp Perrow here and Villandry and Vaux le Vicomte in France—yet the fact remains there was no polished master plan. The garden grew bit by bit, room by room, rather than following a grand strategy.

Even that rather overstates it.

After we had constructed our first vista, Richard Carew Pole glanced at it and commented: ‘You can’t play at design, you must double the length.’

The herbaceous border was conceived when Darren Webster, our head gardener, was repairing the top of the wall around the old kitchen garden and pointed

out that the outside was southfacing. We seized the opportunity to create a herbaceous border and a grass walk; they were so successful that we have just doubled the border’s size, 20 years later.

Our sculpture garden (which consists of two circles, one at either end of four rectangular rooms with recessed display bays) began with the purchase of 15 conical yews in Italy following a NATO conference. A Government colleague suggested a ring of arches and Anne found a fountain in a sale near Marlow, which was erected in the lower circle.

An iron gloriette from a French brocanteur balanced the fountain in the top one.

At auction, we found a pair of Clodionesque terracotta sculpture groups and, years later, after seeing George Carter’s Chelsea garden with its reflective water, we invited him to redesign our walled garden and incorporate them with mirror pools. An advertisement in a Sunday supplement inspired the concept of a rill; a visit to a flea market in Paris delivered a French wall fountain now set in a cloud hedge.

We couldn’t have done it without the advice of experts. First Lanning Roper, then Roy Lancaster, Robert Adams and Mr Carter. We have been encouraged by friends and the advice of many great gardeners, but, when it comes down to it, we do simply build up an ever wider collection of plants and plonk them in every autumn. We did it bit by bit, often mistake by mistake. There was no great plan. We would not have missed it for the world.

For open days and snowdrop walks at Thenford Gardens & Arboretum, Northamptonshire, visit www.thenfordarboretum.com Thenford: The Creation of an English Garden, by Michael and Anne Heseltine, is published by Head of Zeus Next week Westminster shows www.countrylife.co.uk

Andrew Lawson; Alamy

W

HEN my wife and I worked together on the history of our garden at Thenford, we wanted to call it Mistake by Mistake: the Creation of an English Garden.

Our anxious publishers talked us out of it with the advice that no book with so negative a title would sell. Perhaps they were right, as the sales figures indicate, but we both harbour our doubts. To create a garden is to make mistakes. No couple was better equipped to do so.

On our arrival, abandoned woodland formed a giant horseshoe around the house. The silted-up 18th-century lake had only six inches of water after the 1976 drought. The canal that fed it and the avenue of giant yews that bordered it were neglected; near the 11th-century church, the medieval fish ponds were merely undulations under a mass of petasites. The walled garden had rough grass, providing safety for rearing lambs, and ruined Edwardian greenhouses—the walls had only one or two lead labels left to remind us how the Georgians and Edwardians nurtured their espaliered fruit trees.

If ever there was a time to bring in the consultants, arboriculturists, planners, environmentalists and horticulturists, that was it, but we never seriously thought of such a professional approach.

In the early years, one event dictated the future: we met Harold Hillier and sought his advice.

Shortly afterwards, a huge

A year of cut flowers To find out how to fill your vases with homegrown flowers from now until December, Juliet Roberts talks to Becky Crowley at Chatsworth in Derbyshire Photographs by Jonathan Buckley

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T’S no mean feat to grow a year-round supply of gorgeous flowers and foliage, but to do so at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire requires more than meticulous planning. Becky Crowley, who took over the cutting garden in 2014, is an art-school graduate-turned-grower and the driving force behind what has become one of the finest cutting gardens in the country.

Not only must she provide enough yearround blooms for the three in-house florists to decorate the home of the 12th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, for use at events held at the property and to sell in the farm shop, but Becky also has to ensure the garden looks beautiful during the 10 months it is open. Her enthusiasm, knowledge, and

46 Country Life, January 15, 2020

I grow early-, midand late-season bulbs, tender annuals, shrubs, the whole lot hard work are evident to visitors, as well as to her more than 46,000 Instagram followers.

Becky’s regular postings of beautiful floral compositions (which she sells on Etsy to raise funds for a local charity), her stacks of notebooks, obsessive search for new plants, not to mention the barrowloads of flowers picked by the florists, all point to the fact that, despite her relaxed nature,

she runs the garden like a military operation.

With only part-time help from one to two volunteers during the busiest months and a student one day a week, there’s a lot of work to fit in. Good planning is key.

The one-acre cutting garden, set within the three-acre kitchen garden, sits high up on a west-facing slope behind the old stable block. It has extraordinary views of the Peak District, but is vulnerable to winds whipping through, despite backing on to woodland and being protected by a shelterbelt of trees and shrubs.

The layout, which dates from the early 1990s, comprises numerous beds, averaging 23ft long and 3ft–4ft wide (the perfect width for harvesting). The soil has been well www.countrylife.co.uk

Preceding pages and left: The one-acre cutting garden stands within three acres of kitchen garden. Above: The Chatsworth florists gather Hydrangea Annabelle and other stems to make arrangements for the house. In spring, 6,000 tulips will come into bloom, followed by alliums and aquilegias, then, in summer, peonies, delphiniums and roses

Stalwarts of the cutting garden Anemone coronaria Flowering from late February until April, these have an excellent vase life, especially if cut just as the petals begin to open.

I particularly like the dark, velvety petals of Mistral Blue, Bordeaux and Mistral Vinato

worked and nourished, so needs little feeding.

To ensure a succession of cutting material, Becky relies on a wide range of plants. ‘I grow early-, mid- and late-season bulbs, hardy, halfhardy and tender annuals, biennials, hardy and tender perennials, shrubs and climbers,’ she says. ‘Basically, the whole lot.’

The season begins in March, with masses of Anemone coronaria followed by Ranunculus, and ends with chrysanthemums in December, all grown in the Victorian glasshouses on site. Outdoors, spring is heralded by daffodils and an abundance of tulips.

‘We do tulips in a big way,’ says Becky. ‘Last year, we grew 75 different varieties and planted between 5,000–6,000 bulbs.’ In summer, peonies, roses, lupins, delphiniums www.countrylife.co.uk

Ranunculus asiaticus These come in a great range of beautiful colours, from soft pastel shades to rich bright orange and vibrant pinks, and each plant produces lots of stems, which is particularly handy early in the year. The Elegance range is really special Tulipa Tulips are best in their first year, so we treat them as annuals. Instead of cutting the stem when harvesting, we pull it up with the bulb attached, which gives an extra-long stem and a clear planting bed for the next crop. The double and parrot types are the most popular with the florists Papaver nudicaule Despite looking delicate, Icelandic poppies make great cut flowers, especially if harvested just as the buds start to open and if the ends of the stems are seared in boiling water for 20 seconds. I recommend

Champagne Bubbles and, if you can find seed, the Colibri strains for cutting Paeonia Peonies make superb cut flowers and have a long vase life. Their short flowering season renders them a bit of a frivolous use of space, but if you have a spare patch of ground, they’re a real treat Mint and oregano Herbs add an unbeatable just-pickedfrom-the-garden scent and texture to an arrangement. Oreganum laevigatum Herrenhausen is a lovely darker version, although I like them all Dahlia Flowering from August until the first hard frost, dahlias are invaluable cut flowers.

I particularly like the waterlily and collarette types and always grow dinner-plate-sized ones for fun, but the ball and pom-poms tend to have the longest vase life Panicum Frosted Explosion A beautiful, airy, annual grass that adds lightness and texture to the garden, pots and bouquets. I grow it from seed, and am delighted it has started to seed around

Country Life, January 15, 2020 47

and bearded iris are important crops; then, in late summer, dahlias take centre stage.

Plants grown from seed play a major part in the garden and, each year, Becky puts in about 150–180 different varieties, for which she has developed a finely tuned timeline for sowing: hardy annuals in late summer into autumn; then half hardies in March and April. ‘My aim is to avoid potting on.

I start seed in modules, then, when plants are big enough, they go straight outside.’

Timing is crucial, as ground often needs to be cleared to make way for new plants.

In May, it’s annuals (when summer bulbs are also planted), then, in June, it’s biennials and perennials. ‘April, May and June are crazy busy,’ she laughs. ‘In early summer, we’re not only putting plants in, but also taking plants out, as well as keeping on top of weeding, deadheading and maintenance.’

In September and October, Becky pregerminates Ranunculus indoors, then plants spring bulbs between October and November. The final sowing is sweet peas, which is started in a warm greenhouse before Christmas before the flowers are put in cold frames outdoors. ‘That way, I get tough, healthy little plants rather than leggy things that need pinching out.’

It’s not only the clever choice of plants and timings that sets this garden apart Becky grows numerous trees and shrubs for blossom, berries, foliage and stems.

Some of her favourites include Physocarpus diabolo, dark hazel, Ribes sanguineum, paniculata hydrangeas and lilacs that, although not ideal cut flowers, are useful for that inbetween period around May. The estate’s florists also love the immature fruits of raspberries to add texture and a certain wildness, as well as herbs, especially mint, oregano and rosemary. ‘Anything scented helps bring the garden into the bouquet.’

Ornamental grasses make useful fillers, especially Stipa gigantea, Calamagrostis brachytricha, Briza maxima and the annual Panicum elegans Frosted Explosion. ‘The florists seem to just eat the Panicum, but, happily, it’s self-seeded everywhere.’

It’s not only the clever choice of plants and timings that sets this cutting garden apart, however. The practicalities and maintenance are brilliant, too. One of the first challenges—rabbits—was overcome with the installation of ungalvanised weld mesh In late summer, the garden brims with dahlias, zinnias, sunflowers and others www.countrylife.co.uk

A calendar of flowers January (grown and picked around the site) • Mahonia (November– February) • Hamamelis (December –March) • Viburnum x bodnantense Dawn (October–March)

• Camassia (May–June) • Fritillaria imperialis (April–May) • Ranunculus (started inside, then placed outdoors; April–May) • Cerinthe (late May–June) • Lily of the valley (May)

February to March (planned and grown in the cutting garden) • Anemone coronaria (under glass February– March) • Helleborus (February– April; for floating in water or for seed pods later) • Iris reticulata (February –March) and snowdrops (January–March) in terracotta pots (in cold frames) • Papaver nudicaule (Icelandic poppies grown under glass March–April) • Ranunculus (under glass March–April) • Daffodils (March–May)

June • Achillea (June–September) • Feverfew (June–September) • Biennials, such as Daucus carota Dara (June–August) and hollyhocks (June– September) • Hardy annuals, such as Ammi majus (June– September), Calendula (June–August), Eschscholzia (June–September), Malope (June– September), Orlaya grandiflora, Salvia viridis (June–September) and sweet peas (June–September) • Herbs, including mint, oregano and rosemary • Hydrangea paniculata Vanille Fraise and Limelight (June–August) • Lilium regale (June–July) • Lupins (June–July) • Paeonia (June–July) • Philadelphus Belle Etoile (June–July) • Roses (June–October)

April to May • Tulips (April–May) • Alliums (May–June) • Aquilegia (May–July) • Astrantia (May–August) • Bearded Iris (May–June) • Biennials such as foxgloves (May–July), Anthriscus sylvestris Ravenswing (May–July), honesty (May–June, but also for seedheads in autumn), sweet rocket (May–June) and wallflowers (April–May)

July • Campanula (July– September)

fencing. ‘It took two winters to put it all in, but it completely solved the problem.’

Weeds were also a massive issue, tackled by laying down a thick straw mulch on pathways and beds. ‘It’s been incredible. Not only does it suppress the weeds, but it retains moisture and the soil is now full of life.’

However, together with the worms, came the slugs. ‘For the moment, it’s not a problem,’ explains Becky, who generally takes a sanguine approach to damage by wildlife. ‘The florists don’t need every single flower, so as long as we put in more than enough plants, we can share everything.’

One of Becky’s key pieces of advice is to stake well and stake early. She uses several methods, such as birch twigs, poles and brash, and grids of wooden posts (3ft tall,

• Delphinium (July–August) • Foeniculum vulg (July–September • Hardy annuals such as cornflower (July– September), Gypsophilia (July–August) and Nigella (July–Sept-ember) • Half-hardy annuals, such as Cosmos, Rudbeckia hirta, Amaranthus (late July–October) • Helenium (July–October) • Hydrangea arborescens Annabelle (July– September) • Phlox (July–September) • Zinnia (July–October, indoors for long stems) • Amaranthus (July– October) August to October • Gladiolus murielae (syn.

Acidanthera murielae; August–October) • Dahlia (August–first frosts) • Sunflower (August–frosts) • Cosmos (August–frosts) • Rudbeckia (August– October) • Gladioli (August– September) • Cobaea scandens (August–October) • Selenum wallachianum (August–September) November to December • Chrysanthemums (under glass) Visit www.countrylife.co.uk/ gardencalendar for Becky’s Calendar of Tasks

pushed 16in into the ground) topped with hemp netting for plants to grow through.

The aim is to support the first third of a plant to stop it flopping. ‘There’s a big difference between a characterful wiggle in something that’s obviously garden grown and something that’s got an elbow and is unusable.’

Becky is part of a new generation of gardeners combining the best traditional practices with the power of the internet to research and talk to other growers around the world.

‘What interests me most is seasonality.

Flowers picked from the garden mark a particular moment you won’t get again for another year. Piecing together those moments over the year is my job—and I love it.’

Becky has just left for a new role on the Floret Flower farm, Washington state, US Country Life, January 15, 2020 49

I

F there’s one plant you must buy as soon as the year turns, it’s the hellebore—because there’s so much variety on offer. Many hybrid hellebores (also known as Oriental hellebores) are raised from seed and, as a result, they vary from seedling to seedling. The only way to be sure of what you are buying is to see them in flower, early in the year.

There are elegant singles, anemonecentred ruffs and fully fledged doubles. The flowers can be lightly freckled, heavily spotted, picotee-edged, veined or simple plain Janes, with colours that vary from sootblack to every shade of pink, clear-yellow, apple-green and virginal white. Some gardeners love to lift a swooning hellebore flower, but others prefer an upward facing sun-worshipper. Whichever you prefer, early flying bumblebees often get their first nectar fix from a hellebore flower, so they should be a vital addition to every garden.

It’s taken 60 years of dedicated plant breeding, modern micro-propagation techniques and a generous gene pool from the 15 or so hellebore species found in the wild to produce this abundance. The widely grown hybrid hellebore or Oriental hellebore, Helleborus x hybridus, involves a mixture of several species, all originally sourced from the wild.

Helen Ballard, the Queen of the Hellebores, went plant hunting with her husband, Philip, in the 1960s and 1970s, searching for species before selecting rounded flowers in pure colours and giving them names such as Greencups and Dusk.

Later breeders realised that they had to produce hellebores from seed in order to produce sufficient quantity. John Massey’s Ashwood Nurseries uses traditional plant breeding methods; Kevin Belcher selects the best and crosses them by hand, then grows them on and reselects the crème de la crème. Nurseryman Hugh Nunn developed seed strains in separate colours, a process

How to grow hellebores • If you buy hellebores in January or February, wait until March before planting them • If hellebore foliage is green and leathery, it’s best to cut off all the foliage in early December to prevent a leaf spot disease (Microsphaeropsis hellebori) from spreading. Loosen the soil afterwards with a longhandled fork. Leave any attractively marbled foliage alone, however—it’s a great winter feature • Hellebores hate winter-wet ground, because they spread by surfacerooting rhizomes that creep at soil level. They prefer full sun in spring

50 Country Life, January 15, 2020

The hellebore list With so many varieties on offer, it’s essential to buy new plants now, urges Val Bourne

that took him many years; his Harvington Strain hellebores are named after the Worcestershire village where he once lived.

Here, three experts select their favourites.

John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries prefers the less showy species. In 2018, he was awarded The President’s Award at the Chelsea Flower Show for his display containing every known species. His private garden (open on selected dates) features species hellebores and hybrids • Helleborus dumetorum This small species has green, frost-hardy flowers and finely divided foliage, with bracts that rise above the flowers. It’s not difficult to grow, but it does take time to get established. John uses it under witch hazels, close to his kitchen window, where it happily self-seeds.

• H. torquatus This dark and dusky hellebore from the Balkans has finely divided foliage and dainty flowers in a smoky mixture of grey, black and green. It thrives underneath an airy Japanese and dappled shade in summer— lightly canopied deciduous trees and shrubs are excellent. A slope also helps • Hellebores need feeding. John Massey recommends a high potash feed, such as Chempak No 4, in August or September.

Vitax Q4 also works well. Keep the feed away from the crown • If your plant is pot bound, tease the roots apart before planting • Only divide hellebores if necessary.

Split them into large chunks in September or straight after flowering—small divisions die • Deadhead the seedpods on hybrids before they scatter their seeds

Cornelian cherry, Cornus officinalis, with snowdrops, aconites and erythroniums.

• H. x ericsmithii This creamy hybrid cuts well for the vase (most hybrid hellebores flop when cut) and has lovely silvered foliage.

• H. x sternii John’s form has toothed foliage and applegreen flowers that show up well in winter light. It self-seeds particularly well under conifers with needles.

• John’s favourite: Helleborus x hybridus (Ashwood Evolution Group) This vigorous strain, raised on the nursery, produces outward-facing flowers with colourful backs that keep their colour for longer.

Most are mixtures of amber, peach and apricot; some of the selections have golden nectaries.

Rodney Davey spent more than 30 years crossing species hellebores with hybrids to get the best of both. His partner Lynda Windsor, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, has an unusual ability to scan hundreds of seedlings at a time, spotting minute differences between them; Rodney, who is colour blind, aims for marbled foliage and good flower colour. The best of Rodney’s ‘ladies’ have been micro-propagated and are now grown all over the world • Helleborus Penny’s Pink (Rodney Davey Marbled Group (RDMG)) Named after the garden designer and writer Penny Hobhouse, this makes a great container plant, although you must use pot feed in the winter to aid drainage. It’s good in the border where spring sun falls and the fading grey-pink and aster-violet flowers last well.

• H. Molly’s White (RDMG) This hellebore has frosted green foliage and greenish-white flowers, with exceptionally long stamens, and gradually ages to limegreen. Its name refers to Molly, Lady Marriner, widow of the violinist Sir Neville Marriner, who gardens nearby.

• H. Glenda’s Gloss (RDMG) Lots of white flowers, suffused and finely edged in magenta-pink, unfurl from tight buds on this plant. Its cool-green middle tones with veined and marbled grey-green foliage.

• Rodney’s favourite: H. Anna’s Red (RDMG) Named after garden writer Anna Pavord, this hybrid has large, wine-red flowers and marbled foliage frosted in green, silver and pink. The first to be named, it positively glows in winter light.

Mike Byford has held the Plant Heritage National Collection of hellebore species, primary and intersectional hybrids, plus more than 500 hybrid hellebores, at Hazles Cross farm, Staffordshire, for more than a decade and has bred them for 38 years www.countrylife.co.uk

Left to right: Double white picotee Helleborus x hybridus; luminous apple-green H. x sternii; dusky H. torquatus, from the Balkans

Left to right: Helleborus Anna’s Red (RDMG); H. Molly’s White (RDMG); H. Penny’s Pink’(RDMG), named after Penelope Hobhouse

Ashwood Nurseries; Alamy

Left to right: Early flowering Helleborus thibetanus; H. dumetorum is worth the wait; vigorous H. x hybridus (Ashwood Evolution Group) • Helleborus purpurascens An exquisite plant, with flowers that look silvery grey from afar. Close up, it has a hint of purple-pink overlaid with a green colourwash on each nodding, cup-shaped flower.

The purplish spring foliage fades to green.

• H. x hybridus A picotee-edged white that stands out well, perfectly offset by fine purple or dark-red margins. Grow with the beetroot-red foliage of Euphorbia amygdaloides Purpurea.

• H. multifidus subsp. hercegovinus This green-flowered species, which is found in a narrow strip running from Montenegro through to Southern Bosnia, is grown on a raised bed because it can’t cope with Mike’s claggy clay soil and high rainfall. www.countrylife.co.uk

The plant has lots of green flowers per stem and the narrow green foliage, often purpleblotched where it meets the stem, umbrellas out into a swirl.

• H. x hybridus A good green semi-double, or single, with a picotee edge or red, violet or purple speckles, this looks superb in the early spring garden.

• Mike’s favourite: H. thibetanus Although fully hardy, this early flowering Chinese species, found on steep slopes in scrub in the wild, must be planted in welldrained positions that shed water. Flowers can vary from white through to dark pink, but pale pink is the norm. This enthusiast’s hellebore, a primitive outlier, has soft, celery-like foliage.

Where to buy hellebores • Ashwood Nurseries, Kingswinford, West Midlands (01384 401996; www. ashwoodnurseries.com), sells plants by mail order and at the nursery • Twelve Nunns, Lincolnshire (01778 590455; www.twelvenunns.co.uk), has Harvington Strain plants online • Hazles Cross Farm Nursery, The Plant Heritage Collection, Hollins Lane, Kingsley, Staffordshire (01538 752669; www.hazlescrossfarmnursery. co.uk), is open by appointment, from February to March Country Life, January 15, 2020 51

Daring to grasp the thorn Could this be the best way to train roses ever, asks Val Bourne Photographs by Andrew Sydenham

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HEN I’m driving, like many a gardener, I keep one eye on the road and one on the verge. That was how I discovered Asthall Manor, just west of Burford in Oxfordshire. A substantial stone arch, festooned with roses, had to be examined on foot because I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Gertrude Jekyll’s favourite blushwhite rose, The Garland, was a mass of flower, but without its usual lanky stems and wayward habit.

Synchronicity is a wonderful thing—there was an NGS opening on the following Sunday. The fickle British weather turned and it rained all day, so only a handful of stalwarts turned up, which gave me the opportunity to talk to the then head gardener, Mark Edwards. Asthall’s owner, Rosanna Pearson, had commissioned Julian and Isabel Bannerman to add some magic to the austere country house once owned by the Mitford family and Mr Edwards was the man charged with turning the Bannermans’ romantic 1998 design into reality.

The Garland is astonishing: a highly trained wall tapestry of overlapping circles Roses are a key ingredient, especially on the walls, because Miss Pearson wanted the garden to peak in summer to coincide with her ‘On Form’ sculpture exhibition. Hardy geraniums, foxgloves, verbascums, angelica and sweet williams spill over the paths, adding to the Sleeping Beauty feel. There is also a box parterre set on a slope, like something out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, solid waves of yew and flower meadows that sweep down to the gurgling River Windrush below.

Faced with newly planted roses, a foot or so high, and lots of straight wires, Mr Edwards began to train the roses horizontally. However, the rigidity seemed out of kilter with the rest of the imaginative design, so, in the following year, he began looping the rose stems round instead.

Bending rose stems horizontally slows down the sap and produces more flower buds on tighter growth, but forming loops and circles slows the sap down even more and makes the growth much tighter to the wall. As a result, there is far more flower held on shorter stems.

54 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Today, The Garland, underneath its summer skirt, is astonishing: a highly trained wall tapestry consisting of hundreds of overlapping circles. Yet it didn’t end there. Mr Edwards trained his successor, Jenny Barnes, who added her own stamp and began to create spheres of stems, roughly the size of footballs. Miss Barnes posted pictures on social media and many a young head gardener began to follow the Asthall system.

One of her disciples was rose lover Owen Vaughan, Asthall’s latest head gardener, who used to work at Highgrove. ‘My love of roses began there,’ he says, ‘because I helped prune the rose arbours in the kitchen garden. Since then, I’ve inherited wonderful roses in all my gardens.’

Mr Vaughan began to use the Asthall pruning system in his previous post in a private Gloucestershire garden. He arrived at Asthall in July 2019 and now bears the scars— manipulating rose stems and tying them in cannot be done when wearing gloves.

‘Rubber secretary’s thimbles on the index fingers help, I’ve found,’ says Mr Vaughan, as he hops back up the ladder.

‘On Form’, Asthall Manor, Burford, Oxfordshire, runs from June 14 to July 12 (01993 824319; www.onformsculpture.co.uk) Skeletal beauty: in winter, the intricate patterns of Asthall Manor’s rose stems are revealed in all their carefully trained glory

Owen Vaughan’s Asthall pruning method

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HE training process begins in September with the wall-trained roses.

It’s a slow process: some roses can take up to 10 days to train. The team uses tripod ladders to reach the top.

The foliage is stripped from the stems before pruning to lessen the spread of black spot and remove pests that might overwinter. The collected leaves are not composted in the garden; most go for green waste.

Once the leaves are off, the standard practice applies—the diseased, the dying and damaged parts are removed with sharp secateurs.

The object is to keep a balance of new and old wood, but retain the structure.

On average, 60% of the new wood is kept and an equal proportion of older wood is removed if it looks unproductive.

The garden team tries to tie in as much new growth as possible, but every square

yard is different. Some roses love to get up to the gutters and, sometimes, part of the long new growth has to be cut away.

A mulch of composted horse manure and fish, blood and bone is added to feed each rose in spring.

In autumn, the roses are top dressed with leafmould one year and homemade compost the following.

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The Asthall roses New Dawn (America, 1930) A perpetual-flowering sport of New Dawn, this deliciously fragrant rose bears lots of small, silver-pink flowers and the shiny, olive-green foliage sets the flowers off beautifully.

Two roses cover a huge area and rise to 20ft Wedding Day (Sir Frederick Stern, 1950) Raised at Highdown in West Sussex, a chalk garden, this garden rambler produces large trusses of yellow buds that open to creamy white.

The conspicuous orange stamens set it apart from other white rambler roses.

A prolific once-only flowering plant, it produces amazing winter hips. Up to 35ft

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Mme Grégoire Staechelin (Dot Spain, 1927) This free-flowering, Spanishbred, pale-pink climber has petals that curve backwards to reveal deeper pink backs.

It produces huge numbers of flowers in June, followed by orange-red hips, and will tolerate a north wall. Up to 20ft Paul’s Himalayan Musk (William Paul, late 19th century) This pale-pink rambler is normally seen scaling a tree. Here, it’s trained on its own framework and, by midwinter, it’s like a giant armadillo with a carapace of intertwining stems. Drips with pale-pink flowers in June. Up to 30ft Mermaid (William Paul, 1918) Slow to get going, but worth

the wait, because its canaryyellow blooms have honeycoloured stamens. Best in a sheltered position where it will flower into autumn. Up to 20ft Dorothy Perkins (Jackson Perkins, 1901) This rambler bears large trusses of small, clear-pink, almost double flowers in June, enhanced by green foliage.

The stems are very pliable.

Up to 20ft Climbing Cécile Brünner (Hosp, 1904) Often called the buttonhole rose, because the small, shellpink flowers are the perfect size for the role. Mostly summerflowering, with the odd autumnal addition, and much better than the non-climbing version.

Up to 30ft

Frances E. Lester (Lester Rose Garden, 1946) Large clusters of fragrant, single blush-white flowers, colourwashed in pale-pink. Flowers abundantly in summer and small red hips follow. Up to 15ft Lady Waterlow (Nabbonand, 1903) This climber has healthy green foliage and pale-pink flowers, shaded and edged in darker pink. These are abundant in June and more follow. Up to 15ft Albéric Barbier (Barbier France, 1900) This repeat-flowering rambler bears lemon-flushed flowers that fade to white. These emerge from tightly scrolled buds amid glossy green foliage.

Up to 20ft Country Life, January 15, 2020 55

Gardens

The Sphere, large, £840 each, Architectural Heritage (01386 584414; www.architectural-heritage.co.uk)

Queen Anne urn and pedestal, £650, Capital Garden Products (01580 201092; www.capital-garden.com)

Dragon Glass steel and Dutch gold-leaf sphere, from £4,950, Cavendish Stone (01747 842214; www.cavendishstone.com)

Outdoor attractions Garden ornaments chosen by Amelia Thorpe William Kent urn, £1,014, Chilstone (01892 740866; www.chilstone.com)

Ham House pineapple, £349, Haddonstone (01604 266000; www.haddonstone.com)

Set of four composition stone figures of the Classical elements, £3,800, Jardinique (01420 560055; www.jardinique.co.uk)

Italian carved-limestone garden bench-seat, £12,500, Lassco (020–7394 2100; www.lassco.co.uk)

Meditating Buddha cast-iron statue, £236.50, Round Wood of Mayfield (01435 867072; www.roundwood.com)

56 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Corten panel, £128.50 each, Round Wood of Mayfield (01435 867072; www.roundwood.com)

Pair of large, 20th-century patinated bronze lions, £13,730, Westland London (020– 7739 8094; www.westlandlondon.com)

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Letters from Hillside In the first of a new quarterly series from his Somerset home, plantsman-designer Dan Pearson considers the role of the gardener in the landscape Photographs by Huw Morgan

I

T was November nine years ago and the very end of a growing season when we took possession of Hillside. It was a good time to witness a landscape stripping itself back to reveal its bare bones.

The 20-acre smallholding originally produced fruit and vegetables for the nearby town of Bath, but the farmer before us had turned the ground over to beef cattle in the 1980s and grazed it hard to the hedges. He famously said ‘You can’t live off the view!’, but that view is one of the very reasons we are here.

Perched and exposed on the south-facing slopes, our prospect is remarkable. We look west up the valley, where the stark line of Freezing Hill is picked out in a procession of beech trees. The prevailing wind whips up and over the hill from the Bristol Channel to rush over us and remind us where we are.

The sweep of the three fields in front runs down to a shadowy stream and woods that rise on our neighbour’s slopes. These trees form a backdrop and provide a litmus for what is happening with the weather and seasons.

The alders are smoky with catkin in winter, the lofty poplars shimmer silver in spring.

A hazel understorey flares twice, first creamy with catkins as the wild garlic pushes up its aromatic carpet and then with its distinctive undercurrent of yellow autumn colour. There is life in the woods, mushrooms and wild anemone and deer run there in the gloom. Being pitched as we are, level with the jackdaws in the tree tops, we have a bird’s-eye view.

To the east, the ground runs down the valley, dropping into a wet crease and then rising fast to a plump field called The Tump.

Beyond lies a decrepit orchard and the Summer softness: the garden is designed to blend seamlessly with the landscape

Country Life, January 15, 2020 59

Above: The kitchen garden to the west of the property. Centre top: The woodland on the slopes opposite, mainly poplar, oak, hazel, ash and alder, comes down to the stream

Hospital Field, well known by the locals for being good for animals with its diverse sward. The downwardly running ditch oozes boot-gripping mud and, at its base, a fast and continuous supply of water was audible under brambles that first winter.

We cleared them and allowed a broken hedge of hazel to grow out. The opening up revealed fleets of primroses, which we have been encouraging and increasing. I have made a total of five bridges to switch back and forth and studied the feel of the vegetation here: primeval horsetail and runs of meadowsweet that follow the dampest ground and spearing Angelica sylvestris. It is a fecund place, tall with marsh thistle, but incredibly beautiful in its spontaneity.

The ditch is beyond my possible reach of day-to-day care, so I have introduced a number of muscular perennials that fit with the vegetation and favour the conditions. A river of kingcups now runs from top to bottom to blaze in March, with Iris x robusta, giant Inula and silvery Salix purpurea Nancy Saunders, a selection of our 60 Country Life, January 15, 2020

native purple osier, all added as a bridge between the shimmering poplars and something gently cultivated. These light-fingered moves and the paths walked into the vegeation allow the patch to feel heightened and cared for, despite its ruggedness.

The houses in the valley sit on the spring line and the hedges that run downhill do so in the company of ditches that were dug to channel the water. Campion, bluebell, stitchwort and dog’s mercury, which have hidden there, protected from grazing, are the indicators of their age. The hilly, hard-to-manage ground has saved most of the hedgerows from being grubbed up for larger fields and these are lifelines to wildlife. This landscape is far from wild in reality, but certainly old.

Where the house and barns run along the contour, the farmer had carved out a little vegetable patch in the lee of the barn. This is the natural place to have a garden, tilted into the sun like a deckchair and with the barns providing shelter from the prevailing westerlies. Our neighbour, Glad, tells of the lines of produce she remembers on these slopes

when she was a girl. The first time I walked the land, I could feel in my bones that these fields, with their deep soil, sun and moisture, were going to provide good growing conditions.

I knew I wanted to garden here, but we moved to Hillside to be part of something bigger.

I had been gardening a long, thin plot in Peckham, south London, for 12 years, where every square inch was under my control.

I pined for ground that provided an opportunity to observe a wilder place, a habitat that I could become part of and be influenced by, rather than be the dominant party.

The long view here and the acres I couldn’t possibly manage as a gardener have caused me to question a new set of values that are particular to nurturing this land. The big questions are how much to garden, why and what for? A gardener’s desire to tend, to rear and to nurture is a hard one to overcome, but the landscape that laps up to the house and finishes uninterrupted at the horizon is a powerful influence and a good one in several ways. It is the driver of an aesthetic, it demands a way of gardening that is in tune www.countrylife.co.uk

Left: The boundary stream on the edge of the woodland. Above: Seven years after Dan Pearson changed the regime, the first bee orchids arrived of their own volition with the place and with what energy is available. It allows me to think bigger, to give a little, to be custodian, not dictator. This requires a little humility and, with it, moves made in the right place and at the right time.

When I was getting to know the place, my initial actions were practical ones. I planted an orchard in the first winter, because it’s good to be able to see time mapped in trees.

A blossom wood of native trees was also added on our high ground to provide a sanctuary for birds. I set to and repaired the hedges, re-planting sections overwhelmed by elder and bramble with sweetbriar, hawthorn, guelder rose and buckthorn for the brimstone butterflies. We began to relax the land.

We also changed the grazing regime so the fields could show us what they were made of. The three in front we kept as sheep pasture; the remainder were over-sown with yellow rattle (Rhinanthus major) and wildflowers.

To his credit, the farmer had been thrifty: although the land had been worked hard by the animals, it had not seen a plough in years, nor chemicals or fast-food leys of rye grass. www.countrylife.co.uk

Seven years after changing the regime, we are finding our first orchids and witnessing a new ecology of moths, butterflies and beetles.

Swallows have returned and the bats have runs along the hedges we’ve let grow out. Rough banks are left uncut and tussocky and barn owls and hawks hunt for voles and mice.

I pined for a wilder place, a habitat that I could become part of and be influenced by The push of Nature that we have encouraged via careful management has been the barometer and the provider. It took five years of observing and trialling what would feel right on the farmer’s old vegetable patch to decide what to do about making a garden.

Taking the time looking and being part of the place allowed me to know what would work here and the hub provided by the area

near the buildings has enriched the hillside, as well as being very much part of it.

The gardened garden was started in 2015 and made in sections as resources became available and as we repaired the buildings to make way for an area of cultivation. It runs in a spine along the contour that holds the house, borrowing from the wildness of the ditch to the east, jumping the track and moving in an easy swathe that wraps the barns.

It pauses where the meadows reach the house, so we sit to enjoy the view with newly sown wildflower banks coming up to meet us. It then continues west, where we grow to eat in a kitchen garden that sails through into the new orchard and nods to the smallholding that preceeded us with its lines of produce.

Although the garden proper does have boundaries, because the gardener in me needs to be subservient to the naturalist, it is a place that blurs boundaries and allows us to be fully here and connected through tending it.

Visit www.danpearsonstudio.com Next time The woodland Country Life, January 15, 2020 61

To mark Anne Brontë’s 200th birthday, Charlotte Cory looks back at the life and works of this ‘runt of the literary litter’ and finds she was by no means meek and mild

P

ITY poor Anne Brontë, the youngest, overshadowed and least read of the Brontë sisters. Regarded rather as the runt of the literary litter, Anne, like the last born in many large families, has always needed to elbow her siblings aside for the attention that is her due. It is her fate that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, one of the first great feminist novels, is inevitably shelved alongside Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, two of the greatest novels ever written.

62 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Anne was born on January 17, 1820, the sixth and final child of her Cornish mother, Maria Branwell, and Irish father, the Rev Patrick Brontë. A year later, Mrs Brontë became ill and took seven painful months to die, during which the six little Brontës huddled together downstairs, making no noise. Her despairing last words—‘Oh God, my poor children’— rang out through the quiet house although, throughout her illness, she had hardly seen them. As the first Brontë biographer, Mrs

Gaskell, recounted, ‘the sight of them, knowing they would soon be motherless, would have agitated her too much’.

The problem of caring for the orphaned flock was solved when Mrs Brontë’s elder sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Cornwall to take charge of the household. Appalled by the Yorkshire weather, Aunt Branwell shut herself away in her room with the asthmatic, delicate baby Anne. She bolted the window, had a fire constantly burning and only left www.countrylife.co.uk

Mick Manning/Brita Granström/published by Watts/Hachette; Anne Bronte Poster/print sold by the Bronte Parsonage shop

The forgotten Brontë sister

the parsonage on Sundays, to hurry across the churchyard and sit in the front pew of the church to listen to her brother-in-law preach.

Anne was four years old when her four elder sisters went away to the school for clergymen’s daughters, made infamous in Jane Eyre, and five when they returned, the two older ones to die and join their mother in the graveyard visible through the parsonage windows.

Charlotte, now the eldest, appointed herself leader and formed a natural alliance with Branwell, the only boy, with whom she collaborated on stories set in the imaginary Kingdom of Angria. Emily and Anne became so inseparable that people mistook them for twins.

They, too, had their own fictional world, the Lands of Gondal and Gaaldine, developed in childhood and never set aside. They also wrote ‘diary papers’, a few of which survive, revealing their shared, secretive writing life that likewise endured for the rest of their days. www.countrylife.co.uk

Above: The Brontës cross the windy moors.

Left: A modern poster print of Anne Brontë The creative yet claustrophobic parsonage was poor preparation for the outside world and each of the Brontës suffered wretchedly whenever they left home. Apart from a year at school, where Charlotte was a teacher, Anne’s first venture out was to become a governess—firstly with the Ingham family at Blake Hall in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, then for five years with the Robinson children at Thorp Green, near York. Unfortunately, she secured a job for her brother as tutor there and, when he formed an unwise attachment to Mrs Robinson, her husband sent him packing.

Anne left, too. Branwell never got over his disappointment and, turning to drink and drugs, he made life miserable for everyone in the parsonage.

Country Life, January 15, 2020 63

a new work by the bestselling Currer Bell.

Charlotte’s publisher wrote to Haworth demanding an explanation. In a panic, Charlotte made Anne accompany her to London to prove they were separate authors.

Within weeks, Branwell died. Emily perished soon after and, when Anne learnt that her own tuberculosis was fatal, she insisted on journeying to Scarborough, where one of her last acts was to berate a man mistreating donkeys on Scarborough sands. Alone, of the whole tragic family, she was not buried in Haworth, but in a graveyard overlooking the sea.

Top: On leaving home, Anne went to work as a governess for the Ingham family.

Above: Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother, Branwell, telling stories in front of the fire

The passionate honesty and liveliness of Anne’s writing make her a fascinating character

It was during this bleak period that Charlotte pushed her idea of publishing the sisters’ verse. After many attempts, she found a firm that agreed to issue The Poems

by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (as the sisters called themselves), but at the authors’ expense. The sisters used their small legacies from Aunt Branwell and, although the venture was not a commercial success, it emboldened Charlotte to send their novels —her own The Professor, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey—to publishers, who generally sent them straight back.

Eventually, a Mr Newby offered to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, again funded by their authors. Charlotte continued sending out The Professor and, when one firm turned it down, but said they would like to see more from Currer Bell, she immediately

As with Emily, the facts of Anne’s life are scant, largely edited by the domineering older sister Charlotte, who apparently burned letters and manuscripts in an attempt to protect her younger sisters from charges of moral turpitude. She tried to prevent The Tenant of Wildfell Hall being reissued, even though reviewers praised the startlingly unsentimental plot that challenged the idea of a dutiful wife standing by her husband, whatever his behaviour.

Anne’s death at the age of 29 deprived the world of an interesting voice. She wasn’t the meek and mild creature Charlotte would have us believe—the passionate honesty and liveliness of her writing and convictions make this youngest Brontë sister a fascinating character in her own right.

Happy 200th birthday, Anne.

64 Country Life, January 15, 2020

dispatched Jane Eyre. By return, they sent her a cheque and published it six weeks later. The enormous success of Jane Eyre galvanised Newby into rushing out Emily and Anne’s books in a single volume, full of typos, that did neither work any favours.

The reception of Agnes Grey was mixed: the authenticity of the experience of being a governess was admired, but the character of Agnes was too insipid for readers to take ‘much interest in her fate’. This book was inevitably compared to Wuthering Heights, largely praised for its ‘savage grandeur’, but also attacked vehemently for its amorality.

Emily and Anne both suffered from this failure, but not enough to prevent them embarking on new novels.

The following July, 1848, Newby published Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as

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‘For the use of schollars and those affected’ Chetham’s School and Library, Manchester

The buildings of a wealthy medieval college were transformed during the 17th century into a school and what is now Britain’s oldest surviving public library. Steven Brindle visits a remarkable survival Photographs by Paul Highnam

M

ANCHESTER is famed as one of Britain’s great Victorian cities. It harbours some remarkable surprises, however, from its earlier history. At the north end of the City centre is an exceptionally fine latemedieval parish church, now the cathedral.

Just to the north of this is an enclave of latemedieval college buildings that once housed the priests who served the church. Today, it is home to Chetham’s School and Library, one of the oldest charitable institutions, and the oldest public library, in Britain.

Manchester in the late Middle Ages was a compact, but prosperous town, sitting on rising ground in the angle formed by the junction of two rivers, the Irk and Irwell.

The manor house of the De Gresley family, lords of the manor, probably stood on the highest spot, 40ft above the nearby River Irk, and traces of three successive lines of defensive ditches have been found, centred on this site. On the death of Thomas Gresley in 1313, the manor passed to his Fig 1: A view of the library with its gated presses. Note the 17th-century stools Country Life, January 15, 2020 67

Fig 2: The Reading Room. Against the wall is a hinged case, a chained church library sister Joan and, through her husband, into the hands of the de la Warre family. John, 4th Lord de la Warre, had no children and, on his death in 1398, was succeeded by his brother Thomas, a clergyman.

Thomas held the rectories of Manchester and nearby Ashton-under-Lyne and, in 1421, used his considerable wealth to found an independently endowed community or college of priests that would serve the former church. It comprised a warden or master, eight priests, four clerks, and six choristers.

In 1534, the college had revenues of £40 5s 3d from lands and £186 7s 2d from tithes.

Reflecting the resurgent fortunes of Henry V’s claims to the French throne, and the stirring nationalism of the moment, the parish church was re-dedicated to St Mary, St Denis (patron saint of France) and St George.

Thomas died in 1427, the last of the male line of the de la Warres, and most of the family estates passed to another branch of the family. The de la Warres remained the patrons of the church until the reign of Elizabeth I, but their interests were henceforth focused in Kent and Sussex. Thomas, however, gave the foundation his Manchester manor, with its manor house and property, which were added to the existing tithes.

Meanwhile, £3,000 was provided for building the new college and work to reconstruct the parish church was initiated under the direction of the first warden, John Huntingdon. The college’s residential buildings, completed by the mid 15th century, have survived remarkably well.

By 1500, the Stanleys and other local gentry and merchant families were actively patronising the parish, adding more chantry chapels 68 Country Life, January 15, 2020

to the already large church. By the early 16th century, the magnificent choir stalls and a great west tower were being added.

At the Reformation, the college was dissolved under Edward VI’s Chantries Act of 1547, at which time the powerful Stanley family, Earls of Derby, seized control of its buildings. Queen Mary then re-founded the college. In most cases, Elizabeth I reversed such restorations in 1559–60, but Manchester’s college of clergy somehow survived and, in 1578, it was reconstituted as an establishment of a warden, four fellows, two chaplains, four lay clerks and four choristers to sing services.

Almost uniquely in England, Manchester remained a collegiate church up to 1847 In 1595, the remarkable scholar, mathematician, alchemist and philosopher of the occult, Dr John Dee (1527–1609), was appointed Warden by the Queen. The college was suppressed again during the Commonwealth, but revived once more at the Restoration. Manchester, therefore, almost uniquely in England, remained a collegiate church up to the foundation of the new diocese of Manchester in 1847, when the warden became the Dean of the new cathedral.

For the century after the Reformation, the Stanley family used the collegiate buildings as a residence. Their property was seized

by Parliament during the Civil War and the

near-derelict buildings attracted the attention of a remarkable local man: Humphrey Chetham (about 1580–1653). Chetham was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant, whose family had been in the trade since the 1530s. He and his brother, George, worked in successful partnership and, by 1619, their business was valued at £19,000.

Humphrey, who outlived his brother, invested some of his profits in land, buying the lordship of Turton in 1628. He also emerged as Manchester’s leading banker, with a reputation for probity and honesty.

Chetham refused a knighthood and tried to avoid public service, but he was obliged to collect Ship Money for Charles I in the 1630s and subsequently serve as Parliament’s Treasurer in Lancashire in the 1640s. www.countrylife.co.uk

Fig 3: The Audit Room, with its decorative plaster cornice and medieval ceiling. This room was formerly part of Dr Dee’s lodgings Chetham never married, but he was a generous philanthropist. During his lifetime, he sponsored the education of poor local boys and decided to establish a permanent institution to carry on this good work. He died at his residence, Clayton Hall, on September 20, 1653, and was buried in the collegiate church.

Chetham’s will, made in 1651, set aside £7,000 for acquiring lands to be worth at least £420 per annum, as an endowment for a school with places for 40 poor boys from the Manchester area. £500 was set aside for the purchase of property to house the school, £1,000 for buying books to establish a free public library for Manchester, £100 for fitting out a library building and another www.countrylife.co.uk

£200 for founding another five small ‘chained libraries’ for the churches in Manchester, Bolton, Turton, Gorton, and Walmsley.

Towards the end of his life, Chetham was negotiating with the Parliamentary commissioners to acquire buildings of the Manchester College, which he described as ‘spoyl’d and ruin’d and become like a dunghill’. In 1654, his feoffees (the trustees of his charities) managed to acquire them. The buildings were fitted up to house Chetham’s School and Library, in about 1654–58, and they are still there, although the former was re-established as the celebrated School of Music in 1969.

The Library is the oldest public library in the English-speaking world (Fig 1).

Entrance to this miraculously wellpreserved complex of 15th-century buildings is through a gatehouse that opens off Long Millgate into a spacious yard. The buildings are of red sandstone, two storeys high, with stone slate roofs. There were a couple of rounds of restoration in the 19th century, but these were done with some sensitivity.

To the right of the north gate, the entrance yard is closed by a long range that extends to the main block (Fig 6). This was probably lodgings for servants and guests and was later the school dormitories. At the far extreme, it houses the old kitchen, an impressive, double-height space, which retains its original open roof, and a notably broad fireplace.

Country Life, January 15, 2020 69

Fig 5: The vaulted bay window with its fixed wooden benches, opening off the Reading Room, forms a comfortable study

Fig 4: The 1420s great hall looking towards the screens passage, a remarkable survival

The main block is quadrangular, organised around a little cloistered court and entered through a porch that opens into a screened passage at one end of the great hall (Fig 4).

At first, this gives the impression of being an unaltered medieval interior, with its stone walls and open timber roof, but there have been a few changes. Originally, there was a central hearth, with a louvre in the roof to let the smoke out. The great arched inglenook and fireplace in the west wall were probably introduced in the 16th or 17th century.

Otherwise, the original arrangement survives almost completely, including the massive timber canopy over the dais and the entrance screen, perhaps the earliest example of this fixture to survive intact.

The original Warden’s chambers were sited, one over the other, at the south end of the hall beyond the dais. The lower one is now known as the Audit Room (Fig 3), 70 Country Life, January 15, 2020

because Chetham’s feoffees used to meet here to audit the accounts. There is 17th-century panelling and a plaster frieze, but the richly carved ceiling with its deeply moulded beams and carved bosses (which include a ‘Mouth of Hell’, devouring a sinner) are the original 15th-century work. Dr Dee lived here in the late 16th century, and his rooms have become a place of pilgrimage for devotees, being the only place where he resided that still stands.

When the college was built in the 1420s, there were chambers for the eight canons or priests in three wings around the inner courtyard, all linked, at ground- and firstfloor levels, by cloister-galleries (Fig 7). The original layout is not clear, but it may be that each priest had a day-room at groundfloor level and a chamber above. There must have been further chambers for the four vicars or clerks, and the choristers and servants probably lived in the long east wing.

Chetham’s will required that his library should be ‘for the use of schollars, and others well affected’, and that librarian should ‘require nothing of any man that cometh into the library’. An L-shaped gallery was formed to house it in the upper floor of the south and west cloister ranges with their original 15th-century roofs. In the 1650s, a local joiner, Richard Martinscroft, was commissioned to make bookcases, set at right angles to the long walls and thus forming bays. Chetham specified that the books were to be chained to the shelves.

The feoffees, meanwhile, set to work to acquire a collection concentrating on theology, law, history, medicine and science that would be useful to the clergy, professional men and merchants of the town. The practice of chaining was abandoned in the mid 18th century; wooden gates were added to the bays. Readers were allowed to consult books in the Reading Room (Fig 2): originally, this was the Warden’s upper chamber, above the Audit Room, and it retains its original 15th-century bay window (Fig 5) and open timber roof.

This room was panelled, probably in about 1700, and a fireplace wall was filled with a splendid composition of carved woodwork, including Chetham’s arms. Above is an eagle and, to either side, are wreathed obelisks, standing on piles of books and supporting lamps, for learning. There are figures of a Pelican, for piety, too, and a cockerel, perhaps representing Mercury and thus commercial acumen. This beautiful room, www.countrylife.co.uk

with its historic furniture, is still used for meetings of the Chetham trustees.

The library has continued to grow to the present day, now housing more than 120,000 printed items, more than half of which date from before 1850—it is one of our great historic collections. The space also holds a major selection of manuscripts, mostly of local and regional interest, and has grown to fill much of the 15th-century building. A new entrance was made in 1876–78, with a staircase rising in one corner of the main library, but, otherwise, the interiors are remarkably untouched; it is one of the most evocative and atmospheric historic libraries in Britain.

Over the centuries, Chetham’s School continued to fulfil its founders’ vision and was atmospherically photographed by Country Life in 1934. However, when a much larger institution, Manchester’s famous Grammar School, was established nearby, it seemed Chetham’s school needed a more specialised role. In 1969, the bold decision was taken to turn it into a co-educational Music School.

Manchester Grammar moved to larger premises and the re-founded Chetham’s relocated to the Victorian building it had occupied.

Today, Chetham’s is an internationally famed School of Music. The library remains a vigorous scholarly institution, and the www.countrylife.co.uk

buildings are regularly open to the public.

Thus, Humphrey Chetham’s foundations have evolved and thrived, as well as preserving the buildings that form their historic home. It is a remarkable record of continuity and adaptation. The founders could not have foreseen such outcomes, but they would surely be pleased.

Fig 6 above: The entrance yard with the lodging range, later converted into dormitories, to the right, and the hall and porch to the left. Fig 7 below: At the heart of the 15th-century complex is a small cloister.

This shows one of the walks. It has a timber ceiling and the doors leading off to the left opened into the canons’ lodgings

Country Life, January 15, 2020 71

Alas for the mailed warrior!

Alas for the splendour of the prince!

How that time has passed away, Dark under the cover of night, As if it had never been.

‘The Wanderer’, Anglo Saxon, from the 10th-century Exeter Book HE deeds of champions once shook the landscapes of Britain and Ireland—and who doesn’t feel nostalgia for a lost age of monsters and heroes? Let us ramble from Cornwall to Coventry, from Winchester to the Scottish Highlands, singing as we go of chivalry, conquest and at least one diabolical giant.

Of all Britain’s ancient monarchs, Arthur must be the most renowned. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century The History of the Kings of Britain, Arthur is conceived somewhat inauspiciously at Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. During a feast, Uther Pendragon has been flirting with Igraine, the wife of the Duke of Cornwall, Count Gorlois. Insulted, he leaves the court, refusing to return despite the king’s orders. In revenge, Uther sends his army to ravage Cornwall, causing Gorlois to retreat to another castle and leave his wife at Tintagel. With the help of Merlin, Uther transforms into the likeness of Gorlois and visits Igraine. Believing Uther to be her husband, returned home just to protect her, she ‘[refuses] him nothing that he asked’.

T

Land of myth and legend: heroes and monsters The deeds of champions once shook our landscape.

In the second of three articles, Amy Jeffs explores the truth behind the Loch Ness monster and Lady Godiva Illustrations by Amy Jeffs

Immediately, the River Ness monster advances through the black flood In later tales of Arthur’s famed court, desire—now for love, now for glory—sends heroes on vivid quests through the landscape. Take Gawain and the Green Knight.

When seeking his verdant nemesis, Arthur’s knight Gawain ventures into the Green Chapel, a cave-like vessel of greenish hue—a lair for the Devil’s matins—where the Green Knight can be heard sharpening his axe. It has been noted that the visual description recalls Lud’s Church in the Staffordshire Roaches, a chasm with mossrimed walls, lit by viridescent rays. Could it have inspired the poet some seven centuries ago?

Likewise, in The History of the Britons by the 9th-century Welsh historian Nennius, Arthur’s dog Cabal leaves his paw print in a rock when chasing the legendary boar Troynt over a hill. Thereafter, the hill was known as Carn Cabal (now Carn Gafallt, Breconshire). The mark was probably The deception of Igraine at Tintagel Castle

72 Country Life, January 15, 2020

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Country Life, January 15, 2020 73

Above: Gawain enters the Green Chapel, shown here as Lud’s Church in the Staffordshire Roaches. Right: King Arthur’s dog Cabal leaves his paw print on a stone atop Carn Gafallt

a petrosomatoglyph (an imprint, natural or otherwise, of a body part in stone) of the kind found across the world and often incorporated into local legend. The rock is lost, although the Carn’s canine name endures.

Another legendary name may be found in the wilds of Oxfordshire, although this tale is not British, but Germanic. A Neolithic barrow hunkers among the beech trees—it is called Wayland’s Smithy, the Old English for which, Welandes Smiððan, survives in a charter from 955ad. It refers to the forge of the mythic goldsmith, Wayland, whose exploits are recorded in an Old Norse poem, Völundarkvitha, and in pictures on the Anglo-Saxon whale-bone Franks Casket, as well as contemporary stone carvings.

Wayland weds a swan-maiden, but, before long, she abandons him. Lovelorn, waiting, he works ceaselessly at his forge. When an evil king invades Wayland’s hall, he finds it strung with 700 red-gold rings, all wrought with gems. For Anglo-Saxon explorers of the Berkshire Downs, it seems

74 Country Life, January 15, 2020

the barrow made a fitting home for their artist of heroic ability.

Wayland’s achievements subvert those of the archetypal military hero and tales of saints do likewise. Consider the tantalising story of the River Ness monster, found in the Life of St Columba, written in about 690ad

by Admonán, Abbot of Iona. St Columba and his disciples are following the River Ness through the Scottish Highlands when they spy a group of men across the water. They are burying their friend, who has been killed by a beast from the river. Columba, wanting to join them, asks for the boat on the opposite www.countrylife.co.uk

Right: Lugne meets the River Ness monster. Below: A hoard of 700 redgold rings emerges from Wayland’s Smithy, Oxfordshire

bank and the holiest of his followers, Lugne, dives in to fetch it. Immediately, the monster advances through the black flood until, when it is seconds away from devouring the swimmer, Columba orders the beast to retreat.

This it does, as if wrenched by ropes.

Elderly but lethal, Guy vanquishes the giant, delivering England from the Danes Prowess and piety coalesce in a hero of later legend, Guy of Warwick. His romance, popular from the 13th century, is set in the reign of the Anglo-Saxon King Æthelstan (who died in 939). After a lifetime of military exploits, Guy returns from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as a pious hermit, retreating to a hermitage in the Warwickshire hamlet now known as Guy’s Cliffe. However, the Danish invade with a giant called Colebrand

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and Æthelstan knows that only Guy can defeat him. Brought to Hampshire and begged by the royal court at Winchester to intervene, Guy reluctantly meets Colebrand on Hyde’s Mead, just north of the city walls. Elderly but lethal, he vanquishes the giant, delivering England from the Danes.

Guy’s sanctity implies divine support for the English victory, a tactic echoed in the legend of the Welsh Castle of Dinas Bran (today a dramatic ruin on a hill) in Denbighshire.

The remarkable History of Fulk FitzWarin resurrects Gogmagog, the last giant of Albion, drowned upon Brutus’s foundation of

Country Life, January 15, 2020 75

76 Country Life, January 15, 2020

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Britain (‘Land of myth and legend: origins’, January 8). It begins with William the Conqueror travelling to Wales, where he discovers a demon has possessed Gogmagog’s corpse, dragged it from the sea and taken over Castle Bran. William’s knight, Payn Peverel, enters the ruins, brandishing a cross on his shield. Cowed by the holy symbol, the demon flees the carcass. The Welsh are saved by the Normans and Peverel’s descendants become lords of Whittington Castle, Shropshire, ancestors of the legend’s eponymous Fulk.

Civic, rather than dynastic, politics underpin the West Midlands tale of Lady Godiva.

A Coventry resident of the mid 11th century, she is a hero of the people. Her legend appears in the work of Roger Wendover (who died in 1236), historian at St Albans Abbey. He records how she protested the crippling taxes imposed on the citizens by her husband by riding naked through the streets, veiling her body with her own hair. Although she commanded the townsfolk to shut their windows, later iterations of the tale describe how one ‘Thomas’ could not resist a covert glance— thus the nickname ‘peeping Tom’.

Monstrosity and heroism take many forms: giants, children, knights and smiths. These islands have seen them all. www.amyjeffshistoria.com www.countrylife.co.uk

Facing page: Gogmagog’s corpse leaves the ocean and makes for Dinas Bran. Above: Guy of Warwick’s defeat of Colebrand at Hyde’s Mead. Left: Coventry’s Lady Godiva heads for the stables

Country Life, January 15, 2020 77

Interiors The designer’s room

Victoria Wormsley’s elegant kitchen balances traditional elements with modern touches

F

RENCH-BROOKS INTERIORS is a design studio in South Kensington and Hampshire. At its helm is Victoria Wormsley who, having spent 15 years designing interiors for developments in central London, is comfortable working in a range of idioms, from paredback Minimalism to traditional and eclectic.

Adhering to the mantra that interior design needs to speak to the architecture of a house, Victoria set out to create a kitchen that would set off the scale of the space that was formerly the dining room.

‘I didn’t want a predictable country-house style. I was aiming for a more impressive, more formal space, which incorporated some contemporary elements.’

The focal point is the chandelier above the dining table. Made by Cox London, it features oak leaves made of steel and brass (020–3328 9506; coxlondon.com).

‘It’s imposing, yet very much of the countryside, especially as there are lots of oaks locally. We all love it. It’s like living with a piece of oak tree growing in the house.’

The table, which seats 10, was made to order in Wiltshire to echo a medievalrefectory table, with a pedestal base in a stained oak. The chairs are in a style known as os de mouton (‘lamb bone’, which relates to the shape of the stretches on their bases) and covered in a Belgian linen by Stereo with antique brass nailing (01892 750003; www.stereointeriors.co.uk).

The compact cooking area was designed

by Martin Moore in a classic style (0845 180 0015; www.martinmoore.com). For this, Victoria chose muted colours, including Stony Ground by Farrow & Ball, for the cabinetry (01202 876141; www.farrow-ball. com) and Plumbago Blue by Fired Earth on the island (01295 812088; www.fired earth.com). The storage is closed, underpinning the space, which is used by both the family and for more formal entertaining: ‘I didn’t want lots of cheery mugs and colourful cookery books on show.’

Arabella Youens French-Brooks Interiors (020–7591 0165; www.french-brooks.com) Mel Yates

78 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Interiors

Wrought Iron Grape chandelier, £1,104, Besselink & Jones (020–7584 0343; www.besselink.com)

24-arm Leaf chandelier, £11,760, Charles Edwards (020–7736 8490; www.charlesedwards.com)

Antique White Leaves chandelier, £580, Cox & Cox (0330 333 2123; www.coxandcox.co.uk)

Swing low Anjou chandelier, £2,682, Vaughan (020– 7349 4600; www.vaughandesigns.com)

Chandeliers and hanging lights to add a decorative flourish to any interior, chosen by Amelia Thorpe

Gold Palm Tree chandelier, £398, Graham & Green (01225 418200; www.grahamandgreen.co.uk)

Highlands chandelier, large, £5,740, plus shades, Holloways of Ludlow (020–7602 5757; www.hollowaysofludlow.com)

Sussex pendant light in Old Gold, £662.50, plus shades, Jim Lawrence (01473 826685; www.jim-lawrence.co.uk)

Globe chandelier, £905, Julian Chichester (020–7622 2928; www.julianchichester.com)

Garrick chandelier, £400, Neptune (01793 427450; www.neptune.com)

Acanthus chandelier, £1,720, Paolo Moschino for Nicholas Haslam (020–7730 8623; www.nicholashaslam.com)

Larger Halo chandelier, from £490, Pooky (020–7351 3003; www.pooky.com)

80 Country Life, January 15, 2020

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Kitchen garden cookNuts

by Melanie Johnson

More ways with nuts Maple pannacotta with mixed-nut brittle Lightly grease six pudding moulds with vegetable oil and set aside. In a saucepan, combine 400ml of single cream, 200ml of whole milk, one teaspoon of vanilla paste and 150ml of maple syrup.

Heat until almost boiling, then drop in five sheets of gelatine that have been soaked in cold water until soft. Whisk together before pouring into the prepared moulds. Chill until set.

Meanwhile, make the brittle by heating 450g of caster sugar, 100ml of water, 100g of butter and 125g of golden syrup in a saucepan. Bring it to a boil, but don’t stir, just wait for it to turn a dark caramel. As soon as it does, add 350g of mixed nuts.

Stir and pour onto greaseproof paper, then leave to cool. Invert the pannacottas and serve with broken shards of brittle.

Armagnac-soaked prunes would be a great addition.

Italian panforte Serves 8, after dinner Preheat your oven to 160˚C/ 320˚F/gas mark 4 and lightly grease a 25cm (10in) loosebottomed cake tin. Add a circle of parchment paper to the base and set aside.

Process half of the nuts until coarsely ground and place them in a large bowl with the remaining whole nuts.

To the same bowl, add the flour, cocoa powder, spices and chopped dried fruit. Mix well so everything is evenly distributed. Set aside.

Heat the caster sugar and honey in a saucepan until bubbling. Allow to caramelise

for a few minutes and pour onto the nut mixture. Mix everything together and pour into the prepared tin, pressing down with the back of a spoon to form a smooth surface, then dust the top generously with flour to cover. Place in the preheated oven for 50 minutes to an hour.

Remove the panforte from the oven and cool in the tin for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool further. Use a pastry brush to brush off the flour, then generously sift over icing sugar in a thick layer. Slice into wedges and serve after dinner.

Ingredients 350g mixed nuts 100g plain flour (plus more for dusting) 40g cocoa powder 2tspn ground cinnamon 2tspn ground ginger Half a teaspoon ground nutmeg 200g dried fruit, apricots, figs, prunes 200g caster sugar 200g honey Icing sugar

We could all do with ways to use up our leftover Christmas nuts 82 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Spiced nuts Toss 400g of mixed nuts with a splash of neutral oil, a drizzle of honey, a chopped sprig of rosemary, chilli flakes and seasoning, then lightly roast in a moderate oven until just taking colour.

Cool slightly and serve.

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Melanie Johnson

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Property market

Penny Churchill

Decisions, decisions...

This year, we can expect some serious movement in the market–and these delightful country houses could be snapped up quickly

T

HE overall feeling at the upper end of the residential property market is largely one of relief at the outcome of last month’s General Election, with leading estate agents expecting to see a ‘Boris bounce’ in London reflected in the market for country houses in areas often shunned by nervous buyers in recent years.

As Edward Rook of Knight Frank explains: ‘Last year, even buyers desperate to move to the country were slow to commit to buying a house that either meant a major lifestyle change, involved a difficult commute 84 Country Life, January 15, 2020

or was expensive to maintain. This resulted in some really good country houses remaining unsold in 2019—a situation that we expect to see reversed in 2020.’

He cites the example of charming, Grade IIlisted Comforts Place, near Lingfield, Surrey, which came to the market in September last year, at a guide price of £3.15 million through Knight Frank’s Sevenoaks office (01732 744460). The house, the name of which is thought to derive from an old Surrey family that lived in the area from 1204 to 1294, originally formed

part of a medieval aisled hall that was extended in the early to mid 15th century.

The core of the present house is formed by an Elizabethan manor house of 1597, although its earlier origins can be seen in features such as the crown-post and medieval joists within the surviving earlier cross-wings.

During their 17-year tenure, the current owners have substantially enhanced the house, gardens and grounds (owned at one time by music producer Andy Hill and his wife, Nichola Martin, creators of pop group www.countrylife.co.uk

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Left and above: Grade II-listed Comforts Place has been extensively renovated. £3.15m Comforts Place is built of brick and part tile-hung under a Horsham-stone-slate and tiled roof and stands in 16½ acres of gardens, grounds and paddocks, in a wonderfully private location some two miles north-west of Lingfield. It benefits from an excellent rail service from Oxted, 4½ miles away, that takes just under 40 minutes to London Victoria and 30 minutes to London Bridge.

‘Clearly, commuting is not a problem and, although the upkeep of the house, barn, buildings and sporting facilitie, which include stabling for six horses, a manège, fencing and paddocks, plus a tennis court and swimming pool, represent an obvious long-term commitment, that no longer seems quite so daunting,’ Mr Rook suggests.

Last year, even buyers desperate to move to the country were slow to commit Bucks Fizz). Year by year, they have increased the accommodation, upgraded, renovated and modernised the house and barn, and added extensive equestrian facilities. The main house offers more than 8,000sq ft of accommodation, including three reception rooms, a study, garden room, kitchen/breakfast room, five bedrooms and four bathrooms, with a further four bedrooms and two bathrooms in a separate guest wing. The barn, with its two-bedroom annexe and entertaining room, provides a further 1,776sq ft of living space. www.countrylife.co.uk

With terms such as ‘opulent’, ‘vast’, ‘splendid’ or even ‘grand’ no longer rude words in the property lexicon, Will Peppitt of Savills country department (020–7016 3780) is suddenly more confident of finding a buyer, at a guide price of £9.5m, for imposing Grade II-listed Leasam House and Grange, set in some 57 acres of gardens, parkland and woodland near the ancient hilltop town of Rye, East Sussex.

Built on the site of a 13th-century manor house that was bought and demolished in 1790 by local banker and town clerk of Rye, Jeremiah Curteis, the present house dates

from about 1800, with various improvements effected during the 19th century. The west wing, built in the style of a traditional Georgian manor house, is thought to have been rebuilt in about 1840.

In 1903, Sir George and Lady Warrender had the house and garden altered and extended by the prolific country-house architect Sir Reginald Blomfield, perhaps best known for his work on Chequers between 1909 and 1912. From the mid 1950s to 1992, Leasam House was a private school, after which it was returned to private ownership.

Described in its historic-buildings listing as ‘a fine mansion built by Jeremiah Curteis between 1798 and 1806’, Leasam House was in what Mr Peppitt describes as ‘a very basic state’ when, in 2006, he handled its sale to its present owner, who has extensively—and expensively—refurbished it in a mix of Classical and contemporary styles.

The 17,277sq ft main house has everything a modern squire could wish for, including seven reception rooms, a kitchen/ breakfast room, catering kitchen, 11 bedroom suites, a 10-seat cinema, gym and steam room; state-of-the-art heating, climatecontrol, lighting and music systems have been installed throughout. The Grange is a substantial, 3,592sq ft secondary house with three reception rooms and three bedrooms, suitable for family, guest, office or staff accommodation. Owners of private car collections will be impressed by the 19 garage spaces on offer (with room for more), some of which have been converted from former stables.

Leasam House is approached via a long country lane that finishes at high wroughtiron gates set into brick pillars. Its delightful Country Life, January 15, 2020 85

Property market

Above: Grade IIlisted Leasam House and Grange, set in 57 acres near the ancient hilltop town of Rye, East Sussex. £9.5m Left: The Old Rectory, Wiltshire, dates from the 19th century and enjoys spectacular views of the Vale of the White Horse. £2.9m

gardens combine formal elements, such as terraced lawns, mellow stone paths and steps, with brick retaining walls forming a backdrop for colourful flower beds, and informal areas planted with shrubs and ornamental or specimen trees. The west of the house overlooks a quiet terrace with magnificent views over the 86 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Tillingham Valley; to the north, steps lead down to a secluded tennis court.

Like the proverbial oil-tanker, the countryhouse market takes time to turn itself around and, despite the change of mood and an increase in enquiries from prospective purchasers, Ed Cunningham of Knight Frank doesn’t anticipate prices ‘going

north’ in the immediate future. There still remain the perennial problems of shortage of stock and high transaction costs, and the fact that Brexit is still, in reality, only half done. He expects the market to be strong this year in Hampshire and West Berkshire, with Hungerford a likely hotspot.

One good house that slipped through the buyers’ net last year was The Old Rectory at Stanton St Bernard, Wiltshire, which stands in 2.2 acres of gardens and grounds on the edge of this popular hamlet in the favoured Pewsey Vale, within the North Wessex Downs AONB. It’s back on the market through Knight Frank’s country department (020–7861 1080) at a guide price of £2.9m.

Surrounded by undulating downs and open farmland, the former rectory enjoys spectacular views of the Vale of White Horse.

Originally built in the 19th century, The Old Rectory has been renovated and extended in impressive style by its present owners, who bought it some eight years ago. It now offers some 6,000sq ft of living accommodation on three floors, including an entrance hall, three reception rooms, a simply splendid kitchen/breakfast room and a superb, orangerystyle family room on the ground floor, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms on the first floor and two further large bedrooms and a family bathroom on the second. www.countrylife.co.uk

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Art market

Huon Mallalieu

Jewels of note A Sacred Heart, portrait miniature and intaglio ring with royal and ducal connections shine at Cheffins, where gentlemen were not forgotten

U

NUSUALLY, there were several interesting things to write about in the jewellery section of the December 12 sale at Cheffins of Cambridge, without the need to pad things out with facets and carats.

One, to which I was alerted by Jean Wilson, whose scholarship runs from church and funerary monuments to the imagery and playhouses of Elizabeth I, was a little flaming heart in rubies, garnets and green hardstones bound by a stylised Crown of Thorns (Fig 1). The catalogue offered no date, merely noting that the plain bangle on which it was set was ‘later’. The consensus is that it was a recusant Catholic jewel dating from the late 17th century and Dr Wilson (supported by my friend, the antiquarian Richard Falkiner) points to a connection to Charles II’s Queen Catherine of Braganza, or to James II’s Mary of Modena.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began in the 13th century, but it was not until the mid 1670s that the visions of a Burgundian nun, St Margaret Mary Alacoque, revived the cult and it was popularised by her Jesuit confessor Claude de la Colombière, later also canonised. In 1676, he was sent to England as preacher to the then Duchess of York (other sources say chaplain to Queen Catherine) and brought the cult to their households. However, two years later, he was arrested during the Popish Plot hysteria and nearly died in the King’s Bench Prison, but, thanks to royal protection, he was not executed as at least 22 others, including Jesuits, were. He returned to 88 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Fig 1 above: Sacred Heart ring of rubies, garnets and green hardstones. £953. Fig 2 right: Cornelian intaglio ring, one of the ‘Marlborough Gems’. £42,720

Fig 3: Portrait miniature of George III. £1,397

France in 1679. Mary followed in 1688, when James was dethroned, and Catherine departed for Portugal in 1692, so perhaps the jewel might be dated to the 16 years from 1676.

In any event, the heart, measuring only half an inch wide and

Fig 4: Victorian brooch of a skeletal hand with rose-cut diamonds. £1,016

surmounted by flames, attracted enough interest to boost the price well over estimate to £953.

There were further royal connections, some obvious, others perhaps less so, in a portrait miniature of George III, which sold for £1,397 (Fig 3). It probably derived from a full-sized portrait by Allan Ramsay, whose studio is estimated to have produced about 150 images of the King. The mount was bordered by round-cut pastes and on the back were the initials GR over a glazed panel of brown hair.

There was also an inscription— ‘Sophia from G’, in a rather Gothic script—that seemed more 19th than 18th century.

Numerous questions were posed: was it the King’s hair, or

perhaps G’s, assuming them to be different? Was Sophia the king’s daughter, her cousin Sophia of Gloucester or someone else entirely? If Sophia of Gloucester, then might G have been her brother William Frederick, 2nd Duke of Gloucester (otherwise ‘Silly Billy’), who might well have signed so?

Despite what was perhaps a Roman emperor carved on a cornelian intaglio ring, which made £42,720 (Fig 2)—the top price of the sale—the interest was more ducal than royal. This was one of the ‘Marlborough Gems’ sold by Christie’s in 1899, the whereabouts of many of them now unknown. The collection had been formed by the 4th Duke of Marlborough (not the 3rd, as Christie’s had it), who had bought several earlier famous collections, including that of the 17th-century Lord Arundel. In 1875, the great agricultural slump forced the sale of many of the contents of Blenheim Palace and the gems were bought for £35,000

by David Bromilow, High Sheriff of Leicestershire. The 1899 sale was on behalf of his daughter and, since then, this ring had remained in the buyer’s family. An 1899 catalogue came with it. www.countrylife.co.uk

Pick of the week Gentlemen were provided for among the jewellery, with links, studs and at least one interesting gold signet ring, at £356. It was set with a shield-shaped bloodstone, with an intaglio carved crest of a crowing cockerel, and it came in its original shaped ring box by Mappin & Webb, dating from the firm’s years in the Queen Victoria Street, EC2, building that was demolished amid great acrimony in 1994 and replaced by No 1 Poultry.

Unusually, a metal die-stamp, engraved with the same crest and the motto ‘Virtute Vici’ (I conquered by virtue) accompanied the ring. This was in a turned boxwood case stamped Parkins & Gotto, 24 Oxford St, W, which dated it to between 1860 and 1899, and ‘Ingram’ was handwritten on the bottom. The crest and motto were indeed those of Ingram and the ring is most likely to have belonged to Hugo Francis Meynell-Ingram, who married Lady Emily Charlotte Wood, daughter of the 1st Viscount Halifax, in 1863, inherited Temple Newsam and Hoar Cross Hall, Staffordshire, in 1869, but died in a hunting accident in 1871.

No provenance was given for a bizarre 1½in-long Victorian brooch in the form of a skeletal hand made up of rose-cut diamonds, which sold for £1,016 (Fig 4). Two stones were missing, one, presumably coloured, from a ring on the little finger.

This would make a suitable present for a Bride of Dracula.

This sale also included a substantial silver section where many of the most impressive items came from the collection of Lord Hastings. The current holder of the title is the 23rd Baron and, over the centuries since its creation in 1290, the title has worked its way through various lines and names, includ-

ing Hastings, Le Strange and Astley. They held seats and estates in many areas of England, including Norfolk, where the Astleys were seated at the time when a child’s silver mug (Fig 6) here was made by Thomas Havers of Norwich.

This brooch would make a suitable present for a Bride of Dracula Hallmarking there began in 1565 and ended in 1706, but no date letters are recorded between 1642 and 1688. The Astley crest was engraved on the mug and one might guess that it was intended for the future 3rd Baronet, who was born in 1690/91. This rarity sold for £8,255.

Also rare, and much more imposing, was a pair of Charles II silver 16¼in-diameter sideboard dishes (Fig 5). These were marked 1661 by a now untraceable London smith with the initials WM and the wide rims were lavishly decorated with repoussé pastoral scenes, swags and putti. In the centres were the Astley arms. The price was £13,970.

Next week An ingenious mechanic

Fig 5: A pair of Charles II silver sideboard dishes of about 1661. £13,970

Fig 6: Child’s silver mug by Thomas Havers of Norwich. £8,255 www.countrylife.co.uk

Country Life, January 15, 2020 89

Exhibition Indian master painters at the Wallace Collection

A symbiotic alliance Louise Nicholson welcomes an exhibition of paintings, many newly discovered, made for Enlightened Europeans by accomplished Indian artists

T

Above: Cheetah, 1780, by Shaikh Zain ud-Din, part of the Impey Album. Below: Brahminy Starling with Two Anteraea Moths Caterpillar and Cocoon on an Indian Jujube Tree, 1777, also by ud-Din

The starting point for this show was a Mughal dagger in the Wallace Collection that had belonged to Claude Martin, a French adventurer who lived in luxury in Lucknow and became a leading figure of the Enlightenment in 18th-century India.

Importing thousands of sheets of drawing paper from Europe, he commissioned musawwir (native artists) to paint, among

A Great Indian Fruit Bat or Flying Fox, 1778–82, by Bhawani Das

90 Country Life, January 15, 2020

other things, the local flora and fauna. Examples such as Red Hibiscus, probably by his artist Mihr Chand, bow to formal European herbariums, but are steeped in Lucknow’s deeply sensitive Mughal inheritance.

To emphasise the equal importance of painters and patrons, the show kicks off with a masterpiece self-portrait by Yellapah,

an artist from Vellore in South India who depicts himself sitting cross-legged on the floor with his paper, brushes and colours, his sacred thread indicating his high Brahman status, his whole manner brimful of confidence.

Many pictures are on public display for the first time, after recent discovery by academics.

Rummaging in the archives at www.countrylife.co.uk

Cary Welch; Wallace Collection; Minneapolis Institute of Art

O look at the 100 or so paintings spot-lit in the Wallace Collection’s basement galleries is to step out of a grey London January and experience anew our entrancing world in all its glory. A fruit bat flies alarmingly straight at you; a spray of green mangoes hangs in front of your nose, seemingly ripening on the page; a stork deftly prizes a snail out of its shell.

A single close-up image completely fills a large piece of paper and is painted with surreal precision, every feather, every fish scale achieved with technical brilliance by Indian artists trained in indigenous traditions, especially the late-Mughal courtly one.

They were commissioned from the 1770s by European patrons inspired by the new interest in Science and the Arts and swept up by India’s exoticism, which they wanted to document. Thus, Sir Elijah Impey and his young bride arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata), gathered their own private zoo and then employed several artists to record it for posterity. The Impey Album has 197 ravishing paintings, including the masterpiece watercolour of an alert, tense cheetah painted

by Shaikh Zain ud-Din in about 1780 for Lady Impey, who lists the animal’s precise measurements on the same page.

Kew and Edinburgh’s botanical gardens, in the British Library and other institutions, they found thousands of these remarkable studies, many forgotten for decades and still to be catalogued.

William Roxburgh, whose astounding 2,512 drawings are at Kew, started his artist commissions on the Telegu east coast, hub of chintz production. The flatter, more decorative styles and thicker paint of his drawings are signs that he probably employed the textile artists of the area.

When Dr Robert Wight arrived in Madras, inspired by Roxburgh he embarked on a project to illustrate all the plants of South India.

His principal artist, Rungiah, was from the deep south, Tanjore, whose Raja had a legendary library, doubtless including some Western natural-history books.

Rungiah’s study A Wild Squash, with tendrils dancing madly, was made in about 1828 and blends soft European lyricism with local characteristics of thick paint, bright colours and bold design.

They gathered a private zoo and employed artists to record it If flora and fauna dominate, almost as arresting are the paintings of groups of Indian men of different occupations made in and around Delhi for William Fraser. In one, eight fierce, bearded horse merchants swathed in gorgeous Kashmiri shawls stand in a row, their penetrating gaze slightly unnerving. Fraser ran a thriving business importing horses from Afghanistan to Delhi and was an energetic patron of Delhi artists, in particular the family of Ghulam Ali Khan.

One of the finest of these, Ali Khan, seems to have been part of the development of topographical drawings in this region— the show’s delicate, intimate portraits of the Taj Mahal and Salim Chishti’s mausoleum at Fatehpur Sikri testify to a fully-formed www.countrylife.co.uk

Eight Sikh Courtiers and Servants of the Raja of Patiala, made for the Scotsman William Fraser

sophisticated genre, often produced for British admirers.

Curated by historian William Dalrymple, the exhibition reveals how the symbiotic relationship between Indian artist and European patron was the catalyst for creating something distinctive and of the highest quality. The default umbrella name has been ‘Company School painting’, but that implies the patrons were all East India Company employees (they were not) and that some of the artists were British; it also forgets the purpose of the art.

Rather, as Henry Noltie suggests in the excellent catalogue, ‘Indian Export Art’ would be more appropriate: it honours the artists and makes clear that these paintings were almost always commissioned with the intention of bringing them back to Europe. That so many are in Britain is our good fortune.

‘Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company’ is at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1, until April 19 (www.wallacecollection.org) Next week Dora Maar Country Life, January 15, 2020 91

Theatre

Michael Billington

Farewell to the greats Remembering four giants of the theatrical world who died last year

A

S the new theatrical year takes time to get underway, I find myself thinking back to some of the great names we lost in 2019: in particular, an actor, a dramatist and two directors between whose lives there are strange connections and who all, in different ways, had a profound impact on British theatre.

I felt a particular pang over the death of Albert Finney for personal reasons. Growing up in the Midlands, I found myself, in my late teens, becoming a devotee of the old Birmingham Repertory Theatre in Station Street. One day in 1956, I chanced to see a piece of Irish whimsy called Happy as Larry by Donagh MacDonagh. The play included a chorus of dancing tailors and I couldn’t take my eyes off one who was square-shouldered, moon-faced and exuded a sense of mischief. I discovered his name was Albert Finney and, over the next couple of years, I saw him play Henry V, Archer in The Beaux’ Stratagem and Face in The Alchemist.

Above all, I remember him in The Lizard on the Rock by

92 Country Life, January 15, 2020

John Hall, which required him to be shot at point-blank range in the stomach: as he suddenly crumpled, uttering cat-like cries, the critic Kenneth Tynan in The Observer described it as ‘the best fall since Feuillère’, who was then queen of the French stage.

If I dwell on Finney’s early days, it’s because there was a peculiar excitement about seeing a young actor mature into greatness in a repertory theatre—inconceivable today, where the idea of the permanent company has, largely for economic reasons, been lost.

He was unforgettable as John Osborne’s Luther, in the twin roles of a poker-backed Parisian bourgeois and an idiotic hotel porter in Feydeau’s A Flea In Her Ear and as a camp antique dealer in Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy telling a naive debutante that ‘there wasn’t actually a Mrs Michelangelo’.

Finney achieved movie stardom in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tom Jones and Murder On The Orient Express, but also remained a loyal company man, playing Tamburlaine, Hamlet and Macbeth for Peter Hall in

the early days of the National Theatre. In my last encounter with him, at Chichester, he talked animatedly about horse-racing, which reminded me that he was the son of a Salford bookmaker.

I was especially saddened by his passing because I had been lucky enough to witness his playby-play growth as a young actor.

The newspaper headline next day ran “Count Dracula no longer so fearsome” The playwright Peter Nichols, who died last year, had a great gift for making fine drama out of his own life-experience, most famously A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, recently revived in the West End, which showed what it’s like to bring up a severely disabled child.

Nichols also made brilliant use of his time as a hospital

patient in The National Health and, in Privates on Parade, used his memories of performing with Combined Services Entertainments in Singapore and Malaya—where colleagues included Kenneth Williams, Stanley Baxter and John Schlesinger—to raise serious questions about Britain’s role in the post-war world.

Apart from cannibalising his own life, Nichols daringly broke the conventions of keyhole naturalism and always wrote with irrepressible humour: one of his most quoted lines is that of the dragqueen in Privates on Parade, originally played by Denis Quilley, who says of a great Irish dramatist ‘that Bernadette Shaw —what a chatterbox!’

It’s worth pointing out that Nichols, like Finney, if with less distinction, was a product of regional rep. Finney once gleefully told me that when he played a famous vampire in Glasgow, the newspaper headline next day ran ‘Count Dracula no longer so fearsome’. The real connection with Finney came in other ways: Finney played the lead in The www.countrylife.co.uk

Getty; Alamy

From left to right: Director Franco Zeffirelli (b.1923); playwright Peter Nichols (b.1927); and actor Albert Finney (b.1936)

Death of Joe Egg on Broadway and gave an astonishing performance in one of Nichols’s most moving plays, Chez Nous, as an architect who has a destructive impact on the family life of his closest friends.

One of Nichols’s less successful plays—in fact, it was a downright failure—was The Freeway, produced at the Old Vic in 1974.

It was directed by Sir Jonathan Miller—another loss last year— and marked the end of his nonetoo-happy relationship with Peter Hall at the National Theatre.

It would be unjust, however, to highlight one of Miller’s flops, as he was a major figure in British theatre and opera, as well as a superb communicator in TV programmes such as The Body in Question and States of Mind. Although I had the misfortune to fall out with him, I view his volume of work with something like awe and feel great affection for the man himself.

I witnessed Finney’s playby-play growth as an actor That partly stems from meeting him shortly after the first night of Beyond The Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. This was one of the great nights in my theatregoing life that showed a phenomenal quartet—Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore alongside Miller—attacking the complacency and smugness of the post-war world with unparalleled wit and verve.

Attending a press conference two days later with a fellow student, we found Miller bounding over to us saying: ‘You’re obviously not professional journalists, who are you?’ I’ve never forgotten his Sir Jonathan Miller (b.1934): director, actor, author, presenter and doctor www.countrylife.co.uk

curiosity and avid desire to talk, even enquiring if there was anything about the show we didn’t like. It’s a memory that stayed with me even when, in later life, Miller became rather less keen to hear my critical opinions.

His productions of Rigoletto, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte have rarely been bettered. Intriguingly, it was his Così at the Maggio Musicale that, in 1991, won him Florence’s coveted Lion’s Club award, an honour that, the preceding year, went to Franco Zeffirelli, who has also lately died. Zeffirelli was another great opera and drama director, one of whose finest British productions was a deeply Sicilian version of Much Ado About Nothing staged at the Old Vic in 1965.

The stars were Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, but one of the best performances was of Don Pedro, who was played as a solitary cigar-smoking grandee sadly excluded from the concluding marital harmony. The actor in question? None other than Albert Finney. Even in death, there is a strange fellowship.

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Books

The rise and fall of a real-life Flashman Biography/crime The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns Rebecca Gowers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)

O

N October 17, 1874, a man was shot dead at point-blank range in a rooming house at the Yellow Jacket Mine near Calistoga, in northern California. A jury later acquitted the killer, Eadweard Muybridge, on the grounds that the victim had been conducting an affair with Muybridge’s wife, Flora. Muybridge went back to his career in photography and produced a series of studies that, for the first time, explained the way people and animals actually moved. He revealed, for instance, that a trotting horse lifted all four feet from the ground at once, which had been a matter of debate. Artists had depicted horses galloping with back and front legs extended; Muybridge showed the legs gathered instead under the horse’s belly.

His young victim remained a sorry footnote to Muybridge’s story. In The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns, Rebecca Gowers, his distant relative, takes Larkyns’s brief trajectory through this world and slows it down, frame by frame, like a Muybridge study.

Larkyns’s life gives the lie to anyone who thinks Victorians were tame, stay-at-home or stuffy.

94 Country Life, January 15, 2020

There was nothing sedentary or predictable about this child of Empire, born in India in 1843 into a family of East India Company men, ship owners and captains, civil servants, lawyers and soldiers.

At the age of three, Harry was sent to England, with his sister.

Mrs Larkins (Harry substituted the y) stayed in India and inflicted senseless wounds on her children from a comfortable distance.

Letters travelled back and forth so slowly that her reproaches and reprimands were six months out of date, raking up longforgotten trespasses. Meanwhile, she indulged in tender references to the children she had kept with her, including little Georgie, 10 years younger than Harry. It’s hard to guess how much Harry enjoyed hearing about Georgie’s jolly mischief, faithful servants and his naughty little dog, not to mention his easy way with his

father, when he was exiled from them all at an English school.

After 1857, there were no more letters. Harry’s parents were stationed at Cawnpore and when the Indian Mutiny broke out, the garrison was destroyed under siege, bombarded, and tricked into the open by an offer of safe conduct. One hundred or so women and small children survived the initial massacre, to be butchered in their turn as an avenging army approached. No more Georgie, no Mrs Larkins.

The fantastical twists and turns in Larkyns’s later life are brilliantly, and coolly, recovered by the author, who also draws on analogous experiences of, say, The Brontë sisters in a Brussels school, Walter Dickens in the Indian Army or R. L. Stevenson on the emigrant trail. Larkyns travelled across the globe. He saw active service in the Punjab.

Leaping to fame, despite it all: one of Muybridge’s sequences

He staked a claim during the Gold Rush. He was charming, clever and lived in Paris like a milord, befriended ‘tous les lions du high life’, frequented the theatre, rooked jewellers and horse-dealers, used pawnbrokers to raise funds on jewels he could not pay for, and ended up in Mazas, a grim isolation prison. Once, he fought with a French guerrilla unit against the Prussians and won the Légion d’Honneur.

He wrote millions of words for a San Francisco newspaper. And he fell fatally in love with a married woman, Flora Muybridge.

It’s not a comparison the author makes, but with his taste for women and adventure, high life and derring-do, Larkyns reminded me of another Harry, the fictional Flashman. His murder comes almost as an anti-climax.

We learn that Muybridge made no effort to exonerate himself, yet the jury acquitted him. Flora died and her child with Larkyns was raised in an orphanage. He became a car mechanic and died in the 1940s. Strange, brilliant, quirky and illuminating, books such as this remind us, if we need reminding, that books matter.

Nothing else can take you away, take you back, take you to places you’ve never known, to meet people you would never meet.

Only books roam wide. Without them, we are left with footnotes. www.countrylife.co.uk

Getty

Eadweard Muybridge was not only the pioneering photographer of motion, but also a murderer. Jason Goodwin relishes this tale of the dashing rogue and adventurer who became his victim

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Crossword

Bridge Andrew Robson

A prize of £15 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened.

Solutions must reach Crossword No 4612, CounTry LIfe, Pinehurst II, Pinehurst Road, Farnborough Business Park, Farnborough, Hampshire GU14 7BF, by Tuesday, January 21. UK entrants only.

E travel back to Stratfordupon-Avon for the 2019 Schapiro Spring Foursomes, where, in recent years, the field has expanded to include many Europeans and, this year, a few American players.

My team made a few unforced errors and didn’t make the final stages. One was bidding Blackwood (actually, Roman Key Card Blackwood) when we couldn’t cater to a Five Spade response (ending in Six Hearts, missing two Aces).

Another was playing the wrong third-hand card in this suit layout.

ACROSS 1 Clairvoyant’s job involving nutter with long life? (7-7) 7 Longings for ultimately princely income (9) 9 Hurry back with directions for hospital worker (5) 10 Terrible din always identifies criminal type (9) 12 Listened to sound made by group of animals (5) 13 Get well ahead of Tosca in duet, unfortunately (11) 14 Self-sufficient national leader needed pint, perhaps (11) 19 Expect a comic to tour area (5) 20 Gull making little Christine stir from sleep, say (9) 22 Beast of burden Buddhist monk found by lake (5) 23 Follow directors? A lorry driver may let one down (9) 24 Short meeting in the cinema?

(5,9)

DOWN 1 Game—or insect in Paris?

(6,7) 2 Take a backward step regarding outing, perhaps (7) 3 Cook too little, being weaker party mostly (7) 4 Greek character in the Territorial Army (5) 5 Reproduction of Tenniel— not severe (7) 6 Senior relative eager to produce cotton cloth (7) 8 NCO? Officer? No, warrant officer (8-5) 10 Turn out and tour circular building (7) 11 Asian’s outstanding features originally evident around east (7) 15 Crazier woman on line? (7) 16 Head of poly with a tendency to be flexible (7) 17 Picturesque presentation involving tuba and ale (7) 18 Court holding a nude entertainment? (7) 21 Woman in Tobruk, a renegade (5)

4612

CASINA

W

Dummy ♠ Q75 West

♠ J1032

-----

East (you) ♠ A94

Declarer ♠ K86

Defending 3NT, your partner leads the two of Spades and dummy plays low. At the table, East played the Ace and now declarer had to score two tricks. In the cold light of day, East should have played the nine. Let declarer win the King, as your Ace beats dummy’s Queen and declarer scores only one Spade trick.

Here was another one that got away—letting declarer make this Four Spades.

Dealer East Neither Vulnerable

N W✢E S

A105 10 A1098 KJ974

KQJ8762 J 5 AQ86 South

West

4♠(1)

End

North

East 1♣

(1) Optimistically—East’s Club bid on his right having upgraded his hand.

NAME (pLease prInT In CapITaLs) ADDRESS Tel No TI MedIa LIMITed, pubLIsher of CounTry LIfe wILL CoLLeCT your personaL InforMaTIon soLeLy To proCess your CoMpeTITIon enTry and Then IT wILL be desTroyed

SOLUTION TO 4611 ACROSS: 1, Double-crossing; 9, Interpose; 10, Islet; 11, Consorted; 12, Passé; 13, German flute; 17, Interdicted; 22, Ideal; 23, Autocracy; 24, Evens; 25, Benignant; 26, Sublieutenants.

DOWN: 2, Outlast; 3, Bootleg; 4, Conform; 5, Obeisance; 6, Superbly; 7, Nascent; 8, Timpani; 14, Endurance; 15, Endless; 16, Memorial; 18, Nouveau; 19, Coconut; 20, Dilemma; 21, Leveret.

Winner of 4610 is John Allen, Lindfield, West Sussex

96 Country Life, January 15, 2020

Dealer South East-West Vulnerable 843 QJ974 1083 108 J107 52 1065 K N AJ97 ✢ Q652 W E J53 AQ9742 S AKQ96 A832 K4 K6 South

West

North

East

1♠

2♣

Pass

3♣(1)

3♥

4 AK964 K7632 32 93 Q87532 QJ4 105

his remaining Spade: this removes dummy’s Spade, East able to win the Ace and cash a Club.

However, this wasn’t clear to West and, in practice, he continued with the Knave of Diamonds. Declarer gratefully ruffed and could now ruff his fourth Club, the four of Spades too high for West’s three.

Declarer’s only loser from here was the Ace of Spades—game made.

Perhaps West could have divined the position and, after winning the Queen of Diamonds, switch to his Spade. However, isn’t the position completely known to East? Shouldn’t East have overtaken the Queen of Diamonds with the Ace, cashed the Ace of Spades, and followed with a winning Club? Down one.

From making life easy for partner, we move to giving declarer a losing option, a Greek gift.

West led the ten of Clubs, declarer winning the Queen and crossing to the Ace-King of Hearts, hoping to drop his Diamond.

However, East ruffed the second Heart with the ten. Declarer overruffed with the Knave, then cashed the Ace of Clubs and led a third Club.

West ruffed with the nine of Spades and led the Queen of Diamonds, winning the trick as declarer withheld dummy’s King. To defeat the contract, West now has to lead

Pass

4♥(2)

End

(1) Courtesy raise—mainly a preemptive ploy.

(2) I’d probably have passed— better to have three Clubs than two, for then partner would probably hold only one.

West, Kay Preddy, sensibly stayed off her Clubs, instead leading a Diamond. East, husband Norman Selway, won the Ace and switched correctly to a Club, West winning the Queen and cashing the Ace, felling declarer’s King. What now?

Say West leads a second Diamond.

Declarer wins the King, but, with no way to reach dummy to take the Heart finesse, has no choice but to lay down the Ace. West’s singleton King is felled—game made.

Mrs Preddy foresaw this and cunningly led a third Club.

Declarer should probably have been suspicious, but, in practice, he took the bait. He ruffed the Club in dummy and ran the Queen of Hearts. A grateful West won her King and declarer was one down.

As Virgil put it in the Aeneid: ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’ www.countrylife.co.uk

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Schools

THE COUNTRY LIFE GUIDE TO GOOD SCHOOLS

Happy days:

Children from Cheam School photographed by Millie Pilkington

25 Home Counties prep schools

A privilege shared: why it’s time to trumpet good deeds PLUS French without tears and thoroughly modern matrons

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February 26th 2020: School Life Focus A special issue to celebrate the very best independent schools across the UK. Also visit www.countrylife.co.uk/directory/schools to discover independent nursery, pre-preparatory, preparatory, and senior schools in your area.

To advertise please contact Sophie Bailey: e: sophie.bailey@ti-media.com t: 01252 555316

Country Life, January 15 2020 101

Spectator

Jason Goodwin

The imaginarium of the winter gardener

J

ANUARY is fantasygardening month, when you lean upon your metaphorical rake and cast an eye over vegetable beds bursting with illusory vigour, all from the comfort of your own bed, tucked up and imagining things.

For the catalogues have arrived, those pornographers of herbage, verbiage, greenery and legumes; the Whizzer and Chips of the potager; the TLS of vegetables, the OK! of the kitchen garden, the ¡Hola! of the allotment. I can think of nothing more inspiring than the garden catalogue. Outside howls the wind, lashes the rain, but here by the fire, tucked up in bed, blooms the promise.

I could imagine religions founded on less than this.

The gang are all here. Thomas Etty potters behind the cucumber frames, like Mr McGregor. Here are my alliums, leeks ‘hardy and cold-resistant, turning darker after frost’; and there a row of imaginary turnips, ‘uniform white heads with red shoulders’. Mr Sutton is stooping over the onion sets, as D. T. Brown and Mrs

Franchi stand side by side with their arms folded, talking out of the sides of their mouths. There’s salad burnet, with a ‘slightly herbal, cucumber-y flavour’; Edwin Tucker with his trousers held up with twine; salsify and chicory, tomatoes and chillies, ‘loaded with fruit, almost a foot long and 2 inches wide’. Sarah Raven sweeps past, trailing dahlias and raffia ties. The sound from the potting shed is Mr Fothergill scrubbing his clays and my shy neighbour from Sea Spring Seeds is carefully planting out Japanese salads with a dibber.

My mental garden is so prolific and unbounded that I intend to garden this year with one hand tied behind my back. From now on, I’ll sow no hybrids. There’s nothing wrong with hybrids, in themselves.

It’s just that they belong to the agro-industrial machine, bred for mass production rather than gardeners and allotment holders.

Farmers need seeds by the million, which pays for the science, but the specific characteristics they call for may not be ones you and I value in smaller quantities.

TOTTERING-BY-GENTLY

Member of the Audit Bureau of Circulation

By Annie Tempest

Supermarkets want straight, long leeks, which can be reliably achieved by hybridising two varieties, but we want taste. Disease resistance may be bred in, via hybridisation, to satisfy the farmer with 40 acres of cabbage, but if his cabbage tastes of blotting paper, I’d rather have an old-fashioned

I want my vegetables to be bohemian, unpredictable and generous favourite. F1 plants advertised as quick to harvest, or good for home freezing, obscure the subtext: they will all mature at once.

Good for the farmer who clears his field in a day, with machinery, but not so useful for the home cook.

I want my vegetables to be bohemian, unpredictable, generous and true to themselves, like my friends. The seed of proper old-fashioned varieties is handed

down from one generation to the next and can be gradually adapted to flourish in your garden.

Harvest after harvest, you keep back seed from the healthiest, hardiest, most vigorous plants and your stock improves. Skip the plants that bolted early, or the tinier parsnips, or the disappointing tomatoes. Being openpollinators, these plants are fertilised with the widest possible —in your locality—pollens. Instead of being regulated for a few desirable supermarket traits, they’re robust and genetically diverse.

They have stories of their own. It’s like being an archaeologist, as well as an antiquarian, and a gardener.

One of the nicest stringless bush French beans—Cupidon filet —is commercially unavailable.

It produces only a few seeds per pod, which makes the seed expensive. To you and me, the extra pennies aren’t much, but to a farmer, hundreds of pounds. Coco Sophie, from the late 18th century, is a flat French climbing bean that slipped out of commercial production barely 10 years ago.

And on it goes. I can’t wait.

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