Country Life 17th May 2023

EVERY WEEK

The glory of the summer garden

Chelsea: real gardens for real people

Flowering high: how to grow delphiniums

Plant legacies, pygmy goats and pot-bellied gnomes

Clara runs her family’s facilities-management business, together with her sister Dr Laura Sasse-Werhahn, and is engaged to Peter-Paul Nicolas Bernard Brenn, whom she will marry in June.

Clara is the daughter of Dr Eberhard and Dr Christine Sasse of Lanfine, Ayrshire, and follows in the footsteps of Laura, who appeared on the Frontispiece on June 7, 2017.

Miss Clara Sophie Sasse

Photographed by Robert Perry

Contents May 17, 2023

A forager’s dream: strong-scented wild garlic—or ramsons

Dawn light hits the parterre at Pettifers, Oxfordshire (Clive Nichols)

COVER STORIES

62 The impossible made possible

This year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show promises aromatic planting, re-imagined rock gardens and mouth-watering productive plots, as Kathryn Bradley-Hole learns

80 Delightful delphiniums

John Hoyland rejoices in these delicate and statuesque plants that are equally dazzling in the garden and on the show bench

86 Let’s celebrate gardening

It’s time to put ‘H’ for horticulture at the heart of the RHS showpiece, argues Alan Titchmarsh

96 Here’s looking at you, kid

Julie Harding discovers what makes owners fall for the charms of the pint-sized pygmy goat

108 Gnome alone

Ben Lerwill digs into the history and enduring appeal of our rosy-cheeked garden chums

136 Homing instincts

Christopher Woodward reveals how Cedric Morris safeguarded gems from his plant collection

THIS WEEK

58 Lady Caroline Percy’s favourite painting

The interior designer is drawn to an intriguing Turner scene

60 The stork cometh

Jamie Blackett welcomes a rare and exciting visitor to the farm

68 Time to sit and stare

Non Morris savours a delightful West Sussex garden fashioned with rest and relaxation in mind

76 Take a bough

Treehouses, swings and seats for summer, from Amelia Thorpe

88 Baronial dreams

Clive Aslet charts how Lutyens helped a businessman become king of Castle Drogo in Devon

94 Native breeds

Kate Green on the high-stepping Hackney, a real equine ballerina

102 When I am feeling blue

Don’t be fooled by the blue tit’s songbird sweetness—it can be unfaithful, warns Stephen Moss

112 The good stuff

Hetty Lintell falls head over heels for the best of British millinery

120 Interiors

Giles Kime soaks up Nature in a luxurious outdoor bathtub

142 Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson speaks up for tarragon, an unsung herb hero

150 The plays that turn full circle

Classic drawing-room comedies still sparkle for Michael Billington EVERY

( Allium ursinum)—carpeting a woodland floor near Milton Abbas, Dorset

What is a garden?

NEXT week sees the return of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. It is a joyous temporal marker, heralding the English summer outdoors, its fêtes and festivals and, of course, gardens galore ( preview, page 62). ‘Gardens are for People,’ declared the mid20th-century American landscape architect Thomas Church. His book of the same title (first published 1955) has been required reading for garden designers in every subsequent generation. Recently, however, the flagship show of the RHS has stoked concern: that gardens enjoyed by people are sidelined by judges who prefer to reward ‘wildlife habitat’ non-gardens.

T he most extreme example was seen last year, when a Gold Medal and the Best Show Garden award went to an exhibit that the RHS itself described as ‘a wilder countryside that ecosystem engineers such as beavers help to create’ (In the garden, page 86 ).

T he late John Sales, who was head of gardens at the National Trust for the last quarter of the 20th century, was also the chief judge of Chelsea’s show gardens for many years. He proposed that flower-show gardens are ‘theatrical tableaux’, but they must also work as a garden. Credulity in this respect has been stretched to its limits recently. This year, however, there are glimmers of resistance. For example, Savills brings to the show a productive garden combining ornamental and edible plants with a working kitchen and dining area that offers genuine take-home ideas and Hamptons transports us to elegant outdoor dining among Mediterranean fruits and fragrant herbs. Are they on to something?

S eed producer Burpees, which supplies familiar brands including Suttons, Unwins, Thompson & Morgan and Mr Fothergill’s, has seen a 58% volume increase in sales of its huge edible range, compared with pre-covid

2019. Tomatoes have leapt ahead, followed by aubergines, sweet and chilli peppers and cucumbers. The company cites supplychain pressures that shops will continue to experience, as well as rising food prices and guarantees of provenance and freshness, for the rise in homegrown crops.

T he nursery and garden-centre sector supports some 700,000 jobs and contributes £28.8 billion in GDP, £6.3 billion to the Exchequer, according to the Horticultural Trades Association’s (HTA) latest figures. The HTA sees unavoidable challenges ahead for horticultural businesses, due to inflation, consequent rising prices and reduced consumer confidence in spending. Although it’s important to help wild creatures, people need gardens, too. It is time for the RHS to step up and show that it fully supports horticulture, skilled gardening and design. These things, after all, are the society’s lifeblood and the show’s raison d’etre

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Town & Country

Edited by James Fisher

The late Queen’s legacy grows

SOME 1,000 acres of woodland consisting of more than half a million trees will be established across the UK, thanks to the Woodland Trust’s Platinum Woods scheme. The charity, in partnership with The Queen’s Green Canopy, began a large-scale tree-planting initiative in 2022 to coincide with and celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of the late Queen. Following the death of Elizabeth II in September last year, the scheme was extended to allow people to plant trees in her memory. As a result, a total of 14 ‘life-giving Platinum Woods’ have been established—including at an honorary site in New Zealand—that will see some 500,000 trees sprout from a combination of planting and natural regeneration.

According to Toby Bancroft, central England regional director at the Woodland Trust, The Queen’s Green Canopy initiative has been

‘inspirational’, adding that ‘in the face of the climate emergency and Nature crisis, we have never needed trees more for all the benefits they deliver for people and wildlife’. He added:

A total of 14

“life-giving Platinum Woods” have been established

‘It’s been so heartening to work with likeminded landowners to create more than 1,000 acres of new native woodland as a significant contribution to The Queen’s Green Canopy.’

The 14 new woods span the entire country and will include sites at historic homes, such as Burghley in Lincolnshire; farms, including

the Wimpole estate in Cambridgeshire and Tidgrove Warren in Hampshire; as well as an urban site at Sandhills Wood in East London. A wood has also been planted at Glen Kyllachy in Scotland, a landscape that was ‘particularly beloved by Her late Majesty’, says the Woodland Trust. In New Zealand, Taimana Forest on North Island was prompted by the Queen’s love for the Commonwealth.

‘The Queen’s Green Canopy has inspired people across the UK,’ says Woodland Trust ambassador Jules Acton. ‘Schools and communities have planted their grounds with the Woodland Trust’s native-tree packs, boosting Nature and the wellbeing of local people. Landowners have played a vital role creating woodland at scale, linking up our landscape. That helps the UK’s Nature become more resilient to the threats it faces. Although the initiative is at an end, the inspiration goes on.’

Shown here is the first look at the new grass amphitheatre at Raby Castle in Co Durham. The amphitheatre, which will be completed this summer and open to visitors next year, is part of a wider remodelling of the castle’s Walled Garden by garden designer Luciano Giubbilei. When open, the space will host a series of summer activities, such as musical events and plays, as well as providing visitors with ‘a beautiful garden for quiet contemplation’ (www.raby.co.uk)

Grazing a greener path

A100 -STRONG mowing team has been called in by the National Trust to assist with the Stroud Landscape Project (SLP), it was announced last week. Over some 52,000 acres, the SLP in Gloucestershire intends to create ‘more space for Nature’ through a network of wild places that are ‘bigger, better joined up and more resilient to climate change’. To achieve this goal, as well as producing good-quality food, the Trust will deploy its secret grass-mowing weapon —100 Belted Galloway cattle.

Belted Galloways (or ‘Belties’ to those in the know) are expert grazers of steep slopes and devour grasses that other cattle would find far less palatable. With their help, delicate plants, such as marjoram, thyme, vetches and rare orchids, will hopefully thrive, which, in turn, will boost populations of wildlife, such as Duke of Burgundy butterflies and greater horseshoe bats. The Trust praised one member of the mowing team in particular, a young pedigree bull called Charlie (‘HillGill Charlie’). Not only is Charlie ‘calm and handsome,’ according to the Trust, but he is also red and white, as opposed to the more familiar ‘humbug’ striped black and white associated with Belties. Research is

suggesting that cattle with fairer coats cope much better with heat stress, meaning that Charlie and his offspring will not only continue their conservationgrazing work, but also be more resilient to a changing climate.

‘Our climate is changing at a faster rate than ever and Nature is in trouble,’ says David Armstrong, SLP delivery manager. ‘The challenge is huge and complex, but the SLP is confronting the climate and Nature emergencies head on. The solutions can be simple and many are very much within our grasp —we need to create havens for wildlife that boost biodiversity.’

Using the simple solutions within our grasp has been the longstanding message of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST), which advocates the use

Good week for Artificial abundance

114 artificial rockpools on harbour walls in Poole and the Isle of Wight are providing safe habitat for some 65 species. The manmade habitats could be a sustainable way to improve ecosystems in urban ports Saurona, Lord of the Flies

A newly discovered genus of butterfly with orange wings and brown eyespots has been named after Tolkien’s villain Sauron. The name was chosen to spark interest and raise awareness of declining species Devon on the map

An 18-mile stretch of the Devon coast has been awarded protection as a world surfing reserve. The UK’s first designation joins 11 others, including Malibu and Santa Cruz in the US, and Noosa in Australia

Coronation memorabilia

The COUNTRY LIFE souvenir edition is on sale now, in shops and from www.magazinesdirect.com. With 100 pages of the best pictures and commentary from the historic day, there is no better way to relive

The King’s Coronation Cow pack

of rare native livestock, such as the Belted Galloway, to help protect Nature and the climate. Responding to the news about the Belties being deployed in Gloucestershire, RBST CEO Christopher Price said: ‘Our native breeds of cattle were bred over centuries for our habitats and climates; in turn, their natural activity helped forge our landscape. As a native breed with a hardy nature, Belted Galloway cattle are ideal for conservation grazing to improve our natural environment and promote biodiversity. It is great to see Belties playing a key role in the Stroud Landscape Project and the results are demonstrating... the unique role native livestock and equine breeds can and should play in... restoring cherished habitats.’

A herd of 35 cattle was found ‘trotting around and being inquisitive’ in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. No damage, but plenty of surprise, was reported

Bad week for

Sweet bites are made of these

A study suggests soapy fragrances could make you an ‘attractive target’ for mosquitoes, as the fruity, floral scents echo plant nectars

Zoning in (or out)

Research has discovered that, based on the Köppen-Geiger climate classification mapping system, 38%–48% of the global land area will change climate zone by the end of the century

Top of the naughty list

Analysis has revealed fossil-fuel extraction and exploration is taking place at almost 3,000 sites in protected areas around the world. The UK tops the list with 509 sites, most in the North Sea and AONBs AEW

Where Belted Galloways graze, wildflowers and wildlife thrive

Town & Country

A swift welcome

THEvillage of Harbury in Warwickshire has become a ‘Swift Village’, with 50 nest boxes having been installed in preparation for the return of the almost-always-airborne avians. The community decided to act after seeing consistently declining numbers of swifts returning each year; indeed, for the past 20 years, there has been a 50% decline in the number of swifts in the UK, according to a study by the BTO and RSPB.

Swifts visit the UK for only three months in the spring and summer to nest and breed, having travelled more than 6,000 miles from Africa. The birds were once very common in Harbury, say residents, who loved their ‘screams, swooping flight and scythe-shaped silhouettes’. They are very faithful to their nesting sites, returning to nest alongside other swifts in colonies. A major cause of their decline is the loss of these sites, often as a result of the renovation or demolition of older buildings, as new buildings typically do not provide nesting opportunities.

Art–and dogs –to delight

THEsummer show at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, is an eye-opener. The Italian Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) is celebrated as the first female professional artist in Europe to run her own workshop, the first to paint nudes and one of the first not to be airbrushed from art history after her death. She was also, evidently, a dog lover.

However, this is no longer the case in Harbury. Renovation work at the village’s Old New Inn, a former pub, inspired other villagers to take action to help these migratory birds. Supported financially by Harbury Parish Council, in 2022, work began to install some 50 boxes, 10 of which came from the Bishop Itchington’s Men’s Shed, a tool-sharing woodworking collective, and a further 40 from Craig Knowles of Phoenix Craft Creations.

‘It has been wonderful that so many have offered their properties to give swifts a home, as well as purchasing additional boxes to help build a colony in their neighbourhood,’ says resident Amanda Randall, who initiated the Harbury Swift Project. ‘Where a choice of sites had to be made, data from the RSPB’s Swiftmapper website and local knowledge of past nest sites helped inform the best place for the boxes.’

‘The parish council funded the boxes and the installation work and provided some logistical support, but it is really the residents of Harbury to whom we are most grateful for embracing Amanda’s initiative and volunteering to host the boxes on their properties,’ says parish council clerk Alison Biddle. ‘We are looking forward to seeing the results!’

www.lpoty.co.uk/competition/rules

There are 35 of her oil paintings in the exhibition—plus drawings, works by contemporaries and contextual art objects—and 10 dogs appear in them. In her native Bologna, where she made her name portraying scholars, merchants and aristocrats, small dogs were fashion accessories, often bedecked not only with jewelled collars, but earrings. White cani bolognesi were widely admired, but Fontana mostly depicted miniature brown and white spaniels (above), ancestors of the Cavalier King

Charles. Another fashion accessory that often appears is the zibellino, an ermine pine-marten’s pelt with gold head and paws, a talisman for fertility.

As well as goldsmithing, Bologna’s fortunes came from silk and luxury textiles, so it is no surprise that Fontana became an accomplished painter of fabrics. ‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule-Breaker’ is a delight (until August 27; www.nationalgallery.ie).

Founded by photographer Charlie Waite, the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition is back for its 15th year, with submissions being sought now, urban, coastal, industrial or the countryside. Now is the time to scale a mountain, wade a river and chase a sunset to capture the UK’s most beautiful locations, such as Three Silver Birches in the Lickey Hills (above) by Dominic Williams. With a prize fund of £20,000, the award is open to all and submissions must be received by May 31. Visit

Getty; National Trust Images/James Dobson; Alamy; Sussie Bell

Time for Thyme

FIND out how Caryn and Jerry Hibbert, with advice from conservation charity Plantlife, restored their ancient water meadows at Thyme, Lechlade, Gloucestershire, on the banks of the Leach, a chalkstream that flows through the Cotswolds from Hampnett to Eastleach. Historically managed by a series of sluice gates and ditches, the meadows—designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest—are now home to large drifts of pyramidal and bee orchids and the variety of grasses and other plant and animal species is increasing annually.

Join C OUNTRY L IFE Gardens Editor Tiffany Daneff and Matt Pitts, meadows advisor at Plantlife, in conversation in the meadows on May 26, to talk about the benefits to farmers and landowners of increased biodiversity. The evening runs from 4pm–6.30pm and tickets, which include drinks and canapés, cost £25 (with £12.50 of that donated to Plantlife), available from www.thyme.co.uk

A rose to soothe

ANEW rose grown in support of The Menopause Charity has been launched by the Harkness Rose Company, it was announced last week. The plant, named The Menopause Charity Rose, is a type of floribunda or bush rose. It’s a light, candy-pink flower, consisting of up to 60 petals, that will treat owners to repeating displays throughout summer and autumn and is ideal for growing in a large pot or in a border, says Harkness Roses.

Each rose will come with information and links to a trusted website, so that those experiencing menopause ‘understand the changes that are happening to them and what to do next,’ the grower says. £2.50 from the sale of each rose will go to The Menopause Charity and funds raised will help the organisation develop online and livechat services, providing support to those experiencing menopausal symptoms.

‘We are delighted to be launching The Menopause Charity Rose with

Pretty in candy pink: The Menopause Charity Rose from Harkness

Harkness, working together to raise funds and awareness of menopause symptoms,’ says Menopause Charity CEO Jenny Haskey. ‘It’s a truly beautiful rose, but, most importantly, each sale will help ensure many more women can access trusted information and support so they don’t suffer needlessly.’

Country Mouse A cut above the rest

ALMOST overnight, my newly sown lawn went from brown to green to mildly out of control and I finally ordered a new lawn mower. The choice was bewildering. The first decision was whether the machine needed to have a roller to ensure neat stripes.

I grew up with stripes. My late father, a naval officer, was particularly keen on them, on everything from his immaculate lawn to his pressed trousers and the parting in his hair. He liked military parades, too.

None of this, sadly, rubbed off on me. I was not a success in the cadets at school. I deliberately gave up brushing my hair as a teenager. I am a disaster with an iron and feel uncomfortable even walking on a perfect lawn—the sort you see at schools and National Trust properties.

So, although I wanted to remember my father in a lasting attempt to create the sort of lawn he would have liked, I realised I couldn’t. I don’t have it in me and, besides, I do like the buttercups and daisies that, when he looked out his window, could ruin his breakfast, but which grow healthily in my green patch.

I know that dad, however, would have approved, anyway, as he always used to say: ‘Thank goodness we are all different.’ MH

Town Mouse Coronation cake

THIS week, the seating stands, decorations and barriers erected for the coronation have been vanishing from the streets as rapidly as they appeared. On the day itself, the steady fall of rain and the prospect of vast crowds dissuaded the family from venturing out to Westminster. Instead, we watched the ceremony on television with friends. It was a very happy occasion and the children were engaged by the spectacle despite themselves. Not only were they intrigued by some of the more unexpected elements of the regalia, such as spurs and armills, but one of them quite clearly fancied a golden supertunica for themselves.

Next day, the sun came out and launched parties and fêtes across the locality. In the course of the afternoon, we spent hours in conversation, drank tea and Champagne to excess and—a particular pleasure —managed to block-print four coronation tea towels.

I can’t remember the neighbourhood feeling so relaxed, although, curiously, the holiday atmosphere and the widespread sound of chatter in the streets brought back memories of alfresco socialising during lockdown. Asked later in the week what the highlight of the coronation weekend had been, the children agreed that the most amazing thing had been the sheer quantity of cake they had managed to consume. Disappointing, but possibly true.

JG

Town & Country Notebook

Quiz of the week

1) What does a nidologist study?

2) The Crystal Palace, the venue for the 1851 Great Exhibition, was originally built in which London park?

3) Jane Fairfax is a character in which Jane Austen novel?

4) Chelsea is known as Britain’s greatest flower show, but is it also the largest?

5) England’s shortest county boundary is between which two counties?

Edited by Carla Passino

Cabinet of curiosities by David Profumo

FROM the Spey Valley brewery in Keith comes this bottle of ruby ale, David’s Not So Bitter, which could have been christened just for me—is that a genitive apostrophe or an abbreviated verb?—and is described as, ‘wellbalanced and simple’: I’ll settle for that. The modern proliferation of micro-breweries and craft beers has created a spectrum of ingenious labels—another Scottish favourite, Alechemy,

offers Bad Day At The Office and Ten Storey Malt Bomb (surely designed to guarantee a katzenjammer) and our local Perthshire outfit is called Wasted Degrees, as that’s what folk thought the enterprising founding brothers had done with their academic qualifications. They can sell you Helles Lager or Spruce Tip Stout.

Slàinte!

Word of the week

Ruspicer (noun) Diviner,

100 years ago in May 19, 1923

WE’VE got Norton and Lycett and Wheatley; we are not so bad; why, we might win.’ This was said in answer to the usual wail that England no longer produces lawn tennis players likely to carry off the Davis Cup. It set five people talking at once to explain that Mr Norton and Mr Wheatley were from South Africa and that Mr Lycett had learned his lawn tennis in Australia, ‘where they can play lawn tennis’.

The hullabaloo became, after a time, a discussion on why we couldn’t. Inability to play in this sense means inability to beat [US top-ranking champion Bill] Tilden and a few others; and judged by that standard, it had to be admitted that the inability was manifest and the prospects for the season the blackest. Judged by any other standard, they are bright enough— E. E. G.

Time to buy

Pure new wool picnic blanket,

Heating & Plumbing London (www.heating-and-plumbing.com)

Vegetable Medley recipe journal, £26, Papier (www.papier.com)

‘If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine’

Love Among the Chickens, P.

G. Wodehouse

Riddle me this

What goes through a door, but never enters or exits a room?

Foldable hat with leather clasp, £20, National Trust (shop.nationaltrust.org.uk)

1) Birds’ nests 2) Hyde Park 3) ‘Emma’

4) No (Hampton Court Flower Show is)

5) Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire (about 20 yards) Riddle me this: A keyhole

soothsayer

£135,

In the spotlight Bearded tit (Panurus biarmicus)

Reedbeds are diverse in their usefulness, whether as efficient water cleansers, a source of woven materials or a vibrant wildlife habitat— home, among others, to the rare bittern, the shy water rail and the beautiful bearded tit. The latter is a real charmer, more easily heard than seen, its cheepings making an elastic, pinging sound with a touch of metallic twang about it, to be caught above the general rustlings and whisperings of the grasses themselves.

‘Bearded’ is a misnomer for Panurus biarmicus,

Unmissable events

May 20–September 3

‘FLOW’ art exhibition, Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury, Somerset. Five artists celebrate the county’s coast and waterways in painting, embroidery, printmaking and sculpture (01458 831197; www.swheritage.org.uk)

Every Friday until August 18

Beekeeping experience day, The Noble Bee, Furzedown Farm Conservation Area, Southampton, Hampshire. Learn about bees, observe a wild colony, taste honey and make your own beeswax candle (www.thenoblebee.com)

Wines of the week

A new spin on an old grape Balla Géza, Kadarka, Transylvania, Romania, 2020. £8.99, Lidl, alc 14% And now for something completely (well, at least a bit) different, in both style and packaging design. The Kadarka grape can make full, tannic reds, but this expression is lighter, wonderfully fresh and fruity. It’s a bright, paleish-ruby colour and sings with aromas and flavours of fresh Morello cherries. A great Beaujolais alternative.

Always in pour taste

which doesn’t sport a beard at all. Instead, the male has a macho pair of long, black moustaches, seen well against the pale-grey head and white throat. His bill is tiny, exactly right for the fine work of picking small insects off the reeds through spring and summer. His body (as does hers) sports beautiful, warm gingery tints that merge with the hues of the ripening reeds. When summer gives way to autumn, the bird’s diet will change in favour of the reed seeds, which provide sustenance in the colder months.

May 22–28 ‘Profusion’, Gallery

8, London SW1 ( pictured ). The perfect complement to Chelsea Flower Show, this exhibition by Maria Bell-Salter is a triumph of floral beauty (020–7930 0375; www.galleryeight.com)

May 24–July 16 Pigs Might

Fly, various venues. The UK tour

of this musical adaptation from Michael Morpurgo’s Mudpuddle Farm, with songs and puppetry, starts at Theatre Peckham, London SE5 (www.britishtheatre. com/pigs-might-fly-tour)

Book ahead

June 10–11 EA Festival, Hedingham Castle, Halstead, Essex. COUNTRY LIFE Editor-inChief Mark Hedges is one of the guest speakers at this event, which combines talks by leaders in literature, media, music, art, history, philosophy and environmental conservation, with music performances in the Norman keep (www.eafestival.com)

The Old Parsonage, Arley Green, Cheshire CW9 6LZ, May 20–21, 2pm–5pm You discover this house and garden tucked away close to the family’s main home, Arley Hall, which has opened its famous garden for the NGS since its first year in 1927. The Old Parsonage garden is contrastingly intimate and secretive and holds an absorbing selection of plants. On Sunday, there are other excellent gardens open nearby, including Manley Knoll, Mayfield House and Tirley Garth Garden.

Principe Pallavicini, Malvasia Puntinata, Roma, Lazio, Italy, 2021. £15.99–£17.25, Alexander Hadleigh, Liberty Wines, Noble Grape, Valvona & Crolla, alc 13.5% A touch of skin contact and several months ageing on the lees. Sweetly ripe yellow fruits give an exotic character, balanced by a saline, mineral tang and a pithy finish. Easy drinking, a delicious everyday wine.

Vive la France

Berry Bros & Rudd, Côtes du Rhône Rouge by Rémi Pouizin, France, 2021. £13.95, Berry Bros & Rudd, alc 13.5% Rémi Pouizin of Domaine DieuLe-Fit in Visan makes this greatvalue blend for Berry Bros. Peppery, herbal, red-berry and cherry aromas lead to a lively, juicy palate. Lovely purity of fruit; ripe red and black berries balanced by a mineral freshness.

The sherry on top Diatomists 12-Year-Old Amontillado, Jerez, Spain. £18.90/ 37.5cl, Diatomists, alc 18%

The innovative Diatomists work with selected Jerez growers, putting equal emphasis on terroir and the solera in their sherries. This bursts with salty, richly savoury aromas, layers of roasted nuts, dried apricots, orange peel and ripe lemon. It unfurls to a lip-smacking finish.

For more, visit www.decanter.com

Glyn Satterley/Country Life Picture Library/Future Plc; Getty; Alamy; Maria Bell-Salter, The source of the rainbow, Iris

Letters to the Editor Mark Hedges

Letter of the week

The advantages of age B

EING able to politely decline invitations to communal viewings of live television coverage of the coronation was one advantage of advanced years. My response was: ‘No thanks, I’ve already seen one’.

Alan Field, Nottinghamshire

The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol

Roger Brut Réserve Champagne

Canine intuition

Root of all ills

IAM grateful to Jamie Blackett for his thoughtful review of my book, Cry of the Wild: Eight animals under siege (Books, May 3). He makes an illuminating and troubling observation: ‘Otters (right)… are no longer under siege… They recovered strongly a decade ago…’ Well, yes, we all know that. Nor ‘under siege’, in the sense of dangerously reduced numbers, are many of the species considered in the book—for instance fox, rabbit and gannet. One of my species is Homo sapiens. There are quite a lot of them. This might have alerted Mr Blackett (even if my writing is obscure) to the fact that the ‘siege’ in the subtitle is not only or mainly about numbers. The book’s main concern is how humans

The mystery of Mallory

interfere with the thriving of animals—including ourselves: how we stop them living the lives they should. To measure the thriving of a species only by counting heads shows, I’m afraid, a lack of real empathy. And that’s at the root of many of our ecological and political ills.

Prof Charles Foster, University of Oxford

DID Mallory (right) conquer Everest in 1924? (‘Conquering the goddess of the sky’, May 3). There are three factors which indicate that he probably did achieve the summit, but fell when descending after sunset. When his body was discovered in 1999, his snow goggles were found in his pocket. A photograph of his wife, Ruth, which he had planned to leave at the top, was not in his wallet or pockets. He was a man of astonishing skill and determination and was seen by Noel Odell ‘going strongly’ only some 650ft below the summit. He is likely to have got there.

Charles Harris, Oxfordshir e

Red ants everywhere

THIS year, I am finding an abundance of red ant nests in my meadow and on my lawns. Does this mean it’s going to be a good year for the green woodpecker, which laps them up?

Fergus McMullen, Essex

WE recently received a telephone call from a neighbour in distress, asking if she could come round for some support and help. When she arrived, she was in floods of tears and my wife simply gave her a big hug. Our lurcher, Lupin, was observing all of this and when my wife stood back, he got up on his hind legs, put his paws on our neighbour’s shoulders and rested his head next to hers. He then gently started to lick the tears away. He sensed that he could provide some tender assistance. It was remarkable to witness.

Christopher Ray, East Sussex

COUNTRY LIFE , 121–141, Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR

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Chirrup notes

HAVING just read about the loss of sparrows (Country Mouse, May 1), I can answer the question that you raised by saying that I looked out of my kitchen window to see a dozen around the bird feeders. Perhaps not too surprising, as I live in the centre of The Lost Gardens of Heligan. When people telephone me, they sometimes comment on the background sounds of birdsong, which must be something of a rarity nowadays.

Charles Francis, Cornwall

Lake District traffic takes its toll

FURTHER to the opinion article by Douglas Chalmers opposing a tourism tax for visitors to hotels, B&Bs and campsites (‘Is the ‘tourist tax’ realistic?’, April 19), I do think what is urgently needed is a road-toll tax to reduce the number of vehicles used by day visitors to the Lake District and to encourage more use of public transport.

The funds raised could be ringfenced and used to reduce or make free the local public transport services that, at present, are some of the most expensive in the country. Local residents and businesses could be exempted from the tax.

John Entwistle, Cumbria

Tolerance is our way

EARLY last week, I looked down across the valley and the sun suddenly broke through. It seemed that spring had come at last. The newly unfurled leaves shone with that special green they show for all too fleeting a time. A hawk wheeled in the sky, ‘off, off forth on a swing/As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’. Gerard Manley Hopkins catches its flight perfectly and, like him, ‘my heart in its hiding’ rose up with the bird and was stirred by ‘the mastery of the thing’. I could only say ‘thank you’ to be in England.

What a fortunate generation we are. Neither ourselves nor our sons conscripted for war, suffering neither invasion, nor revolution, and living in a society that, for the most part, cares for the less fortunate. Yet, even so, we continually dwell on the political imperfections; complain about the failures of the system; and demand ever more from those who govern us. What was so special about the coronation was that all that complaining was set aside and the country embraced this very special expression of continuity and stability.

love affair with Nature, Cornishware’s 100th birthday and a guide to Britain’s rare native orchids

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fortune, we should reach out to those who have not had our advantages. We gave our word that we would give 0.7% of our GNI (Gross National Income) in aid to the poorest. Not only have we broken our solemn promise and reduced that to 0.5%, but we have pinched a great deal of the remainder to pay for our programme to send migrants home.

The promise was a sensible one because, if we do not make life better in the poorest of countries, then more and more people will leave home to find a better life elsewhere. Climate change will hasten the process and every rich country will be faced with huge immigration pressure. Keeping our word on aid is a self-interested essential.

Britain must uphold the Rule of Law even when, in the short term, it seems inconvenient

That is the message we should take from that remarkable event. It is a great privilege to be British, yet these past few years have not been worthy expressions of the standards and values by which we have been characterised abroad. The coronation has given us a definitive chance to recover our reputation, which can be summed up in three simple phrases. Our word is our bond; we uphold the Rule of Law; and tolerance is the hallmark of our society.

Now, as we return to the political skirmishing that is the mark of a healthy democracy, those are the phrases by which we should judge legislation. In recognition of our good

We have the right and the duty to protect our borders, but we have to do it in ways that uphold international law —law that we British have largely helped to frame in order that other nations should have the legal protections that have been so important to us. The proposition in the Illegal Migration Bill is that we should be prepared to break international law. That is a disastrous suggestion because, as a global power, we rely on international law for own protection. Britain must uphold the Rule of Law even when, in the short term, it seems inconvenient.

We are a tolerant society and that means insisting that people’s views aren’t dictated by fashion. If one believes that gender is determined at birth then one should be able to say it. Opposition to abortion should be an allowable view. Campaigning against the Moslem treatment of women is not Islamaphobic. A tolerant society accepts diversity of view. Freedom demands we defend the right of others to express views we abhor. Keeping our word, upholding the Rule of Law, defending freedom —these are the things of which Britain is justly proud. Let us not betray them in 2023.

Athena Cultural Crusader

Bringing history to life

IN whatever form they come before our eyes—whether as objects, buildings, archaeological remains, texts or images—the vestiges of the past need to be animated in our imagination before we can properly enjoy them. There are many ways of ‘bringing history to life’, but, by a cruel irony, most of them are not, in fact, very engaging. Absorbing the bread and butter of dates, technical description and historical context, for example, through the medium of labels, texts and diagrams requires time and concentration. A parent with children could reasonably struggle to find either and even an idle visitor might as easily be put off as engaged by a barrage of information.

A much more immediate way of rearing the past into present reality, of course,

The way we

were

is to re-create it. The idea of historical re-creation has a long history in Britain and, in recent years, the popularity of period drama has perhaps increased our appetite for this approach as a means of interpretation. That said, the most ambitious recent projects of this kind—such as the Renaissance rooms at Stirling Castle—are informed by formidable scholarship.

It has not been designed to appeal to an audience; it is interesting because it aspires to accuracy

To such initiatives must now be added another outstanding project: the modern reconstruction of a Roman villa at The Newt in Somerset. Be warned, this is not an ordinary visitor attraction that you can simply pitch up to view: it is visible to hotel guests and members of its club.

The villa is based on the excavated foundations of a real predecessor, which was abandoned in the mid fourth century. A museum now stands on the site of the

original building. This displays individual finds, as well as the exposed archaeology of the Roman bathhouse. The interiors of the nearby modern villa make use of all the available evidence about the original, but, where this fails, they look to the example of other Roman sites in Britain or, if necessary, to objects from yet further afield across the Roman Empire. The interiors are filled with period fittings and objects. Even the wood-fired hypocaust that heats the bathhouse operates, the flues leaving smoke stains on the lime-washed walls.

Leaving the villa, Athena found herself wondering why, exactly, it was so successful. The answer, she thinks, lies partly in its quality, extent and full-blooded confidence. For a parallel in these regards, she can only think of the Villa Kerylos at Menton, France, created in about 1900 by the archaeologist Théodore Reinach. Added to these elements, it has not really been reconstructed first and foremost as a visitor attraction, but as an essay in experimental archaeology. Expressed another way, it has not been designed to appeal to an audience; it is interesting because it aspires to accuracy. This is not a project that could be helpfully repeated in lots of places and Athena suspects it will look its age quite quickly, but for sheer impact and interest it is hard to beat.

Photographs from the C OUNTRY L IFE archive

1900May 12 published

The rose garden at Clifton Hall, Nottinghamshire. The pergola was described as giving ‘both a grateful shade from hot suns and a place for the growth of beautiful climbing plants’. Gardeners were often shown labouring in such photographs, but, here, a woman, probably a professional model, is to be seen tending the flowers.

Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www. countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@ futurenet.com

My favourite painting Lady Caroline Percy

Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus by Turner

Lady Caroline Percy is an interior designer and consultant in fine art and antiques, founder of Hotspur Design and co-founder of Historic Decoration

A number of Turner paintings fall into my favourites category. The particular appeal of this one is that it depicts a moment in antiquity that has always intrigued me. Germanicus, heroic general and proconsul of Gaul, was closely related to two infamous and degenerate emperors, his son Caligula and grandson Nero. I enjoy Turner’s vision of the story and impressionistic treatment of light, washing a golden veil over the Roman architecture and shimmering reflections on the water of the Tiber. Agrippina’s boat glides into harbour with her husband’s ashes at the end of the long journey from Antioch, where he perished

Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Caesars Restored, exhibited 1839, oil on canvas, 36in by 48in, by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Tate Collection

Charlotte Mullins comments on Ancient Rome

THIS late painting by J. M. W. Turner was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1839, as one of a pair. Its companion, Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino, depicts the ruins of ancient Rome with goats picking their way between remaining columns. By contrast, this painting shows ancient Rome alive, imagined as a mirage of spectacular buildings and bridges that glow and pulse at this liminal time, as the sun sets and a full moon rises.

Nominally, the painting shows the widow Agrippina being rowed to shore across the Tiber, holding the ashes of her poisoned husband, Germanicus—a Roman general—in an urn. This was a favourite subject of history painters: Nicolas Poussin captured the moment of death; Peter Paul Rubens conjured a double profile

‘portrait’ of Germanicus and his wife; Benjamin West depicted Agrippina landing in Brundisium (now Brindisi) in Puglia. West had the story right, whereas Turner either applied artistic licence or was misinformed because, in AD19, Agrippina conveyed the ashes from Antioch back to Italy, landing on the east coast and not in Rome.

This was Turner’s second pairing of modern and ancient Italy. With their hazes of light and indistinct details, many critics didn’t understand them. Blackwell’s Magazine described them as ‘washy-flashy splashes of reds, blues and whites that, in their distraction, represent nothing in heaven or earth’. Today, the paintings are seen as ethereal examples of Turner’s late work that reflect on the passing of time and the rise and fall of empires.

Alamy

Farming life

Jamie Blackett

The stork cometh

A visiting stork causes great excitement, but no babies, and a cold spring holds the farm back

IT has been a dispiriting nesting season so far. I had high hopes for the lapwings after last year’s success, but they have been struggling to breed. We were seeing them regularly a couple of weeks ago, but had yet to identify any nests, which we would then have fenced off against grazing cattle and foraging badgers. Sadly, the lapwing parents were spending so much time in the air mobbing the crows that I fear they have decided to cut their losses and try elsewhere. We are doing what we can to control the crows with Larsen traps, but there seem to be a lot of them this year. Perhaps that is because bird flu cut such a swathe through the buzzards and red kites that the corvids have fewer enemies themselves.

Probably it was a European bird that was geographically embarrassed

Then, on April 17, to great excitement, a white stork—other storks are available— appeared in our fields. I tweeted a video of the bird gracefully stalking, or even storking, about, snacking on frogs near a large puddle in the middle of the field, where the water accumulates in a wet time. The twitchers duly descended on us the next morning and the bird obliged them by staying around so that it could have its photograph taken before flying off up the Nith Estuary like a large white-and-black hang-glider.

Speculation mounted as to what it might mean and the sainted Maureen, the administrative dynamo behind our dairy business who has hitherto kept the village school afloat with her numerous children, was forced to put out a statement saying that it did not mean she was having another baby.

The power of recall in the digital age confirmed within minutes that it was the first sighting of a stork in Dumfries and Galloway for 12 years. Summer-resident storks became extinct in the UK in the early 1400s—there is a successful reintroduction programme that started at Knepp in West Sussex, where

they have them nesting in oak trees and chimneys. By chance, a couple of years ago, I registered my interest in becoming a stork host here, but this one wasn’t ringed and it seems unlikely that they are already probing this far north. Probably it was a European bird that was geographically embarrassed on its way back from Africa. It would be wonderful to think, however, that they might one day be a regular sighting here, as the egrets are.

The stock response to this seismic ornithological event is: ‘Global warming, innit?!’ If it is, then it is the only sign of it around here in recent weeks. It has been another cold, late spring. The grass has been well behind and it has taken supplementary feeding with expensive silage to keep the milk yield up (a double whammy when the price has been plummeting). Frigid, wet soils meant the barley went in almost a month late, before the first cuckoo, when farming lore dictates that tardy sowing depresses yields, but weeks after we had hoped to drill it.

No one likes to be contrarian about the climate any more for fear of being burnt at the stake for heresy, but the whole point of a farming diary is to make an honest record for posterity. The direction of travel isn’t always one way: we have had more frosts here this last winter than the one before, which was, in turn, colder than the one before that. I put it down to greater volcanic activity recently.

The maverick in me harbours a forlorn hope that this might be some latter-day Maunder Minimum, one of those moments in history when the climate oscillates, if only to see the look on the net-zero zealots’ faces. If it is, then it may be just in time to save livestock farming from the globalist technocrats and angry eco-fanatics who wish to close us down.

Two people who take a keen interest in frosts are my new friends Max and Penny, who run Steilhead Cider from their lovely orchard smallholding in Nithsdale. Apple trees need frosts in winter, but decidedly not when they are in blossom. Yesterday, I went to pick my friends’ brains about planting orchards and spent an enjoyable afternoon seeing where their delicious ciders are made and blethering about Galloway Pippins, Tom Putts and Scotch Bridgets. The plan is to plant some new orchards here, each surrounded by hedges and undersown with wildflower meadows, enriching our habitat mosaic.

If global warming has not burnt us to a cinder or we are not under a glacier in a new ice age, I hope to spend my retirement snoozing in a deckchair under an apple bower, listening to a chorus of bullfinches, gratifyingly fuddled by cider.

Jamie Blackett farms in Dumfries & Galloway and wrote ‘Land of Milk and Honey, Digressions of a Rural Dissident’ (Quiller)

Heralding a rare return or merely lost? Storks may yet be seen in south-west Scotland

RHS Chelsea Flower Show preview

The impossible made possible

Kathryn Bradley-Hole anticipates a confident return to form at Chelsea, with mouth-watering designs for productive gardens, aromatic Mediterranean planting and even a reinterpretation of the rock garden

THE most recent shows at Chelsea revealed the great resilience and resourcefulness of British gardening, defying the challenges of health uncertainties and irregular supply chains. This year, expect to see increased buoyancy, with an energised, confident event of commendable variety—and even, perhaps, an emerging shift of emphasis.

Of late, we have become used to laissezfaire, pastoral sensibilities, with an abundance of shaggy hedgerows and flowery meadows. The wild-and-weedy look has gained ground incrementally at the show for many years. ‘Wildernesses’ will be there next week, but, this time, they’re strongly challenged by exhibits rooted in what constitutes a real garden. Shouldn’t it be a place for people, as well as plants and wild creatures?

One theme gaining momentum in real life is the productive garden, with enthusiasts across all age groups. In The Savills Garden,

Mark Gregory interprets the trend with ‘a seasonal potager at a country hotel, combining beautiful ornamental and edible planting’. Occupying one of the largest plots, it has a small building on the boundary, with a kitchen leading into the garden, alongside a verandah-covered dining area. Its Yorkstone courtyard has margins of pretty flowers and a short run of crisp, stilt hedging in hornbeam. The potager occupies the second half of the garden, with a collection of small raised beds of vegetables, salads and herbs, set out next to a running ‘brook’ crossed by rustic stone bridges. Fruit includes espalier ‘step-over’ apples, a fan-trained pear tree, quince, figs and grapevines. The layout is informal and compact, but it would comfortably translate to many different home-garden settings. The pleasure of eating outdoors in a more southerly latitude is celebrated in the Hamptons Mediterranean Garden, designed by Filippo Dester. Its formal, square plot

Ornamental and edible planting in The Savills Garden, designed by Mark Gregory

Left: Darren Hawkes offers dramatic contrasts between strife and sanctuary in The Samaritans’ Listening Garden

RHS Chelsea Flower Show preview

contains a central kitchen/bar and adjacent dining furniture, surrounded by Mediterranean trees and shrubs, such as slender cypresses, lemons, figs, myrtle, lavender and cistus. Culinary herbs include rosemary, thyme, oregano, fennel, chives, mint and sage. If the sun kindly shines on the show, this aromatic, sophisticated garden, with its crisp water canal, will have considerable allure.

Efficacious herbs get a vastly different treatment in Jihae Hwang’s A Letter from a Million Years Past. This is a piece of ancient landscape, where some 200 tons of Scottish basalt form a magnificent hillside in miniature, imitating a slice of South Korea’s majestic eastern Jiri Mountains. The region supports some 1,500 native Korean plants of medicinal value, many of which are now scarce. A particular feature here is a traditional Korean herb-drying tower, a slender, but tall building with a pitched roof that allows the passage of air, yet keeps out the rain. The Korean artist’s previous exhibit at Chelsea was the memorable DMZ Garden in 2012, a poignant and remarkably detailed expression of the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. This time, she draws dramatic attention to ancient knowledge and the curative properties of herbs in her homeland. It is

Filippo Dester encourages dining alfresco amid aromatic planting in the Hamptons Mediterranean Garden

literally taking Chelsea’s 100-year-old tradition of rock-garden displays into new territory. Health and wellbeing-associated charities have a strong presence among the sponsors and—still with rocks—a tough, stony ‘journey’ is presented by Darren Hawkes in The Samaritans’ Listening Garden, celebrating

the charity’s 70th anniversary. On a rectangular site, the designer envisages a ‘brutal and foreboding’ entrance at one end, with steel girders and cables suspending menacing chunks of concrete. Relief is found beyond, where the scene opens out into a welcoming sanctuary, the listening area. Its gurgling

Darren Hawkes; Mark Gregory; Filippo Dester; Sarah Price; Getty; Jihae Hwang; Images are computer generated

Sarah Price weaves Benton End bearded irises into the Nurture Landscapes Garden

water flows between a smoother, brighter rockscape, with some nice trees and contemporary drifts of grasses and perennials growing out of the stony fissures.

The calming influence of trees and abundant woodland flowers is presented in Myeloma UK’s A Life Worth Living Garden, by Chris Beardshaw. Its two neo-Classical pavilions are reached via a meandering path of charred oak, whereas a more open part of the garden includes crisp yew hedging and a traditional, colourful border of early-summer flowers.

Sarah Price may well provide some of the most captivating and original views of the show

A glass stairway leads up to a cantilevered viewing platform in the heart of Cavernoma On My Mind, a garden by Taina Suonio and Anne Hamilton for The Cavernoma Society. It gives a bird’s-eye view over a small and pretty square plot, including shrub roses, salvias, peonies, herbs and other reliable Chelsea favourites, interwoven with dainty grasses and wildflowers. An enormous amount of symbolism and messaging has been put into the choice and location of each plant. That will be lost on most visitors, of course,

More to see...

In the Grand Pavilion, ferns and tree ferns ( Dryopteris and Cyathea species) gracefully ornament a number of gardens and nursery exhibits Caley Brothers are gourmet mushroomgrowers selling a variety of fresh mushrooms and grow-at-home kits. Now run by sisters Jodie and Lorraine, the original family business was set up by their grandparents in the 1950s

Caribbean floral displays from Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados and Grenada invigorate the marquee with tropical warmth in heliconias and torch ginger

Hoyland Plant Centre further warms things up with brilliant displays of clivia, agapanthus, amarine and nerine

New exhibitor Lincolnshire Pond Plants shares the wonders of water lilies for ponds of all sizes

Derbyshire Bonsai and David Cheshire Nurseries, both Gold medal winners in 2022, return with their diminutive trees

At the central Monument site, the RHS celebrates Women in Gardening, including Gertrude Jekyll, a guiding force in matters horticultural for the first three decades of COUNTRY LIFE’s existence

who are looking for overall effect, but the contemporary belvedere will literally lift this garden into another dimension.

Thomas Hoblyn’s Boodles British Craft Garden draws inspiration from mid-19thcentury Pre-Raphaelite ideas of English woodland. Its naturalistic planting includes martagon lilies and a connoisseur’s range of ferns. The crafts element includes a metal arbour modelled on branches, a terrace of fossil-rich Chatsworth limestone and a ‘floating’ pool by imaginative fountain creator Bamber Wallis.

Old-fashioned bearded irises can be tricky to bring to the show, having a delicacy in their quivering petals. The tougher, highly bred modern varieties tend to have greater weather

resistance; yet, for many, the subtle hues and potential fragility of the best mid-20thcentury varieties put them in a class of their own. In this respect, irises bred by the artist Cedric Morris (1899–1982), in his Suffolk garden at Benton End, have special appeal. Morris bred them, in his own words, for ‘form, poise, colour, texture and general design’. In The Nurture Landscapes Garden, Sarah Price weaves them among grasses, magenta Gladiolus species, pastel-hued poppies and tall stems of dark-bronze Aeonium arboreum, a statuesque tender succulent, native to Macaronesia. Silver foliage illuminates the garden here and there, via the olive-like shrub Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’ and succulent Cotyledon species. This exhibit may well provide some of the most captivating and original views in the show, but if you replicate it at home, do put it in a slug-proof location. A combination of herbaceous hideaways described as ‘dishevelled, with Nature encroaching at the edges’ and tender succulents is, to molluscs, a five-star hotel with Michelin-starred restaurant attached. Real Nature can be a bind sometimes, although part of the art of Chelsea derives from seeing the impossible made possible, even for a fleeting moment.

Rock gardens return to Chelsea in Jihae Hwang’s A Letter from a Million Years Past

Time to sit and stare

The West Sussex home of Harriet Anstruther and Henry Bourne Non Morris discovers a garden that has been brilliantly designed to make you want to stop and simply enjoy its loveliness

Photographs by Éva Németh

THE thing I most love about the garden is that it has a magical quality. It had a very remarkable feel to it, even when I first took it on. I had noticed this atmosphere as a child when we used to visit the farmer who lived here.’

Interior designer Harriet Anstruther acquired the collection of dilapidated buildings and overgrown yards—a former livery and stables—close to her family home in West Sussex 25 years ago and has transformed it into a seductive, deeply comfortable haven. To get there, you disappear ‘down a lane, off a lane’ and find yourself arriving at a rambling, steep-roofed hamlet, a perfect small estate with the central two acres of groomed gardens edged with expanses of wildflower meadow, the whole embraced by sheltering woodland.

Clearly, this is an amazing place for a party

Ms Anstruther spends three months a year working under dazzling blue Los Angeles skies in California, US, and is clear that a passion for rock music infuses her work— especially Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, which is ‘quiet, but powerful, bold, but beautiful’—but her heart is deeply rooted in the English countryside. ‘I grew up in woodland. We didn’t have a television as

kids, so we spent all our weekends wooding with Papa, clearing and building bonfires and planting saplings.’

Over the years, a weekend retreat has become a place to live and work full time, its relaxed and welcoming atmosphere created by layers of found or inherited elements, and plants given as presents or grown from cuttings. The Bothy, which was once a garage, is now an idyllic studio reached by a curving gravel path and a former pigsty is abundant

with sculptural artichokes and ‘20 quid’ agricultural feed bins brimming with ferns and agapanthus. Crucially, fences have been removed and the paddock grass left to grow tall, so the whole garden flows and connects. There are two distinctly different moods to the gardens at the front and the back of the central 16th-century farmhouse. The expansive front garden is surrounded by soft, red, ironstone walls—they had totally tumbled down when the new owners arrived—and reflects

Preceding pages: The swing seat hanging from a cooking-apple tree was made by a friend and given as a present by Harriet Anstruther to her husband, Henry Bourne. Above: Shaded seating with a pretty Indian parasol and stone dog found in a junk shop

Facing page: Foxgloves are left to seed themselves around the garden and roses to scramble as they will. Above: The back of the 16th-century Sussex farmhouse, with cherry trees deliberately left loose in contrast to the tidily trimmed box squares beneath

the slightly grander stone cladding and southfacing aspect of this side of the house. ‘My husband [photographer Henry Bourne] loves sunshine, but I’m Scottish and prefer to sit in the shade at the back of the house, which is the original brick and stone and looks like a higgledy-piggledy timber-frame cottage.’

The front garden has a graceful French feel that reminds me of the enchanting fête champêtre in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. (Clearly, this is an amazing place for a party.) Timeless box parterres anchor the blocky shape of the house, pale-pink and luminous red roses are draped over every

You cannot separate house and garden. If you are inside, you are looking out. If you are outside, you are looking in

structure and self-seeded foxgloves and hazy love-in-a-mist dance freely through the curving borders. A majestic copper beech towers over a lawn peopled by gnarled old apple trees, a magnificent walnut and younger plums and greengages.

Against the house, the brick terrace is a nestling place soft with wisteria, box and hydrangeas. There is a pretty Indian parasol, a stone dog on a table found in a junk shop and an old urn spilling over with lacy Erigeron karvinskianus. Flowers are grey, mauve, white and pink. ‘Absolutely no yellow or orange —I had orange hessian wallpaper when I was

young, which I loathed.’ The inky Salvia ‘Nachtvlinder’ and chocolatey Scabiosa ‘Black Cat’ offer dark accents, but the overall effect is pale and silvery. ‘It looks amazing in the moonlight—it’s utterly magical then with barn owls, moths and lanterns casting shadows.’

Everywhere are places to read or talk. The swing seat suspended from the cooking-apple tree was made ‘by a friend of ours as a wedding present from me to Henry. We sit here quietly sometimes. It’s heaven when the tree is in blossom and again when Rosa ‘Albertine’

is blooming. ‘Albertine’ is one of my favourites, such a soft, old-fashioned ballet pink.’

A perfectly ordered potting shed cleverly links the front garden to the back. This is one of Ms Anstruther’s favourite spots: ‘I love to be in here with a cigarette and a coffee with the rain pounding on the roof.’

You emerge from the potting shed to another terrace, where plump-cushioned rattan armchairs invite you yet again to sit. Key to the feeling of welcome is the way the terrace here is protected by a double row of

flowering cherry trees emerging shaggily from immaculately clipped box squares. A gardener recently suggested tidying up the canopy of the trees to match the neatness of the box, ‘which goes against everything I have set out to do. I love the déshabillé feel of the trees next to the ordered topiary and then the view out to Nature beyond.’

Behind the cherries is a wildflower meadow now full of orchids, which simply arrived when the grass was left to its own devices. At its centre, a delicate canvas-roofed

Magical by moonlight: the planting is pale and silvery in shades of grey, mauve, white and pink—with absolutely no yellows or oranges

pavilion emerging from a pool of ox-eye daisies exerts another magnetic pull.

Ms Anstruther firmly believes that you cannot separate house and garden. ‘If you are inside, you are looking out. If you are outside, you are looking in. I once worked on a house where the design of the interior was based on the exterior light bouncing off the lakes. Everything was about reflection.’

At her Sussex retreat, she has created an enticing garden that wraps seamlessly about its buildings, drawing you endlessly outside to celebrate the blossom or the roses or the way everything is bathed in moonlight. Whatever you are drawn out to admire, she has ensured that there is always somewhere delightful to sit.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Harriet Anstruther’s tips for making a garden to relax in

Garden furniture can look ugly and clunky in the same way as a swimming pool can look completely out of place. I love old French metal chairs, but they are deeply uncomfortable—much better to place them under an apple tree simply to look at. To sit on, you need something with deep cushions covered in a waterproof fabric. I have simple rattan armchairs from Oka, which are both functional and inviting

The most atmospheric spaces are created with layers of elements that have a personal story. When we rebuilt the walls, I included a salvaged wroughtiron gate that belonged to my Aunt Joan

Using mirrors outside is a classic idea, but it is effective. I found the circular mirror on the wall of the bothy for £8.99 on Amazon. From a distance, it makes you feel as if there is something else going on

Lighting in the garden is so important. I put mirrored glass behind candles in

small nooks in the garden walls, suspend lanterns from trees and have solarpowered lights all over the place, which come on automatically at dusk

I love creating sheltered places to sit. I designed the corten-steel gazebo in the front garden to mirror the proportions of the bothy and use elegant parasols from the Raj Tent Club as much to protect from the elements as to draw you to a place that feels secure and settled

An ironwork pavilion surrounded by a froth of ox-eye daisies in the wildflower meadow

A repeat-flowering rose grown from a cutting, meandering up the south-facing barn

French style

The hand-forged iron, semi-circular Ladderback Garden Tree Seat with arms, £2,160, is inspired by 19th-century French design, from Architectural Heritage (01386 584414; www.architectural-heritage.co.uk)

Circle time

From teak garden furniture specialist Corido comes this Round Tree Seat with arms, £2,085, designed to create a garden focal point (020–8655 6242; www.corido.co.uk)

Double the fun

This Two Seat Oak Rope Swing, from £339, can be hand carved with an inscription of your choice, from Sitting Spiritually (01297 443084; www.sittingspiritually.co.uk)

Tree tops

Treehouse designers Blue Forest will build anything from a treetop hideaway to an enchanted castle. Prices from £120,000 for a bespoke children’s treehouse (01892 750090; www.blueforest.com)

Take a bough

Treehouses, seats and swings to while away summer days, selected by Amelia

Thorpe

Swing low

The Oak Baby Swing, from £355, would make a joyful addition to any new parents’ (or grandparents’) garden, from The Oak & Rope Company (01227 469413; www.theoakandropecompany.co.uk)

Trunk call Templated to fit your space perfectly, the oak Broadwalk Circular Tree Seat is made in Hampshire, featuring a curved backrest for comfort, from £33,480, Gaze Burvill (01420 588444; www.gazeburvill.com)

Easy does it

The Striped Hanging Garden Chair, £36.99, is made of cotton with a padded base and back for idling in comfort, from VonHaus (www.vonhaus.com)

Branch lines

Be it a children’s playhouse, glamping destination or home office, Cheeky Monkey specialises in bringing treehouse designs to life, prices from £18,000 (01403 262219; www.cheekymonkeytreehouses.com)

Delightful delphiniums

We may not all be able to grow show quality delphiniums, but even in ordinary gardens these statuesque plants still turn heads, says John Hoyland

VISITORS to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show know all the plants there are grown to the highest of standards, but there is one family that consistently outshines all the others: delphiniums. Impossibly tall and perfectly proportioned, their spires of delicate flowers often elicit gasps of astonishment and many gardeners make an annual pilgrimage to marvel at the growers’ skills and be dazzled by the opulence of the flowers. Seasoned gardeners take most plants in their stride, but delphiniums can intimidate even the most experienced of us.

Achieving the same calibre of display in the rough and tumble of the British garden

Above: Semi-double, dark-eyed ‘Faust’.

Below: Blue ‘Cassius’ is tinged with purple

is beyond the abilities of most gardeners, although fantastic displays of delphiniums can still be seen, notably at Temple Newsam in West Yorkshire and at Regent’s Park in London, where a colour-themed sweep of the flowers shines out against a protective yew hedge. Visit between June and early August when delphiniums are at the peak of their performance.

Anyone who has grown them knows that, although the perfection shown at flower shows and in professional gardens is almost impossible to achieve, delphiniums will, nevertheless, always be impressive. The height of the blooms, the intensity of colour

(particularly the blue forms) and the elegance of the flowers make a group of even common-or-garden delphiniums irresistible. These are plants that don’t need to be the mollycoddled supermodels of the show bench to make an impression; even a poorly grown delphinium will still turn heads.

The individual flowers of delphiniums are so intricate that they seem to be hand crafted, as exquisite as Meissen porcelain. In 1936, New York’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the beauty of delphiniums by presenting an exhibition not of paintings nor sculpture, but of living plants. The delphiniums had been bred by Edward Steichen, at the time the notable

Preceding pages: The King at Highgrove in Gloucestershire with his prized delphiniums, of which he has long been an admirer. Above left: Delphinium ‘Lilian Bassett’, with its distinctive dark eyes amid the white. Avoid seed-grown plants, which may not come true

Above: At 4ft, ‘Mighty Atom’ is diminutive.

chief photographer for magazine publisher Condé Nast. Steichen’s private passion was breeding delphiniums and the museum thought them so striking that they were worthy of display. The exhibition catalogue describes the plants as having been produced with as much creativity as any work of art. This may be the only time that the artistry of the plant breeder and the beauty of living plants have been celebrated in an art gallery.

Steichen’s plants were cultivars of Delphinium elatum. Although there are about 300 species of delphiniums in the wild, mainly in southern China, very few have been used to breed garden-worthy hybrids. D. elatum is among the tallest of the species and more

floriferous than most others. It is now a parent of the majority of the perennial hybrids.

At the end of the 19th century, the French nurseryman Victor Lemoine, renowned for introducing many new forms of overlooked plants, began producing spectacular delphiniums by crossing Delphinium elatum with other species. Lemoine had a sharp eye for the commercial potential of plants and when his work was carried on in Britain by James Kelway, it produced a minor ‘Delphinium fever’. Every gardener wanted to grow the new hybrids. Later, in the middle of the 20th century, Charles Langdon and James Blackmore championed the genus and introduced many hybrids. The nursery that

Quintessential ‘Langdon’s Blue Lagoon’

Below: Florists’ favourite ‘Strawberry Fair’

An unusual example, ‘Fanfare’ has tightly packed, pale-mauve flowers with a silvery sheen

John Paul/Country Life Picture Library/Future Content Hub; Alamy; Clive Nichols; Marianne Majerus

still bears their name is the one that presents those spectacular displays at Chelsea.

Delphinium hybrids are produced vegetatively by taking cuttings, which is a labourintensive and, therefore, expensive process. Seed-sowing can create many more plants and there are several seed strains of delphiniums. The first of these appeared in the 1930s in California, US, and were marketed as the Pacific Hybrids. This and other seed strains enable nurseries to cheaply supply large numbers of delphiniums that are uniform in size and colour, even if the plants are not identical. Seed-grown plants often flower in their first year after sowing, but are not long lived and are best treated as annuals. None of the seed strains produce plants that are as full of flowers as the named hybrids.

The intricate flowers seem hand crafted, as exquisite as Meissen porcelain

Delphiniums are best seen in traditional herbaceous borders and are little used by contemporary garden designers: they are not companionable plants and sit uneasily in modern, naturalistic planting schemes or fashionable, prairie-style gardens. Their ambassadors are nurseries such as Blackmore & Langdon’s, plant societies and enthusiastic amateurs, who carry on growing established varieties and breeding new ones, striving for plants that are more vigorous and longer lived, with a wider range of colours that do not fade with age. Although most traditional gardeners might prefer their delphiniums to have blue or white flowers, there are now hybrids with pink or creamy-yellow ones, with the promise of more colours on the way. These new hybrids will ensure that delphiniums always have a place in the garden and on the show bench and perhaps, one day, they will find their way back into an art gallery.

Pick of the bunch

Delphinium ‘Cassius’

A floriferous hybrid that has many branches off the main stem. The eye-catching flowers have an outer row of blue petals and an inner ring of mauve ones that produce a two-tone effect. By the end of the season, the whole flower has faded to a pale blue

Growing advice

• Start off with a good plant. A named hybrid from a specialist nursery should be reliably perennial. If you buy a seed-sown plant, be prepared for it to last only one year

• Choose a sheltered, sunny site, away from wind; even moderate winds will dry the plant out and can snap the stems

• Good drainage and a rich soil are essential. On heavy soils, add loads of grit. Incorporate a bucket of compost or manure when planting

• In the height of summer, even established plants can dry out. Check weekly for signs that the plant might be wilting, and water if necessary

• In spring, place a mulch of garden compost around the base of each plant

• Delphiniums need staking. Tall bamboo canes are ugly and obtrusive. Semi-circular metal supports are effective if they are placed around the plant when they reach about 2ft tall. Hazel stems can be woven or tied into a supportive framework that becomes hidden among the foliage

Delphinium ‘Fanfare’

The pale-mauve flowers have a silvery sheen on the petals and are an unusual colour for a delphinium. The flowers are tightly packed along the stem, which grows to 6ft tall

Delphinium elatum

‘Langdon’s Blue Lagoon’

If there were to be a quintessential delphinium, this is it. The plant stands more than 6ft

tall, with a flower spike packed with sky-blue flowers that have a white centre. The flowers are made of two sets of petals that have a slightly ruffled edge.

RHS Award of Garden Merit

Delphinium ‘Lilian Bassett’

Sparkling-white double flowers with a contrasting black centre. Seed-grown plants are often sold, but these are usually inferior examples with dirtywhite flowers

Delphinium ‘Mighty Atom’

An old cultivar with vigour that has helped make it a popular plant for decades. The semidouble, dark-violet flowers are tightly packed along the stem. At 4ft tall, it is much shorter than most delphiniums

Delphinium ‘Strawberry Fair’

A 6ft hybrid with lavender-pink flowers, a favourite of cut-flower growers for its ability to hold its shape and colour in a vase

Delphiniums ‘Langdon’s Pandora’ (mid blue), ‘Faust’ (dark blue/purple) and purpleblue ‘Orpheus’ flourish in profusion in a classic cottage-garden border in Surrey

In the garden

Alan Titchmarsh

Let’s celebrate gardening

WHAT is the point of the Chelsea Flower Show?

Is it a highlight of the social calendar and the start of the Season? Is it a chance to put gardening at the forefront of our minds as spring gets properly under way and an opportunity for garden designers to show off, to shock and, sometimes, to annoy? Or is it simply a way of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) publicising itself? It is, in reality, all of these things and, having attended this horticultural extravaganza every year since 1969, it has been interesting to watch it evolve and become increasingly high profile. Perhaps that profile has something to do with the nation’s ever-increasing awareness of environmental concerns—of climate change, global warming and sustainability. But it would be a shame if that were the only driving force. Call me old-fashioned if you want, but I like to think that in the third week in May, on the greensward in front of Chelsea’s Royal Hospital, we have a chance to celebrate that middle initial of the RHS. It stands for horticulture, which the dictionary defines as: ‘The art or practice of garden cultivation and management.’

The prime aim of the RHS Great Spring Show—to give it its original title—should surely be to celebrate horticultural excellence and allow the growers of all kinds of plants and the designers of all kinds of gardens to demonstrate their skills and to pass them on to future generations. I can’t think of anyone who would argue with that

aim, it’s only that, sometimes, it is obscured by the need to demonstrate that gardeners are not dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, but vibrant folk with a finger on the current environmental pulse. This can lead us down a garden path that endangers the very things we ought to cherish.

I am a great supporter of the RHS. I am one of its vice presidents. I applaud its encouragement of children through its Campaign for School Gardening, its championing of horticulture as a vital contributor to our health, both physical and mental, and its commitment to the importance of gardens and gardening to wildlife and humanity. But I do worry about the dangers of pandering to current trends and allowing gardening to become predicated on a kind of laissezfaire attitude to plants that eschews any kind of human interference under the assumption that Nature is best left to herself and any muscling in on our part is to be deplored.

Horticultural aide-mémoire Dispatch lily beetles

Pest control is a vexed question that exercises us all. One difficulty is the evolved invisibility of the insects that subtly destroy the things we love. An exception is the lily beetle, which is equally fond of the related genus Fritillaria. Nothing could be more obvious. There it stands, brazen, scarlet and statuesque, on the lily leaves. Approach it with soft tread or it will rumble you and drop off. Catch it and, before either of you have time to reflect, dispatch it with your thumbnail. The first one is the hardest. It’s them or the lilies. SCD

Gardening is, by its very nature, intervention—but intervention intent on enabling plants to grow well and to produce a scene that we find uplifting. Last year, the garden judged Best in Show was The Rewilding Garden—a confection of wild plants that showed no signs of ‘gardening’—except, of course, that it had been put together by gardeners.

There’s a wider range of wildlife in my garden than in my meadow

I feel a Lady Bracknell moment coming on. You remember: ‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ In other words, to allow one garden predicated on no intervention from Man to be considered Best in Show is risky, but should it happen again then a society devoted to and predicated on passing on horticultural skills could legitimately be accused of shooting itself in the foot. Why are we so frightened of promoting gardening?

Two acres of my own ‘garden’ is devoted to wildflower meadow. I love it. The other two acres evince a greater influence of design and the use of a wider range of exotic (non-native) plants. I am an organic

gardener and use no chemicals or sprays. My ‘cultivated’ garden teems with a wider range of wildlife —avian, mammalian and insectivorous—than the meadow. It is a mistake to assume only native species attract native wildlife. What they enjoy is a range of plant material offering pollen, nectar, food and shelter. Call it biodiversity if it salves your conscience.

Chelsea represents an opportunity to celebrate our ability to grow a wide range of plants from all over the world. This country is home to the best specialist growers anywhere on the planet. They need encouragement—and sometimes financial help—to populate the Great Pavilion where they have, over the past few years, become thinner on the ground.

The judges of the show gardens need to remember that the thousands who attend the show enjoy beautiful plants and gardens they feel they want to be in even more than off-the-wall design ideas that are regarded as ‘cutting edge’. Yes; we need refreshing ideas, but at the heart of this show should be a celebration of gardening. I really hope that my 55th Chelsea Flower Show proves that to be the case.

Alan Titchmarsh’s new book The Gardener’s Almanac is out now Next week Slow gardening

Spot the gardener? The Rewilding Garden that won Best in Show at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show

Baronial dreams

Castle Drogo, Devon, part I A property of the National Trust

In the first of two articles, Clive Aslet reveals how a fascination with ancestry encouraged a wealthy Edwardian businessman to enlist the help of Sir Edwin Lutyens to build a new castle

Photographs by Dylan Thomas

ON a sunny spring day, Castle Drogo, on its bluff overlooking the wilds of Dartmoor, could fairly be described as sparkling. Cut in granite, not only do the complex angles of the stone remain as sharp as when the masons shaped them 100 years ago, but the whole building has recently changed colour, a result of the National Trust’s newly completed nineyear restoration programme. Before, a century of exposure to the elements had turned the exterior a dark and gloomy grey with lichen. Now that the lichen has been removed, we see the beauty of the material as Sir Edwin Lutyens intended—blocks of subtly varying shades, predominantly silvery grey, but scattered with accents of brown, charcoal and pink. The lichen will return, but, for the time being, it is possible to see this gargantuan Edwardian caprice with the eyes of its first owner, Julius Drewe. He wanted

a castle and he got one that is also a work of exceptional refinement and beauty.

Drewe’s portrait hangs on the main staircase of the castle. It shows him in Scotland, with an enormous salmon at his feet. At other times, he wore a suit, discarding the waistcoat (he had a drawer of unworn waistcoats) for a light-coloured one, his off-white tie fastened with a diamond pin. The son of a clergyman, he got his first job through an uncle, the Peek of Francis Peek and Winch, later Peek Freans. This gave him the opportunity to visit China, Japan and San Francisco, US, as a tea buyer. By 27, he was frustrated with his position and started a chain of Willow Pattern Tea Stores, largely selling tea. This was followed by the Home and Colonial Stores—its name inspired by a sister who was soliciting donations to a missionary society called the Home and Colonial Training Establishment. In 1903,

it had more than 500 outlets. By that time, however, Drewe had already retired from active participation in his firm. He did so at 33 and never mentioned trade again.

According to a typescript memoir by his grandson Adrian Francis, Drewe made up his mind instantly, never changed it and usually got—as in the case of his castle—what

Fig 1 above: The main hall and passage to the drawing room.

Fig 2 right: The castle entrance is cast in the form of a Tudor gatehouse, with a portcullis set over the door

he wanted. Sitting in a hotel in Brighton one day, he saw a tall, slender, blue-eyed 18-yearold girl called Frances Richardson walk in. ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry,’ he said, turning to an associate. He did marry her and, according to a reminiscence by his daughter, also Frances, in the Brighton Record Office, ‘they were never apart at any time’.

The Drews, as they then were, minus the second ‘e’, enjoyed a happy family life at Wadhurst Park in East Sussex, previously home to the Murrieta brothers, bankers who failed to weather the Baring Crisis of 1890. Drewe had bought it together with all the Murrietas’ furniture, much of which is now at Drogo. On Sundays, chapel was central to

the day, with Drewe himself—an evangelical —teaching in the Sunday school.

A warm-hearted husband, prone to practical jokes and generous to charities, Drewe was adored by his five children, whose musical talents meant that they could practically form their own orchestra. But like some other self-made men, he developed an idée fixe

about his lineage. In this he was encouraged by his brother Willie, a barrister. Research commissioned from Culleton’s Heraldic Office and Reference Library postulated a descent from the Drogo who accompanied William the Conqueror in 1066, whose descendant Drogo de Teign gave his name to Drewsteignton. In 1903, Willie persuaded Julius to buy most of the village of Broadhembury in Devon, together with some land and portraits, previously belonging to the Drewe family of The Grange, the last of whom had died. Later, he would ‘restore’ his name from Drew to Drewe to cement the connection. Strangely, he stopped short of acquiring The Grange itself, but created another place called Culverhayes from a farmhouse; perhaps his hands were already full at Wadhurst or perhaps the idea of Drogo had already taken shape. In 1910, he wrote to C OUNTRY

L IFE , seeking the name of an architect who could build a castle. Lutyens got the job. Blissful at Wadhurst, Drewe’s family were horrified by the idea of re-establishing themselves in Devon. Even Lutyens, who was always eager for work, was nevertheless tempted to look this gift horse in the mouth. With £50,000 for the house and £10,000 for the garden, the budget was big enough— ‘Only,’ he wrote to his wife, Lady Emily, ‘I do wish he didn’t want a castle but just a delicious lovable house with plenty of good large rooms in it.’ The architect did, however, get caught up in Drewe’s dream, producing dozens of sketches using his favourite worm’s-eye view to make the most of the drama and rearranging pepper and salt pots when eating with the Drewes to illustrate his latest ideas. There emerged a gargantuan complex with a gate tower, outer court and

splayed wings, which would have dominated the ridge on which it was placed.

Believing her father to be a ‘very wonderful person’, Frances did not think the project was unusual. ‘The conception of 1910 was an eminently practical one… His plan was to build his castle in form and substance indestructible, severe and magnificent, yet furnished inside with every modern amenity so as to provide an extremely comfortable home… Externally the walls and roof were of solid granite, the windows all bronze casements and the only painting was to the flagstaff!’ Admittedly, it would be ‘a mammoth enterprise’, but the cost, at the prices of the day, could have been easily absorbed ‘without any serious depletion of resources’.

According to a plan in the RIBA Drawings Collection, this castle would have made spectacular use of the falling site to provide

Fig 3 left: The interior is distinguished by the grandeur of its stairs and corridors. Fig 4 right: An enfilade from the drawing room

an enfilade of three enormous rooms—dining room, great hall and drawing room. There was to have been a large laboratory—did Drewe have scientific interests?—between an internal court and a Wagnerian great hall with two fireplaces each 12ft wide.

This was not to be. The 1,200 or so plans and drawings that are kept at Drogo chart Drewe’s retreat. Half the structure was sacrificed in 1912, to make the rooms more livable. Lutyens clung to his gate tower and outer court, proposing to join them to the site that is now occupied by the stables: a fullscale mock-up was made out of the wooden shuttering brought onto the site for concrete floors. But the date—1916—probably explains why nothing was done. The next year, the Drewes’ eldest son, Adrian, an artillery major, was killed in France, taking the joy out of their lives; thereafter, Julius became something of a valetudinarian.

With taxes and trebled building costs, the post-war years were not a time for building castles. Further contractions were made until the last designs were made for the chapel in 1930. What exists today is a mere one-third of the size of the original scheme. The gravel forecourt in front of the entrance stands on the foundations laid for the great hall.

The new castle made use of a portion that had already been built, but to quite different effect. The double-height dining room was divided horizontally in two, with the drawing room (Fig 8) occupying the upper half. This provided rooms of exactly the sort that

Lutyens had originally hoped for—large, but not Brobdingnagian. A billiard room opens off the library. All these interiors, however, are strangely disproportionate to the element of the house that is now the most memorable: the staircases and hallways (Fig 4) . We are left with the sense that Drogo is a gigantic piece of sculpture, the spatial drama of which amazes the visitor at every turn, but with living rooms that are unexpectedly conventional. The same ceiling height is maintained throughout the length of the main staircase, so that it is 13ft at the top (Fig 3) and 27ft at the bottom (Fig 5) .

Fig 5: The final descent to the dining room. A painting of Drewe presides over the stair

The visitor’s first view of the castle, from the north, shows a densely packed cluster of cuboids of different heights. Its windows appear to have been placed haphazardly— a reflection of the exciting changes in floor level that echo Lutyens’s previous experience of Lindisfarne in Northumberland and Lambay off the east coast of Ireland. The main entrance, to the west, stands at the base of a tower and guarded by a portcullis (Fig 2) , originally operated by a geared winch, which the Trust hopes to restore with an electric motor later this year; octagonal turrets to either side end in battlements and arrow-slits (Fig 7). All the trappings of fortification that we conventionally associate with castles are implied, reduced or abstracted. The battlements only project by a matter of inches and there is practically no crenellation, which would have detracted from the play of volumes. Instead, there are grid windows with the glass deeply inset behind the plane of the wall to bestow

Inside, pale-grey granite predominates in the circulation spaces (Fig 1), the rooms being largely panelled in oak. Being happy with the furniture at Wadhurst, the Drewes brought it to Drogo. As a result, the most striking rooms are, curiously, the kitchen (Fig 6) and scullery, fitted out by Lutyens with a mortar and pestle fit for a giant. One might have expected a castle enthusiast like Drewe to want armour and trophies of arms; their absence makes the interior even more sculptural.

the illusion of rugged strength and the walls are battered—a castle motif—but set between razor-sharp fins that look almost Art Deco. Such ornamental moulding as the building displays is cut on supporting architectural elements. Drogo propelled Lutyens on the journey towards abstraction that ended in the Cenotaph, the Viceroy’s House at New Delhi and the largely unbuilt Liverpool Cathedral.

When the client rejected the proposed pitched roof, which would have kept out the weather, preferring a more castle-like flat roof and parapets, Lutyens seized the chance to design an up-and-down puzzle of varied geometrical shapes—there are 28 different roofs altogether, reached by stepping from one to the other or by staircases, which sometimes lead to unusable wells simply for the fun of it. They are the size of two football pitches. Covered in stone flags, it must have provided a thrilling if sometimes dangerous sequence of secret spaces for Drewe’s grandchildren.

All the trappings of fortification we associate with castles are implied, reduced or abstracted

When Lytton Strachey visited Lindisfarne, he found it uncomfortable. Would the same have been said of Drogo? The chimneys smoked, as Lutyens’s often did, and water poured in through the walls. But Drewe only stayed there during the summer. In 1919, he bought Kilmorie, a large house in Torquay that he had long coveted and used that for the winter; it was where he died in 1931. If all else failed, there was his luxurious steam yacht. As a boy, Adrian Francis Drewe—named after his dead uncle—loved going to sleep in the Tower Room, the highest in the castle, which ‘seemed to be miles from anywhere’, with the wind ‘always whining or screaming… caught perhaps by the sharp angles of the tower or the chimney or whistling under the door’. Drogo was an adventure and the process of realising it challenging, as we will discover next week.

Fig 6: The kitchen, with its domed, top-lit interior, evokes medieval and Regency interiors

Fig 7 above: A detail of one of the octagonal turrets that rise above the gate at battlement level. Fig 8 facing page: A view of the panelled drawing room

Native breeds Hackney

Did you know?

The most influential Hackney foundation sire, Shales, was a grandson of Flying Childers, a supreme racehorse owned by the 2nd Duke of Devonshire and a great-grandson of the Darley Arabian

THEHackney is the ballerina of the equine world, a flashy, high-stepping carriage horse (or pony, generally measured between 12.2hh and 14hh). It was originally created in the 18th century by crossing the smart-moving Norfolk trotter with the Thoroughbred for stamina, the idea being to produce a faster mode of transport for the ever-improving roads—the Rolls-Royce of its day. Its name comes from the Hackney marshes east of London, where the horses used for cabs were kept.

The elegant Hackney has an alert demeanour and tightly muscled frame, with particularly powerful hindquarters that produce a piston-like action from the high legs. It is principally used for driving and most people

associate the breed with the formal dress traditionally worn by drivers in the show ring—soft felt hat and tailored costume (women) and grey top hat or bowler and suit (men), plus gloves and knee rug (both)—but enthusiasts now emphasise its versatility and potential for ridden competition, even dressage and eventing. It also makes for a useful cross with some sport-horse breeds.

The breed is classified as ‘priority’ by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, but the Hackney Horse Society, formed in 1883, has received funding from the Horserace Betting Levy Board to help with breeding schemes and DNA blood typing. This year’s breed show is at the South of England showground, Ardingly, West Sussex, on June 6–10. KG

Alamy

Here’s looking at you, kid

What pygmy goats lack in size they more than make up for in personality, says Julie Harding, who meets the owners who have fallen for their charms

Photographs by Andrew Sydenham and Simon Buck

DIMINUTIVE and captivating, pygmy goats are invariably class clowns and escapology experts.

Equally, they are hearty and relatively undemanding, which means that they frequently find favour with first-time animal keepers with small parcels of land. Provide a pygmy with shelter, playthings, a playmate (for they shouldn’t be kept alone), an ample dollop of hay, an unending supply of fresh water, plus a good mineral lick, and they will return the favour with hours of laughinducing antics. Fencing, however, should

be considerably higher than Capra hircus themselves (who generally hit the measuring stick at about the same mark as a cocker spaniel) or bids for freedom are likely to become a nightmarishly regular occurrence.

Kept principally as pets, companions or to grace the show ring, their sanguine temperaments and stature mean that they can sometimes be found visiting the likes of care homes and hospices to provide a pick-me-up to the sick and the frail.

The Pygmy Goat Club (www.pygmygoatclub. org.uk) is a good first port of call for would-be

owners of these pint-sized, sometimes clamorous fizz-bombs, which are descended from dwarf breeds, notably those hailing from West Africa and South Sudan. Once the chosen goats arrive, they certainly won’t be leaving in a hurry, as these devotees attest.

‘We call them outdoor dogs’

SOUTH GLOUCESTERSHIRE smallholder

Tanya Sheasby and her three sons, Sam, 14, Finlay, 12, and James, 10, who run The Little Farming Company, breed and train pygmy goats as therapy animals.

Sally Blair/Blairshots

Above: Hug a goat: Finlay Sheasby enjoys a cuddle. Facing page: Tinka Allingham with ‘inquisitive’ Yoda and ‘sensitive’ Gilbert

‘We call them outdoor dogs. They have huge personalities and they’re very trainable,’ says Mrs Sheasby who recently appeared, with her three sons and some of her 15 goats, on the BBC’s The Farmers Country Showdown.

The trio Milly, Sooty and Arthur kick-started the Sheasbys’ foray into pygmy keeping 11 years ago, but they were quite timid and needed plenty of play and handling to entice them out of their respective shells. Since then, all members of the Sheasby family have devoted hundreds of hours of quality time to their diminutive charges to ensure that when they are sold on from the 14-acre holding their new owners will have years of happy interaction with amiable, well-trained animals.

Gilbert and Yoda have already sported a variety of fetching animal headwear, from a flat cap to a pom-pom hat

‘After weaning, they go to our “goat school”,’ Mrs Sheasby explains. ‘They’re trained without food and learn to walk quietly on a lead and go in a crate in the back of the car to get

used to travelling. We run a waiting list, but people can’t choose their own goats. I take a profile of the buyer and pair them up, like Muddy Matches for pygmies. The majority who buy have never owned an animal before, but we give them a lifetime of support.’

A number of goats, however, are pets and are never for sale, including Ferdi, a youngster with curly ears. ‘He has bleach blonde and red surfer-dude hair that people would pay a fortune for,’ says Mrs Sheasby, a former occupational therapist.

Mrs Sheasby and her sons regularly take a trio or a quartet of pygmies into care homes, hospitals and hospices for wellbeing visits. ‘We get more from giving than receiving,’

she explains. ‘I want my sons to grow up knowing that what they do has meaning.’

‘I’m

surprised at how fussy they are’

GILBERT and Yoda landed on their proverbial (four) feet when they were chosen by West Sussex residents Roger and Leonora Allingham as 26th-birthday presents for their daughter, Tinka.

The pygmy duo lives in a roomy paddock located close to the family home that contains plenty of enrichment equipment— a favourite is a giant tractor tyre—and a palatial shiplap-clad, teal-coloured goat house for the times they want to escape from the elements. They are even concocted regular

tasty titbits by Miss Allingham, who suffers from static motor neurone disease, and her carer and PA Lindsay Johnson.

‘I’ve made them lots of treats. The latest contained molasses and oats, but they didn’t eat them. I gave them to the dogs instead,’ says Miss Allingham.

The mainly white Gilbert and his stablemate Yoda, whose brown colouring is punctuated by black legs, were purchased from local breeder Will Carter and collected by Mrs Allingham and her daughter in the back of the Land Rover in March. Despite their brief acquaintance, Miss Allingham has already become familiar with their character traits.

‘Gilbert is quiet and more sensitive, whereas Yoda is quite inquisitive. He likes to be cuddled. I just love how they bleat and jump everywhere,’ she adds.

Miss Allingham, who also has miniature Shetlands she uses for carriage driving, has wasted no time in dressing up her new charges and they have already happily sported a variety of fetching animal headwear with ear holes, from a flat cap to a knitted pom-pom hat.

‘I’m amazed that they are smaller than our working cocker spaniels. Their heads and legs are so tiny, but their bellies are pretty sizeable,’ says Miss Allingham’s sister, Coco.

‘I’ve also been surprised by how much hay they eat and how fussy they are. I thought goats were supposed to eat everything!’

Keeping the sheep from the goats

WEhave five holiday cottages here and, in the winter, when there were no sheep on the land, our guests missed seeing animals, so we got pygmies last year,’ says James Johnston, who owns Mendham Mill on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, the birthplace and childhood home of artist Sir Alfred Munnings. Sourced by his shepherdess, Sam Bryce, and christened Whisky and Soda, the compact pair was turned out with lambs last spring. ‘They played together, but before long the lambs were considerably bigger, although that didn’t stop the goats taking charge and bossing everyone,’ says Mr Johnston.

Despite being kept in a sizeable paddock, the two wethers like to forage through the fence. ‘My husband, Nick [Unwin], is a keen gardener and we have some nice plants here. He tried to net his prized gunnera, but let’s just say that Whisky and Soda have been enjoying themselves. Still, they’re such fun, we don’t mind losing the odd one.’

Mr Johnston and Mr Unwin may have been new to goats last year, but they have found

Left: Perfect pairings: James Johnston and Nick Unwin with the playful Whisky and Soda. Above: Surely, former resident Alfred Munnings would have relished the caprine subjects

pygmies to be relatively unexacting to keep, although they’re ably assisted by Ms Bryce, who trims hooves and keeps an eye. ‘One of them picked up a parasite, but an injection from the vet swiftly sorted that out,’ says Mr Johnston.

It was when living at Mendham Mill that Munnings developed his love of painting horses. There is, however, only one work in which he committed (full-size) goats to canvas, according to Mr Johnston, who is chair of the Munnings Art Museum at Dedham in Essex. ‘Every time I see our goats, I wonder if Munnings would have managed to paint them, as they don’t stand still for long. In his early works, people would have to hold the horses for a long time until he got those poses right.’

They escape twice a day. They’ll be on the woodstacks, perhaps, or munching on the horses’ hay

‘They’re popular attractions–when we can find them’

RACHEL AMESBURY’S two registered pygmy goats, Gordon and Geoffrey, escape from their paddock with alarming regularity. Mrs Amesbury has seen them leap over the low strands of electric wire and then wriggle under three higher strands into the next-door horse paddock.

In 2021, when the diminutive wethers were recent arrivals at the beef farm near Petersfield, Hampshire, run by Mrs Amesbury’s husband, George, she would race to capture them and return them to their own patch of ground, which also holds a small flock of ex-battery hens, the goats’ horsebox housing and gizmos including a trampoline and balance bar.

‘Now when people tell me that the goats are out, I’m over it,’ laughs Mrs Amesbury. ‘They escape twice a day and I don’t rush. I know they’ll be around the farm, on the woodstacks perhaps, or munching on the horses’ hay or the cows’ feed. They live for fun and to eat. As well as being given coarse mix from a bag, they keep the grass down a bit and love gnawing bark and branches.’

Long-haired Gordon, who is brown and white, and his black-and-white half-brother Geoffrey, whose shorter coat gives him a neater coiffure, love being groomed by Mrs Amesbury, a loss adjuster in the insurance industry, who is currently on maternity leave having recently given birth to her first baby, Eleanor. ‘Geoffrey caught his foot in a grate last year and had to have it bandaged. Being

handled so much for treatment made him even more friendly than he’d been before.’

As well as family pets, however, the two pygmies are intended to appeal to the glampers Mr and Mrs Amesbury welcome to their farm. ‘The goats are popular attractions—at least they are when we can find them!’

‘They never fail to make me smile’ ZOË

COLVI l LE grew up in semi-rural Kent with a couple of independent cats and a powerful longing for more pets. ‘I tended to have fads and my parents wouldn’t indulge my requests for animals because they thought I’d grow bored with them,’ says the former hairdresser-turned-shepherdess, podcaster, author and internet sensation, who is also known as The Chief Shepherdess.

Fast forward two decades and Miss Colville has more animals than her 10-year-old self could ever have imagined, for she helps to run a sheep farm near Maidstone with her partner, Chris Woodhead. As well as a flock of 500 ewes, the couple keeps Boer meat goats and various cows, including Highlands.

Six years ago, they added pygmies to the mix when Mr Woodhead bought an inexpensive

black billy at Ashford livestock market. Miss Colville christened him Bilbo and subsequently tracked down a couple of in-kid nannies—black-coated Buffy and white and tan Annie—on Facebook. Now, her herd numbers 16 before kidding, although Buffy and Annie were both sold on, as a pet and for breeding respectively.

One offspring still at the farm is Buffy’s daughter Effie, who is entirely brown, barring her black mohawk back stripe. ‘We call her The Cat as she roams around the farm. I once found her and her two kids in the middle of our landlady’s lawn,’ says Miss Colville, whose recently published first book, The Chief Shepherdess: Lessons in Life, Love and Farming, features stories of Effie and her herd mates.

Miss Colville’s firm favourite, however, is Roo, so called because, as a kid, the pygmy was carried in the front pocket of her overalls. ‘Roo’s mum had triplets and she was the runt, so I topped up her milk with a bottle. She became like my child and still follows me everywhere.’

Although Miss Colville sells some of her young pygmies, she views the ones she keeps as her pets. ‘They have incredible characters and never fail to make me smile.’

Childhood dreams do come true: Zoë Colville with Effie and Roo, two of her 16 pygmies

WHETHER you live in a town or in the heart of the countryside, chances are that blue tits stop by your bird feeders. Together with the robin, blackbird and wren, the species is a regular garden visitor, with the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden Birdwatch recording it in roughly 85% of surveyed gardens, across all seasons. Small, perky and brightly coloured, it is also one of the easiest birds to identify, with its distinctive blue cap, white cheeks and yellow breast. Only 4½in long, it weighs less than half an ounce, between a £1 and a £2 coin.

As are many other resident birds, blue tits are very sedentary: they rarely travel more than 10km (a little more than six miles) from where they were born, although, occasionally, birds do flee hard winter weather on the Continent and turn up in eastern Britain. What they lack in long-distance flying, however, they make up in energy: they are constantly active, because, being a small bird, they need to eat between one-quarter and one-third of their body weight every single day in order to survive, especially during the short and chilly days of winter. Outside the breeding season, they often travel in mixed flocks with other small songbirds, maximising their chances of finding food.

Whether they have chosen a natural or an artificial site, the female alone builds the nest, a circular cup

If they do survive the winter—typically, a blue tit will live for two or three years, although the oldest ringed bird went beyond its 10th birthday—they will start to pair up early in the spring, with the male courting the female by bringing her morsels of food. He will then defend his territory by singing his rather tuneless, slightly irritable song, which repels rival males, as well as cementing the bond with the female. The pair will then seek out a place to breed: they evolved, as have many woodland species, to nest in holes and crevices in trees, but, together with so many of our garden birds, they take readily to artificial nest boxes, which can now be fitted with cameras to see what goes on inside.

Whether they have chosen a natural or an artificial site, the female alone builds the nest out of pieces of grass, loosely arranged to

First one home put the kettle on: a family of blue tits swoops to its tree-trunk nest

When I am feeling blue

With a cobalt cap, white cheeks and tiny wings, the blue tit might be a picture of songbird sweetness, but its morals leave much to be desired, says Stephen Moss

A bolt from the blue

Numbering about 3.2 to 3.4 million pairs, blue tits come in at number eight in the league table of the most common British breeding birds. A hard winter can reduce the population, but they usually bounce back within a year or two and can be seen across most of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, albeit not on most offshore islands or in upland areas.

form a circular cup. She makes a small depression in the centre, which she then fills with soft moss, where she will lay between eight and 10 eggs—one of the largest clutches of all our garden birds. Once this is complete, the female starts to incubate the eggs and the chicks hatch between 13 and 15 days afterwards. They only have one brood.

Then the real hard work begins: both male and female spend every daylight hour hunting down oak moth caterpillars or other invertebrates and bringing them back to the nest to feed their hungry chicks. On average, they must find no fewer than 1,000 food items every day—and that’s not counting

what they need to keep up their own energy. Outside the breeding season, they feed on a wider range of food, including seeds and nuts, often visiting bird tables and hanging feeders to snatch a free meal.

Since the BBC’s Springwatch was first broadcast in 2005, blue tits have always been among the stars of the series—a particularly memorable one was Runty, the smallest chick of the brood, which presenters Bill Oddie and Kate Humble finally witnessed leaving the safety of his nest box for the outside world, after much encouragement from his parents.

Or his supposed parents. The Latin saying that ‘the mother is always certain, the father

We cannot see it, but the caps of male blue tits vary in intensity, to help females choose

devised clever strategies to avoid being spotted when being unfaithful, but, sometimes, males will notice the intruder and chase him away before the damage is done.

Tit for tat: a guide to other tit species

centrally or at bottom

40% of the species’ nests contain at least one chick that’s not the offspring of the male

When it comes to picking a mate, one of the most extraordinary aspects of blue-tit biology comes into play—one that is impossible for us to see. When we look at a male or female blue tit, they appear identical to one another; yet the blue cap of the male is not only more intense than that of the female, but the females use this intensity— which they can see because, unlike us, they are able to detect ultraviolet light—to choose between potential mates.

There are six species of ‘true tits’, of the family Paridae, in Britain, plus two other, unrelated species: the longtailed tit and bearded tit (or reedling). Together with the blue tit, great and coal tits often visit gardens; marsh and willow tits less so and crested tits (found only in the Highland forests of Scotland) very rarely. Great tits also have white cheeks, but have a black head and thick black line down their yellow breast. Coal tits are, as their name suggests, brown, black and buff, with a white nape; marsh and willow tits are more monochrome. Being the largest of the six (close to the size of a house sparrow), great tits tend to dominate the pecking order on feeders, yet, despite their small size, blue tits often give as good as they get and certainly dominate the other, similar-sized, species. isn’t’ holds especially true for blue tits: scientists have discovered the astonishing statistic that 40% of the species’ nests contain at least one chick—and often more—that’s not the offspring of the male bird rearing it.

Once thought to be monogamous, most male songbirds seek to maximise their chances of raising more young—thus passing on their genetic heritage—by mating with females other than the one with which they have paired up. Females, of course, cannot simply raise more chicks, but they can hedge their bets by mating with other males, so that their family includes more diversity than if they stayed faithful to their mate. They have

Despite their beauty and widespread presence across British gardens, parks and woodlands, blue tits rarely feature in our literature, unlike robins, thrushes or wrens. There is, however, one notable exception: George Orwell’s poem Summer-like, which places this humble little bird centre stage: A blue-tit darts with a flash of wings, to feed

Where the coconut hangs on the pear tree over the well;

He digs at the meat like a tiny pickaxe tapping

With his needle-sharp beak as he clings to the swinging shell.

Then he runs up the trunk, sure-footed and sleek like a mouse, And perches to sun himself; all his body and brain

Exult in the sudden sunlight, gladly believing

That the cold is over and summer is here again.

It’s a lovely tribute to one of our favourite garden birds—one with a fascinating, if slightly risqué, secret life.

The author’s latest book, ‘Ten Birds that Changed the World’ (£16.99, Guardian Faber) is out now

Fury of the father: if a male finds a rival has been invited into a nest, feathers will fly

Gnome alone

Vertically challenged, bearded and rosy-cheeked, cheerful gnomes might make for unlikely cover stars, but–says Ben Lerwill–they’ve long graced books, album covers and even The Queen’s private garden

CHARLIE approached the South Pole at 2am on February 4, 1977. His beard was as white as the Antarctic ice and his mouth was curved into a smile. This was history in the making. As the polar sun shone overhead and the frozen plains lay unyielding in the sub-zero wilderness, his momentous hour had arrived. Charlie had become the first garden gnome to reach the southernmost point on earth.

Our eccentric obsession with gnomes is a remarkable thing. Here in Britain, their perky hats and bulbous noses peek out of shrubberies from Portobello Road to Penzance. They appear in films, books, video games and advertising campaigns. They are potbellied perennials, chortling through winter downpours and summer heatwaves. And, as evidenced by Charlie—who had a helping hand on his chilly expedition from owner

Gnomes all have one thing in common: the ability to enjoy life’s simple pleasures

Henry Sunderland—they’re also prolific globe-trotters (or should that be gno-mads?)

Demand for garden gnomes shot up during the pandemic—headlines were made when a shipment of them got caught up in the Suez Canal blockage—but their story is a long one. Their roots are woven into age-old folk tales of pixies, goblins and fairies; by the 18th century, the word ‘gnome’ had emerged as a term for busy underground creatures thought to be guardians of the earth’s treasures. Even today, their lawn-dwelling descendants are seen by some as protective charms.

The first evidence of humanoid garden ornaments seemingly dates back to ancient Rome. These early likenesses depicted gods and goddesses, although statues of squat musicians and dancers were being made and sold in Europe as long ago as the early 1600s. Fast forward to the 18th century and the

formal gardens of Germany routinely featured stocky, sometimes mischievous, dwarf figurines. Smaller wooden and porcelain pieces were designed to sit on house shelves. The archetype of the plump male gnome, complete with beard and hat, began taking hold.

It wasn’t long before British travellers started noticing these indoor and outdoor ornaments on trips to the Continent. What happened next was inevitable. Garden gnomes crossed the Channel to the UK in the 19th century and dug their boots into the soil. Since then, they’ve been making themselves at home, fishing, snoozing, puffing on pipes and occasionally pulling their pants down.

The consensus is that the first true collection of garden gnomes in the UK belonged to Victorian baronet Sir Charles Isham. In 1847, he purchased 21 terracotta figurines from a German manufacturer for the rockery at

Lamport Hall in Worcestershire. Today, only one of the figures remains, the others having been disposed of by Sir Charles’s daughters when he passed away. The survivor, known as The Lamport Gnome, has reportedly been insured for £1 million.

Some people would declare themselves above such trivial adornments as gnomes. Others would counter that if your garden doesn’t have gnomes, what you really mean is that your garden doesn’t have gnomes yet The Queen is known to be a fan, with a pair perched among the foxgloves at her private home in Wiltshire. The King, it’s said, also has a gnome tucked away in the grounds of Highgrove. One estimate puts the British gnome population at more than five million.

‘They’ve got happy faces. That’s what I love about them,’ enthuses Lorna Serna of the Merry Harriers Garden Centre in north Devon, now home to the world’s largest collection of garden gnomes, at about 2,500. Some are sunbathing or having afternoon tea, others are playing football or wheeling barrows. The vast majority of them were transported ‘very carefully, using sacking’ from their nearby former residence, The Gnome Reserve, when it closed in 2021. ‘We’ve got all sorts. They’re mischievous, they’re happy. We actually get lots of garden-centre customers who arrive claiming not to like gnomes, then end up buying one before they leave.’

Mrs Serna points out that children are particularly beguiled by the figures and this fascination has long been borne out in literature. Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the pen name BB, won the Carnegie Medal for children’s writing in 1942 for his fantasy novel The Little Grey Men, detailing the adventures of four gnomes.

There are numberless instances of “gnoming”, taking gnomes on exotic travels and sharing the results

Enid Blyton’s Noddy and Big Ears both have gnome-like qualities, children’s fiction title Gnomes by Dutch author Wil Huygen became a New York Times bestseller in the 1970s and J. K. Rowling includes the creatures in the Harry Potter books (‘their correct names,’ according to character Xenophilius Lovegood, ‘are Gernumbli gardensi’).

However, despite being a part of the British cultural landscape for some 150 years, and initially being an upper-class indulgence, gnomes have not had an easy ride —mainly because their mass-market appeal

became easy to mock. Major’s Garden Ornaments, a company run by the father of former Prime Minister John Major, made its last gnome in the 1960s, apparently foreseeing their demise. By the 1970s, according to Garden Gnomes: A History by writer Twigs Way, ‘the garden gnome was at a low ebb. Vilified by the gardening press… the future looked bleak. Estate agents even issued advice to prospective house sellers to hide the gnomes when buyers came to call’.

Not even the appearance of four garden gnomes on the cover of George Harrison’s platinum-selling All Things Must Pass album (it’s been suggested a miffed John Lennon took this as a dig at The Beatles) could stop the slide. To add to this, the RHS had a longstanding ban on gnomes and other ‘brightly coloured, mythical creatures’ at the Chelsea Flower Show, although this policy was lifted for the show’s centenary in 2013, resulting in gnome versions of the then Duke of Cambridge and his pregnant wife, Catherine.

Gnomes, however, are nothing if not resilient. Recent decades have seen a resurgence of sales, thanks in part to 2011 animated Hollywood film Gnomeo & Juliet, but also because of a sense that snobbery can go too far. ‘I think part of it might be a reaction to modern design trends in recent years. Gnomes add a touch of whimsy,’ says Karen Forward of online retailer Gnomelands,

which has sent gnomes as far afield as Australia and the US. ‘They’ve become a symbol of home and family.’

When French designer Philippe Starck created his still-popular Gnome Tables and Gnome Stools in 2000, it was a clear example of a more contemporary, if tongue-in-cheek, take on the trend. There have also been numberless instances of ‘gnoming’, which involves taking gnomes—sometimes pilfered from other people’s gardens—on exotic travels, then sharing the results on social media, or even posting photographs back to the gnome’s owners. Intrepid polar traveller Charlie, of course, was making these sorts of trips decades ago.

Beyond the ups and downs, our gnomes remain something uncomplicated: a simple if quirky way of bringing comfort and character to a garden. ‘They say that, if you look after gnomes, they’ll look after you,’ notes Mrs Serna, who explains that several people have bestowed their gnomes to the garden centre’s record-breaking collection in their wills. And does she have a favourite among the 2,500? ‘I do. He’s lovely and chubby, and he’s sitting in his chair having a nap, just letting the world go by. That’s what we want in life.’

Phe-gnome-nal: where to see and buy gnomes

The Gnome Reserve, Merry Harriers, Woolfardisworthy, Bideford, Devon, is open Easter to September (01237 431611; www.merryharriers.co.uk; Instagram @gnomes_onthe_roam) Buy garden gnomes, gnome books and even gnome accessories—anyone for a mobile-phone gnome case?—from Gnomelands (www.gnomelands.com)

Even in monochrome, gnomes stay cheerful, as this buxom, behatted lady proves

The day they went platinum: four garden gnomes enliven George Harrison’s album

Lone survivor: one of 21 gnomes bought by collector Sir Charles Isham and still resident at Lamport Hall, Worcestershire

Alamy; Getty; Shutterstock

The good stuff Head over

Monique from the ‘Bonnes Vacances’ collection, £1,650, Stephen Jones Millinery (020–7242 0770; www.stephenjonesmillinery.com)

Tresco headband, £725, Lock & Co. x Eponine (020–7930 8874; www. lockhatters.com)

As the season of weddings and Royal Ascot arrives, Hetty Lintell suggests supporting a British designer with an eye-catching

www.rachelblack

ombré beret with

Neso with leaves, £945, Jane Taylor (020–8392 2333; www.janetaylorlondon.com)

Sarah Cant (07866

Midsummer, £550, Alexandra Harper (020–3633 2281; www.alexandraharpermillinery.com)

Chhavvi in Magenta and £360, Camilla Rose (07788 413639; www. camillarose.co.uk)

£495, Rachel Black

The coronation souvenir edition

God Save The King! A record of this once-in-a-lifetime day

Don’t miss this special piece of history, brought to you by the team behind your favourite magazine

Available now at all good newsagents and supermarkets

Will the hot tub lose its fizz?

Why the outdoor bath offers a more discreet, less expensive alternative

WHEREVER you stand on the burning issue of whether or not a hot tub is a desirable addition to a garden, there’s little doubt that few things beat sitting in warm, effervescent water being pummelled by jets as you admire a well-tended garden. The problem is that it’s a luxury that comes at a financial cost and, in many cases, an aesthetic one. A good hot tub will be priced between £10,000 and £20,000, plus there’s the power required to run it, as well as proper landscaping.

On balmy summer evenings, an outdoor bath offers a unique way to connect with Nature

Hotels have good form when it comes to pioneering new concepts in bathroom design, notably the recent development of bathtubs in bedrooms (‘Soak where you sleep’, September 6, 2017 ). The Zetter Townhouse, a 24-bedroom hotel in a Georgian building a stone’s throw from the old US embassy on London’s Portman Square, is no exception.

Designed by Russell Sage Studio, its Lear’s Loft—the artist and poet once lived here— has a fully-plumbed bathtub on its terrace with views of surrounding Marylebone (plus another inside for the faint-hearted). As a way to experience the world’s most exciting city, two minutes from Marble Arch, it is certainly hard to beat.

Bee Osborn, the Inchbald-trained interior designer based in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, understands better than anyone how to drag cottages kicking and screaming into the 21st century. She chronicled the extraordinary transformation of her picture-perfect Cotswold cottage on her Instagram account, garnering nearly 180,000 followers in the

process—it also features in Katy Campbell’s book At Home in The Cotswolds (£45, Abrams Books). She’s now waving her magic wand over another, larger project that will include a copper bath for alfresco bathing. ‘On balmy summer evenings or frosty mornings, an outdoor bath offers a unique way to connect with Nature.’ James Lentaigne, creative director at luxury bathroom specialist Drummonds agrees that copper is a great option for outdoor use, as is cast iron, as long as the outside is well painted. He recommends that a plumber is consulted on the best spot and that it can easily be drained in the winter. Another consideration is, of course, the location, particularly in town. Site chosen, tub installed: sit back and relax.

Plumb position: the Lear’s Loft terrace boasts a bathtub with views of London

Alfresco bathing: an outdoor bathtub makes a luxurious addition to a well-tended garden

Illustration by Emma van Zeller

Le Vingt-Neuf roll-top bath in Polished Cast Iron, £12,000, Catchpole & Rye (01233 840840; www.catchpoleandrye.com)

873 1121; www.cphart.co.uk)

Atlantic cast-iron panelled bath painted in Wenge, £6,445, Fired Earth (0345 565 2032; www.firedearth.com)

4499; www.drummonds-uk.com)

Soak in style

Freestanding baths for making a statement, selected by Amelia Thorpe

Portman marble top painted bath, from £5,634, Porter (020–3355 1817; www.porterbathroom.com)

Albany bath, £4,239, West One Bathrooms (0333 011 3333; www.westonebathrooms.com)

Ex.t Nostalgia bath in Blue Grey, £11,207, C. P. Hart (0345

Usk bath in Hammered Brass, £14,340, Drummonds (020–7376

Qatego bath by Studio F. A. Porsche, £7,110, Duravit (01908 286680; www.duravit.co.uk)

Antique Copper boat bath, £5,221, Ripples (www.ripplesbathrooms.com)

Lussari 1500 bath in Gravel Grey Blue Gloss finish, £4,226, Victoria + Albert (01952 221100; www.vandabaths.com)

Lessons from the past

On June 13 at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, two leading interior designers will share the enduring design principles that never go out of date

WHAT were the principles that our predecessors relied on that are still relevant to interior design in the 21st century? Proportion? Colour? Symmetry? Decorative finishes? Materials? Decorative detail? Next month, COUNTRY LIFE’s Executive Editor, Giles Kime, will be discussing the subject with two designers creating rooms at this year’s

WOW!house: Tim Gosling and Vanessa Macdonald. Mr Gosling has worked on a wide range of projects in his long career, from the interiors at The Goring in London to the restoration of an early 19th-century château in Normandy, France. He is also the author of a number of books, most recently Classic Contemporary: The DNA of Furniture Design (£45, Thames & Hudson). Mrs Macdonald

Martin Moore event at WOW!house

COUNTRY LIFE and luxury kitchen brand Martin Moore will offer readers an opportunity to see the latter’s New Deco kitchen brought to life as part of an exciting collaboration with the interior designer Henry Prideaux. Together, they have created an imaginative space within Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour’s WOW!house that combines the requirements of a luxury modern-day kitchen

spent 14 years working with the late, great Melissa Wyndham and succeeded her in leading the business, where she maintains the tradition of pared-back classic style in the English tradition.

The event takes place from 3pm–4pm on June 13. Tickets cost £10; visit www.dcch.co.uk/wowhouse

with the glamour that innovative interior design can offer. Custom-built furniture from the New Deco collection has been embellished with glamorous wall coverings, a gold-leaf ceiling and sumptuous velvets, as well as opulent statement lighting

• The event will take place from 6.30pm–8.30pm on June 13 at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, Lots Road, Chelsea, London SW10

• Guests will enjoy an outof-hours guided tour of the WOW!house, followed by

a drinks reception, at which Mr Prideaux will discuss Martin Moore’s New Deco kitchen and his interior scheme with COUNTRY LIFE’s Giles Kime

• There will also be an opportunity to talk to the Martin Moore design team about all aspects of kitchen design

• Tickets cost £20 (50% of proceeds will be donated to TP Caring Spaces, this year’s WOW!house official charity)

• To book, visit www.dcch. co.uk/wowhouse/clmm

A craftsman works on a piece designed by Tim Gosling (right, top), who will talk to Vanessa Macdonald and Giles Kime

Property market

Penny Churchill

Many rooms with a view

Three homes have received new life thanks to some sensitive and extensive renovations

THE recent launch onto the market of the exquisite, Grade II*-listed Studley Royal House near Ripon, North Yorkshire, at a guide price of £8 million through Savills Country Department (020–7409 8881), offers a rare chance to enjoy the privacy and pleasure of a grand country estate with none of the bother, thanks to its location at the heart of the magnificent, 800-acre Studley Royal Deer Park, now owned by the National Trust.

North Yorkshire’s only World Heritage Site, the park is not only home to a large herd of fallow, red and sika deer, it also boasts famous 18th-century water gardens fed by the River Skell, which meanders past the atmospheric ruins of Fountains Abbey—a setting described by Christopher Hussey in his English Gardens

Above and below: Magnificent Studley Royal House is surrounded by an 800-acre World Heritage Site near Ripon, North Yorkshire. £8m

and Landscapes 1700-1750 (1967) as ‘one of the most spectacular scenic compositions in England’.

Fountains Abbey was founded in 1132 and, by the mid 13th century, was one of the richest religious houses in the kingdom. Following the Dissolution, the abbey was sacked, before the buildings and more than 500 acres of land were sold to Richard Gresham, an MP and former Lord Mayor of London. He later sold them to Stephen Proctor, who further despoiled the abbey, using the stone to build the Elizabethan Fountains Hall.

In 1699, John Aislabie, an ambitious politician who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1718, but expelled from Parliament in 1720 following the South Sea Bubble debacle, inherited the Studley Royal estate, where, for the rest of his life, he indulged his passion for landscape gardening. It was a passion shared by his son, William, who inherited the estate in 1742 and began extending the pleasure grounds into the eastern part of the Skell valley.

In 1760, having acquired the neighbouring Fountains estate from the Messenger family, he incorporated the dramatic abbey ruins into an extension of his father’s gardens. On William’s death, the estate passed through the female line to the Vyner family, who sold it to West Riding County Council in 1966. In 1983, North Yorkshire County Council sold it to the National Trust, after which the entire park was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986.

The Aislabies’ house in the northern part of the park, which was home to Queen Ethelburga’s School during the Second World War, burned down in 1946 and was never rebuilt. Instead, the splendid Georgian stable block, built for John Aislabie’s racehorses between 1728 and 1732, was converted into an elegant Palladian country house set in 2½ acres of private formal gardens on high ground overlooking the deer park towards Ripon Cathedral in the distance.

Built of stone under a slate roof with distinctive pavilion towers in each of the four corners, the pristine, 11,708sq ft house surrounds a central square courtyard overlooked by all the main rooms and dominated by the working clock tower. For selling agent Crispin Holborow, ‘Studley Royal House combines the convenience of modern living with the ambience of a classic period house, and the added bonus of the right to use the Trust’s adjoining and neighbouring property’.

The house offers elegant accommodation on two floors, with six public rooms, including a magnificent drawing room, a ballroom, a study and library, a sumptuous master

Studley Royal House combines the convenience of modern living with the ambience of a classic period house

suite with two dressing rooms, a bathroom and a shower room, plus five further bedroom suites and a two-bedroom guest wing. The private gardens to the west of the house are approached through a coach arch from the courtyard and are protected from deer by a gravelled walk that runs around the perimeter between hornbeam and yew hedges. Stone steps lead down to a large Italian garden with meticulously maintained flowerbeds, privet hedges, clipped yew and extensive topiary.

Across the county border in Derbyshire’s Peak District, the historic village of Baslow, four miles from Bakewell, stands on the banks of the River Derwent, a mile or so north of Chatsworth. Over End is a residential area on the hillside to the north of the village, near where Baslow Edge was quarried for the gritstone used to build Grade II-listed Baslow Hall in Calver Road, Over End, on land acquired from the Duke of Rutland for the Stockdale family, who were long-time village benefactors.

With its protruding gables, and mullioned and transomed windows, Baslow Hall could

be taken for a 17th-century Derbyshire manor house, although it was, in fact, built in 1907. In 1913, it was bought by the electrical and radio pioneer Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti and was reputedly one of the earliest houses in the UK to have electricity installed. Following de Ferranti’s death in 1930, the house was purchased by Mrs McCreagh-Thornhill as a wedding present for her grandson, Humphrey Davie. After the Second World War, it was owned by a succession of car dealers, before being acquired by a retired London stockbroker.

When, in 1988, the current owners, Max and Susan Fischer, bought Baslow Hall, they took on an almost derelict manor house with overgrown grounds, a situation aggravated soon afterwards by a devastating fire that destroyed much of the building. Twelve months later, following complete renovation, the property finally opened as Fischers at Baslow Hall, an exclusive small countryhouse hotel with a restaurant, six bedroom suites and a separate flat in the main house, a further six bedroom suites in the garden wing and additional accommodation in the Garden House. It could, however, easily revert to its original use as a distinguished family home.

Over the years, Mr and Mrs Fischer have painstakingly created Baslow Hall’s five acres of beautiful gardens and lawns, flanked by gravelled walkways, well-stocked borders and areas of bluebell woods and parkland. Alongside the wing of the Garden House, they have also created a sustainable and productive walled vegetable garden. Now,

Baslow Hall near Bakewell in Derbyshire is blessed with five acres of fine gardens. £4.5m

Property market

after 35 happy and successful years, they have decided to retire, and Baslow Hall is on the market—at a guide price of £4.5m— through Edward Caudwell of Derbyshire agents Caudwell & Co (01629 810018) and Savills in Nottingham (0115–934 8020).

Nestled in the lower slopes of the Malvern Hills AONB and home to the Berington family by descent since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Grade II*-listed Little Malvern Court comprises a 15th-century Priors Hall, once attached to the 12th-century Benedictine Priory with its impressive Romanesque church tower, but now incorporated into the main house, Victorian additions to which were designed and overseen by the eminent church architect Joseph Hansom. More recent restoration and renovation was taken on by the late Tom and Olquita Berington, who progressively improved and modernised this remarkable house throughout the latter part of the 20th century.

Launched onto the market in today’s C OUNTRY L IFE through the Ludlow office of Strutt & Parker (01584 539984), Little Malvern Court is being offered in one or two lots. Lot 1, comprising the historic house, two semi-detached, black-and-white cottages and some 22 acres of formal gardens, woodland

and grassland is for sale at a guide price of £3.75m; Lot 2, with a guide of £500,000, is an adjoining block of some 35 acres of productive arable land currently let under a contract farming agreement.

In addition to the atmospheric Great Hall and its adjoining altar room, the main house provides a reception hall, six reception rooms, a sitting room, kitchen/breakfast room, principal bedroom suite, five further bedrooms and four bathrooms. According to its Historic Houses entry, Little Malvern Court

represents ‘a perfect blend of history and horticulture’, the latter centred on 10 acres of former monastic grounds with breathtaking views over the Severn Valley, described in a C OUNTRY L IFE article as ‘one of the loveliest gardens in the Midlands’. Following a plan dated 1720, the chain of pools was restored in the 1980s, as was much of the garden. The more formal gardens, which immediately flank the house, include a delightful rose garden and an ancient topiary yew hedge that has been lovingly shaped and cared for.

Above and right: History and horticulture blend seamlessly at Little Malvern Court near Malvern in Worcestershire. £3.75m

Properties of the week

James Fisher

The best rooms in the house

Spring has sprung, the sun has come and now is the time to make the most of it

Devon, £2.25 million

Nestled high on the slopes of a wooded valley overlooking the Avon estuary, Were Down, near Bigbury, is, well, pretty close to paradise. Originally a worker’s cottage dating from the early 19th century, the property has been extended and renovated over the years to become an exceptional family home of five bedrooms in 15 acres. It would be remiss not to start with the view, which is uninterrupted for miles and is maximised by the use of floor-to-ceiling windows in the kitchen/ dining room, as well as from the balcony of the master suite on the first floor. The interiors have been finished to a very high standard throughout and feature extensive use of recycled hardwood from Kentucky, US, as well as refurbished railway sleepers. Despite having 15 acres of land, the ‘gardens’ are mostly woodland, with the property being more a part of Nature than trying to tame it. They do, however, contain a cabin, which provides a further bedroom, living room and bathroom (and, of course, lots of glass to appreciate the view). Paths have been cut through the woods and meadows down to the estuary below, which is a wetland at low-tide, and provides kayak/paddleboard access down to the River Avon and Bantham beyond at high tide. Not enough? The property also comes with planning permission for a two-storey extension on the east side of the house. Marchand Petit (01548 831163)

Cambridgeshire, £775,000

Fronting onto the vast village green of Hilton in Cambridgeshire, Rose Cottage is a charming, four-bedroom home listed Grade II and offering one-third of an acre of gardens that are primed to be transformed into something special. The home is a pleasant period piece of about 2,400sq ft and offers plenty of original features, such as exposed beams and dormer windows. The gardens are mostly laid to lawn, scattered with young trees and newly planted borders, meaning that any green-thumbed owner can readily stamp their identity into this charming slice of East Anglia. The garden also features a traditional converted barn as a summerhouse/ studio, with a bedroom on the first floor. Cheffins (01223 214214)

Properties of the week

Gloucestershire, £5 million

Tucked away on the edge of the hamlet of Fyfield, Baxter’s Farm occupies a secluded setting of 12 acres of pristine Cotswold countryside. The main property is a wonderful example of early-19thcentury design, with plenty of period features throughout, such as limestone flooring, exposed beams and roof timbers and fireplaces, and offers five bedrooms over its three floors. Across the courtyard, the plot also features an immaculately converted barn, which was converted by the owners in the 1990s, designed by The Pocknell Studio and featured in the book Cotswold Stone Homes: History, Conservation, Care by Michael Hill and Sally Birch. As well as being a prime spot for entertaining, with a 62ft-long, double-height ‘party room’ on the ground floor, it also comes with two further bedrooms and bathrooms and a kitchen. Outside, the gardens and grounds were designed and laid out by the owners and are divided into various areas, such as the pergola garden, white garden, herbaceous garden (the owner is a former president of the Herb Society) and sunken garden. Further afield, the property boasts a small lake with willow trees on small islands and the gardens lead down to the River Leach, with 400 yards of double-bank fishing. If that wasn’t enough, there is also an orchard, paddock, vegetable garden and hard tennis court. As popular with wildlife as it is humans, the property is regularly visited by 60 species of bird, including kingfishers, owls and woodpeckers. Strutt & Parker (01285 627680)

Co

Durham,

£1.2 million

Believed to have originally been built in about 1764, Bleach Green Farmhouse near New Brancepeth is a delightful traditional stone farmhouse that offers the ideal blend of character, original features, modern luxury and vintage chic. The heart of the threebedroom home is a handmade, farmhouse-style kitchen, with modern fitted units and a ‘substantial’ central island, that leads into the striking bespoke conservatory, from which it’s possible to enjoy the gardens and grounds all year round. And what gardens and grounds they are; extending to 17 acres, they feature an orchard with more than 30 fruit trees, plenty of ‘rooms’, mature trees, shrubs and manicured hedging and topiary. The River Deerness, which is fishable, meanders past the property to the north and ancient woodland fizzes with wildlife. The property also offers access to miles of public bridleways, cycle paths and country walkways. Finest Properties (01434 622234)

Hampshire, £2.1 million

Originally built in the 17th century, Compton End in the village of Compton caught the eye of the architect George Herbert Kitchin, who extended the house in the late 19th century and created the magnificent Arts-andCrafts garden, living there until his death in 1951. Now, both house and gardens are Grade II* listed and it’s not hard to see why. The house itself is a delight, with four bedrooms under its sloped thatched roof and lashings of period features throughout. The gardens are astounding, marked by a combination of formality and informality. Clipped yew hedges and topiary contrast nicely with abundant naturalistic planting, as vistas lead through rectangular areas and to a pond, croquet lawn, fields and woods. Wildflower meadows and fruit trees add to the naturalistic side of things and the whole ensemble is perfectly finished by the pink-rendered-brick summerhouse. Knight Frank (01962 677242)

Homing instincts

Before artist and gardener Cedric Morris died, he had wisely appointed a plant executor to ensure his precious plants went to good homes. Without such foresight, many gems might have been lost, says Christopher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum in Lambeth

CEDRIC MORRIS was a modern Arcadian: that is, he lived for the present. In spring and summer, he painted and gardened at Benton End, in Hadleigh, Suffolk; each winter, he headed south to Mediterranean or African shores. Shortly before his death in 1982, at the age of 92, he tore up the photographs of himself taken in Man Ray’s studio in 1920s Paris, when his dancing with the socialite Duff Twysden—and his looks—made the clunky Ernest Hemingway jealous enough to mock Morris and his lifelong lover Arthur

Lett-Haines—or ‘Lett’—in the night-club scene in The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Morris did not miss his beautiful youth. But he did care about what happened to the plants he had grown at Benton End, a Tudor house bought in 1940 to become an art school. Beth Chatto, his protégé, would compare the walled garden there to a ‘collector’s cabinet’.

At this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the Nurture Landscapes Garden has been designed by Sarah Price as an evocation of that lost garden. The bearded irises Morris bred in painterly colours will catch the eye

first; Sarah Cook’s display of Benton irises —each named after a person or pet, such as Duff, Nigel (after his lover Nigel Scott) and Menace, a cat—was the sensation of the Marquee in 2015. But by a remarkable story of horticultural legacy, the garden will also re-unite many of the species plants that Morris collected on his winter trips.

The seed of the blue and purple sweet pea, Lathyrus odoratus, is thought to have come in his suitcase back from Sicily. The seed was passed to his friend Tony Venison, the Gardens Editor of C OUNTRY L IFE ; one

Facing page: Cedric Morris photographed by Yevonde. Above: His Benton End, 1947—in the 1950s, as influential a garden as Sissinghurst

packet was passed from Venison’s neighbour Duncan Scott to Dan Pearson, and is, today, growing at his garden at Hillside in Somerset. But Venison gave another packet to Miss Cook, who, after retiring as head gardener at Sissinghurst in Kent, returned to her childhood home outside Hadleigh. She emailed a packet to Peter Clay of Crocus, which is building the garden. ‘It’s such a generous story,’ remarks Mr Clay, who is assembling the 8,000 plants, ‘to get the seeds in the post. And it’s such a beautiful variety.’

In the 1950s, Benton End was as influential a garden as Sissinghurst. Indeed, it was an iris given to Vita Sackville-West that Miss Cook chanced upon at Sissinghurst that began her own journey to assemble as many as possible of the 90 varieties Morris bred.

In his eighties, he appointed a plant executor, Jenny Robinson, co-founder of the East Anglian Garden Group, whose garden, Chequers, in Boxford, was laid out across two acres beside a stream. In her contribution to the book An Englishwoman’s Garden (1980), she

Case history 1: John Grimshaw, director of the Yorkshire Arboretum

‘My first job after finishing my DPhil was to be plant executor for Primrose Warburg, whose late husband Edmund Warburg had been professor of Botany at Oxford University.’

Warburg died in 1996 and her garden at South Hayes, Oxford, was quite an unruly place of several shabby acres, he remembers. Mr Grimshaw was paid by the family to live there from January to July, to record the flowerings, which began with her exceptional collections

of rare snowdrops, and to pick the best home for each plant. There were only seven bulbs of what is now Galanthus ‘South Hayes’ and he chose seven collectors to receive them, including John Morley. ‘These are precious objects,’ he reflects. Being a plant executor is a skilled exercise ‘in matching expectations to reality’.

Warburg was herself the executor to Nancy Lindsay, daughter of the designer Norah Lindsay. Warburg nurtured an unnamed tree peony that had been in Lindsay’s garden; Mr Grimshaw gave that to Elizabeth Parker-Jenkins and, at her death, to the late Lady Carolyn Elwes at Colesbourne Park near Cheltenham. ‘And I’ve kept a scrap of it myself’.

Mr Grimshaw has drawn up his own horticultural legacy. ‘I’ve specified in my will that my house will be rented out, not sold, until the process of dispersal is complete. It’s not a process you can rush’.

Painterly colours: Several Inventions by Morris portrays a selection of his bearded iris grown at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk

Sarah Cook, the former head gardener at Sissinghurst, with some of her collection of striking bearded irises bred by Morris

Sowing the seeds: the blue and purple sweet pea Lathyrus odorata grown from seeds brought back from Sicily by Morris, who gave some to his friend Tony Venison, then the Gardens Editor at C OUNTRY LIFE . Venison gave some to his neighbour, who, in turn, passed some on to the garden designer Dan Pearson, in whose Somerset garden these examples were photographed reflected on the influence of Morris’s ‘taste for the elusive beauty of species as opposed to the more obvious attractions of hybrids’.

‘Mowers,’ she also wrote, are ‘the spawn of the devil’, commenting ‘all the help I have is a 15 year old who mows the grass when the spirit moves him’. Robinson was a veteran of Bletchley Park and is remembered as a jaunty and effective person by John Morley, a painter

and nurseryman who also swapped plants with Morris. Nevertheless, she told Mr Morley, being Morris’s plant executor ‘took 10 years off her life’. Why? The role requires an expertise in both plants and people, who will care for what, and pass it on when the time is right. It is much harder than being an executor for an art collection, for plants need more care than pots or paintings and cannot be labelled

so firmly. At Benton End, she also had to confront the horticultural man of the cloth known as ‘the nicking vicar’ or ‘The Reverend Takeaway’, who was caught in the garden with two carrier bags full of snowdrop bulbs. Robinson was so furious that she threatened to write to his Bishop.

Morris’s collection was dispersed to friends, such as Morley, and to Beth Chatto, including

Mary Evans Picture Library; © Colchester & Ipswich Museums Service/© Estate of Cedric Morris. All rights reserved

2023/Bridgeman Images; Richard Bloom; Huw Morgan; Hermione McCosh; Audrey Tyerman/The Garden Museum; Charlie Hopkins/Future Content Hub

the Papaver orientale ‘Cedric Morris’, a stray he had spotted and which she adored for its blotchiness. Rosa ‘Sir Cedric Morris’, a white rambler, was named for him by Peter Beales (everyone at Benton End had a nickname and Beales was ‘the gipsy’, for his sultry good looks) and continues to be available from his nursery.

After Chelsea, the plants will return to Benton End

Why give to friends, not institutions? Institutions change course by necessity. Many of the irises were bequeathed to the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, but were dispersed when—understandably—it decided it should no longer collect cultivars. Less understandably, it also lost the labels on the collection of succulents it was bequeathed. At the same time, the process allows a dash of personal sentiment: until his death last winter, the writer Ronald Blythe would point to his well-watered windowsill at Bottengoms in Essex and say: ‘Those are Cedric’s pelargoniums.’

Perhaps that is why people who have performed the role of plant executor have a habit of appointing executors of their own; Robinson entrusted her plants to Rod Leeds and Christopher Grey-Wilson. Each horticulturalist is a link in a precious, but fragile chain.

Case history 2: Stephen Lacey, author and plantsman

Stephen Lacey gardens in a walled acre in a pretty town on the Welsh border. He, too, has seen JCBs rip out a life’s expert collecting in hours. ‘It’s a property ripe for development and I don’t want 45 years of plant collecting to go in a skip.’ Lacey has entrusted his plant afterlife to his head gardener, Kew- and Edinburghtrained Aaron Marubi. ‘He’ll have my address book and will match friends to plants.’ To Mr Lacey, a garden is also a landscape of memory. The Astrantia

Forty years after Morris’s death, Robinson’s handwritten lists of ‘who got what’ have enabled the team of Miss Cook, Crocus and Miss Price to re-unite the beauties of Benton End on Main Avenue. After the show, the plants will return to Benton End, where head gardener James Horner has begun the renewal of the garden. The house has been majority gifted to the Garden Museum by the Pinchbeck Charitable Trust, as if the

‘Marjorie Fish’ came via his own mentor Netta Statham. ‘You can buy one in a nursery, but that might not be such a pure specimen’. His collection of scented rhododendrons is a homage to Philip Brown, a ‘genius’ who gardened the woodland at Bodnant in Wales.

‘Many of my plants are here for personal reasons. I’m one of the few people to remember a man called Watkin Samuel who grew red-hot pokers in a nursery in the town. I have ‘Wrexham Buttercup’ and ‘Samuel’s Sensation’. You can buy them in a nursery. For now. But once that ends, he will be forgotten.’

Mr Lacey’s message is that ‘if you have something unusual, whatever it is, make sure it goes to the right person and they know what it is. As Beth Chatto said, we’re all part of the same great chain. But each link is precious’.

generosity of Morris’s own life has bubbled up into the present.

The best gardeners are Arcadians by nature. Arcadia is a pact with Time: you can achieve perfection in the present, but only if you accept that such beauty is ephemeral. But if the corduroyed ghost of Morris were to slink into Main Avenue by night, he would see an unexpected afterlife in a glimmering haze of poppies, cistus and iris.

Plant enthusiasts visit the garden at Benton End in Suffolk with (second from left ) Morris, Audrey Tyerman, the botanist Prof William Stern and Jenny Robinson ( right ), Morris’s plant executor, who compiled detailed handwritten lists of ‘who got what’

Kitchen garden cook Tarragon

by Melanie Johnson

Creamy tarragon chicken with garlic-roasted new potatoes

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4.

Add the new potatoes to a roasting tray and toss with olive oil. Slice the garlic bulb across and add it to the tray (to squeeze out later) and roast for 30 minutes.

Season the chicken breasts all over and toss them in the flour. Heat a large, heavybased pan and add a splash of olive oil. Brown the chicken all over and set aside.

Add the diced shallots to the same pan and fry gently until softened. Pour over the white wine, add the tarragon sprigs

and stir in the mustard. Reduce the wine by half and add the chicken stock. Simmer for about eight minutes to reduce again. Return the chicken to the pan to finish cooking through and pour in the cream. Simmer for a few minutes to thicken the sauce.

Squeeze the garlic cloves from the bulb in among the potatoes and toss to combine the flavours.

Serve the creamy tarragon chicken with the roasted new potatoes on the side, together with some freshly steamed green beans.

Ingredients

1kg new potatoes

50ml olive oil

1 bulb garlic

4 chicken breasts, skin on

30g plain flour

2 banana shallots, diced

200ml dry white wine

2 sprigs tarragon, to be removed before serving

1tbsp Dijon mustard

400ml chicken stock

200ml double cream

With notes of aniseed, tarragon’s versatility is usually unsung, but it works well with chicken, fish and red meat

More ways with Tarragon

Tarragon butter with pan-fried sea bass

Mix 100g of softened butter with a handful of chopped tarragon leaves until evenly distributed. Put a pile on a piece of cling film and wrap it up to form a cylinder. Chill the butter until ready to use. Pan-fry sea-bass fillets for a few minutes skin side down, then turn them over and add a generous slice of the tarragon butter, letting it melt around the fish, and squeeze over a lemon. Remove from the heat and let the fish finish cooking in the residual heat. Serve immediately with a green salad.

Steak with a classic Béarnaise sauce

Separate the leaves from a small bunch of tarragon, saving the stalks. Chop the leaves. Heat the stalks, a few peppercorns, three tablespoons of white-wine vinegar and a diced shallot in a small saucepan. Reduce the vinegar by two-thirds and then strain into a clean bowl that will fit snugly on top of a pan of simmering water. Add three egg yolks to the bowl and then heat gently over the simmering water, making sure the base of the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Whisk the mixture and gradually pour in 225g melted butter. Once all is combined and thickened, remove from the heat and add seasoning, a squeeze of lemon and the chopped tarragon leaves. Cook a steak (or grill a lobster) to your liking and serve with the Béarnaise sauce alongside.

Melanie Johnson

Edited by Kate Green

‘I’m mad, that’s bad, I’m sad’

Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25)

THE eminent biographer and historian Lady Antonia Fraser observes in the prologue to her new book that it can act as a coda to the lateGeorgian volumes that preceded it: the first concerning the reformation (albeit limited) of the UK Parliament through the Great Reform Act of 1832, the second, the equally glacial advance towards emancipation, culminating in the Catholic Relief Act in 1829, and Caroline Sheridan Norton’s less well-known, but no less significant campaign for the rights of married women. In contrast to these prime examples of political, religious and social struggle for the common good, the short, at once volatile and melancholy life of Lady Caroline Lamb, née Ponsonby (1785–1828), was one confined, partly through societal conventions, to personal strife.

An intelligent, creative, ‘elfin’ child, Caroline came from an Anglo-Irish family who numbered the Cavendishes among their illustrious, politically Whig-leaning relations. Caroline’s character was lively, sometimes risqué—with a penchant for page-boy costume (see Thomas Phillips’s striking portrait of 1813, which is still at Chatsworth in Derbyshire)—often intense and, at times, deplorably intemperate, as judged by the elite echelons of which she was part.

The author proposes that such shifts in behaviour may be explained by a condition such as bipolar disorder. (Caroline’s only surviving child, Augustus, who lived for only eight years after his mother’s own untimely death aided by alcohol and laudanum abuse, suffered from epileptic fits and may have been autistic.)

By the tender age of 11, Caroline appeared reconciled to her fate as the family ‘problem’, declaring to her cousin Georgiana Cavendish: ‘I’m mad/That’s bad/I’m sad/ That’s bad/I’m bad/That’s mad.’

Caroline’s crucial misstep was how she publicised the brief, but electrifying encounter with Byron

Caroline’s notoriety, as argued in this briskly paced and disarmingly compassionate account, did not spring from her various affairs when married, from 1805, to the heroically forbearing William Lamb (later, after Caroline’s death, Lord Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria’s confidant and Prime Minister). As the author vividly describes, such flexible attitudes were standard among Caroline’s elders and peers, alongside the inevitable begetting of children who were defined, regarding their

uncertain parentage, as ‘of the mist’, among them William Lamb and, potentially, Caroline herself.

Lady Antonia (Interview, May 10) establishes that Caroline’s crucial misstep, leading to the enduring ‘scandalous’ reputation, was how she publicised the brief, but, for Caroline at least, electrifying encounter with Lord Byron. If Caroline was too unguarded in her fervour, the greater fault was surely Byron’s, with his habitual disregard for everyone and everything except himself and his many and varied appetites, among them an incontinent ‘admiration’ for females, whether 14 or 40, most memorably his half-sister, Augusta.

Caroline’s revenge, or homage (it is difficult to tell), came in the guise of—what else? —a Gothic romance, Glenarvon (1816), which had a barely concealed Byron as the eponymous hero and a heroine somewhat like the author. Knowing very little of Caroline’s story beyond the ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ headline, I hoped that this would signal a turning point: the rechannelling of her evident wit, energy and determination towards a far greater cause—as the social reformer Norton would do— perhaps influenced by her friend, the radical journalist, philosopher

and novelist William Godwin (widower and father respectively of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley). After all, Glenarvon was published during the ‘year without summer’, when catastrophic harvests heaped further misery on a British population overburdened by taxation—most without representation—in the wake of 20 years of devastating war in Europe.

Yet, it was not to be. The broader context—explored in Lady Antonia’s recent publications referenced above—rarely intrudes into Caroline’s world except, for example, when she ventured to Brussels to be near her brother, Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, who was gravely wounded at Waterloo. Caroline’s particular tragedy was that she allowed her passion for Byron, morphing swiftly into obsession, to continue to blight her existence.

Lady Antonia champions Caroline as a free spirit, a modern woman perhaps. To me, she is firmly of her time. For the ultimate tragedy is that a woman of spirit, (relative) freedom and status, on balance, did so little of lasting impact beyond a strikingly unforgettable epithet.

Jacqueline Riding (author of ‘Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre’)

Personal strife: Lady Caroline Lamb by Eliza H. Trotter, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811

Alamy; Paul Allitt

Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists

Laura Freeman (Jonathan Cape, £30)

IN 1956, Jim Ede wrote of his ‘quixotic scheme’ to create a home where beauty is cultivated, ‘each room an atmosphere of quiet and simple charm, and open to the public’. A year later, he signed a lease for a ‘huddle of slum cottages’ just over Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge and embarked on realising his vision. The result was Kettle’s Yard, its whitewashed rooms arranged like a series of still lifes to draw out the patterns and connections between Modern paintings and sculpture, old oak furniture, china and glass, ferns and seedheads, feathers, shells and— most famously—pebbles. Into this sanctuary, Ede welcomed students and visitors daily, for tea, talk and tours.

Long after he gave Kettle’s Yard to Cambridge University (in 1966), his gift of ‘offering you what you didn’t know you were looking for’ has continued to have a transformative influence, yet few of the 100,000 who come here each year know much about Ede’s life. Now, at last, we have a fine biography of this sensitive, high-minded and complex man,

La Vie: A year in rural France

John LewisStempel (Doubleday, £16.99)

ROOFS of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls. Sleepy and shuttered against the blaring sun… The ringing of a bell from a 12th-century Romanesque church skipping across miles of rolling, glorious countryside.’ And so John Lewis-Stempel, one of the most celebrated—if not the best—Nature writers of his

Ede rushed headlong into the arms of Picasso and Braque

who loved early Italian paintings and ‘rushed headlong into the arms of Picasso, Brancusi and Braque’. From his early misfit years—Methodist schooling, art college, the army, Tate—he moved to the centre of 1920s artistic society, turning his London home into an open house and refuge for a ‘communion of like-minded spirits’.

generation begins his latest book detailing his move to France.

Mr Lewis-Stempel’s vividly expressive prose is already well known to readers of this magazine through his wonderfully lyrical, yet unvarnished From the Fields column. In the pages of La Vie, he explains how he and his wife, Penny, swap their Herefordshire farm for a year— à la Peter Mayle in Provence—as peasant farmers in the Charente.

Not unsurprisingly, they soon fall hook, line and sinker for their new life in an old honeycoloured limestone farmhouse with bright blue shutters, where

Unsuccessful as an artist and museum curator, Ede channelled his energies into the roles of collector and dealer (his address book was a Who’s Who of bohemians and Modernists), critic and lecturer, promoter and friend to artists, including Ben and Winifred Nicholson (who transformed his vision), GaudierBrzeska, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallace. Frugal yet generous, he was a restless wanderer, happily married yet unsettled by several intense male friendships. As war loomed, he and his wife, Helen, moved from Hampstead to Morocco,

turtle doves still purr and nightingales sing. This is a seasonal, month-by-month record, peppered with recipes, recording their realisation that, far from the French sojourn being a practical experiment, they’ve quickly developed such a fondness for the relaxed, local way of life that they don’t want to leave.

By the time autumn arrives and ‘the lingering leaves on the lime trees are jaundice hued’, Mr Lewis-Stempel confesses, ‘I caught sight of a dark-tanned man I didn’t recognise’, before realising it’s his own reflection in the hall mirror, as he now

where they built a Modernist house on a hill above Tangier. They visited the US (1940–43) and France (1950s), before settling at Kettle’s Yard (1957–73), where Jim uncompromisingly oversaw two extensions. Edinburgh became their final home.

In 1984, Ede published A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, a mix of memoir, scrapbook, anthology of writings and thoughts. Laura Freeman’s beautifully written biography completes the portrait and illuminates the circle of the British Modernists that revolved around him, and from whom he learnt so much.

Mary Miers

‘lives outdoors, not just at work, but in my freetime, of meals, relaxation and reading’.

However, it’s not only about the Lewis-Stempels, their two children, dogs and menagerie of livestock. La Vie is also an affectionate portrait of the locals —such as Madame Roban, ‘her headscarf pulled tight against the sun’—who welcome the family so warmly. Plus, of course, the author’s comprehension, when out late at night witnessing a fox eyeing up his chickens, that ‘the country is the country. Whether Britain or France’.

Paula Lester

Lasting influence: Jim Ede’s Kettle’s Yard ‘sanctuary’, which he gave to Cambridge University in 1966

The American way

The collection of a successful and sophisticated couple lit up Sotheby’s New York, with paintings, torchères and a Tiffany chandelier

DURING the course of April, Sotheby’s New York offered about 1,000 lots from the collection formed from the 1960s by Erving (1926–2018) and Joyce (Joy) Wolf (1927–2022). Although its focus was American art from the 18th to 20th centuries, the scope was much wider and, indeed, it was the epitome of civilised collecting. A total ‘in excess of $50 million’ had been suggested and, in the event, more than $68 million was achieved.

After war service in the US Navy, Erving Wolf began his career as a lawyer in Cheyenne, Wyoming. However, in 1951, he both founded the Wolf Land Company and, in Denver, met Joy Mandel from Brooklyn, who proposed to him very shortly afterwards. They made a formidable team and the business developed into the Inexco Oil Company, which discovered Wyoming’s 200-million-barrel Hilight Oil Field and its fourtrillion-cubic-foot Madden Gas Field, one of the largest natural gas reserves in the US, as well as the Key Lake Uranium Mine in Canada, which once produced 15% of the world’s uranium.

The couple began collecting rugs and textiles in the Four Corners region, where four rectangular south-western states (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona) meet and is the largest area of Native American reservations. When they moved to New York, however, having made a considerable fortune, their ambitions widened. They began to search out anything that had a bearing on the culture and history of the US, provided that it had quality and, if possible, a story. Erving took his children and grandchildren to hunt for

treasures in the flea market on 26th Street, but also, as one Sotheby’s director recalled: ‘With their children in tow, the couple would sit for hours while taking in the distinctive rhythms of our auctions and learning how to

identify art and objects of exceptional artistry and quality.’

Sometimes, the American theme became a little tenuous; the collection included quantities of Chinese export porcelain, Clarice Cliff ceramics and

20th-century Danish silver and design, the last leading to a large Copenhagen porcelain ‘Flora Danica’ service. Photographs of the Wolfs’ Fifth Avenue apartment, although perhaps posed to some extent, show that it was

Fig 1: In the Studio, 1892, by William Merritt Chase, showing the painter’s wife, Alice. $2,843,000

welcoming and comfortable, as well as a fascinating treasure house, in which items were dis played to show the relationships between them, regardless of origin or period.

The sale was in 10 online or live sessions, including art reference books and jewels, and many lots were offered without reserve. Although the various catalogues were organised by theme, some things were allowed to maintain those rela tionships. A particularly striking pairing in a session titled ‘The Spirit of America’ was a lovely painting by William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), followed by the two Qianlong Chinese export famille-rose torchères (Fig 2) that had flanked it in the apartment. The 29½in by 23½in In the Studio (Fig 1) showed the artist’s wife, Alice, in a dwam as she posed in a rattan chair with a folio of prints precariously held in her lap. It was

Fig 2: A pair of Qianlong Chinese export famille-rose torchères, a Dutch-Chinese collaboration, possibly by Cornelis Pronk. $44,450

painted in 1892, just after they had moved into a newly built house on Long Island and, despite the distractions of this comfortable studio, Chase was able to work prolifically.

At $2,843,000, the painting was one of the more expensive Wolf lots, whereas the torchères,

a Dutch-Chinese collaboration, took a more modest and underestimate $44,450. Drawings and wooden models made in Delft, almost certainly by Cornelis Pronk (1691–1759), were sent to the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen. Two other near exact pairs are known, but nothing else has

these ‘torchbearer’ figures, so they were probably a commission.

Further paintings included a lovely Sargent watercolour of the Piazza Navona in Rome ($609,600), views and scenes on the New England coasts by Winslow Homer and others and a strong Homer 9¾in by 7in pencil and gouache drawing (Fig 3) of a girl deep in a book ($95,250). As a study of absorbed concentration, this last made a contrasting pendant for the Chase.

Furnishings designed for particular houses by American turnof-the-20th-century architectdesigners were extremely well represented, including Greene & Greene of California and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the case of Greene & Greene’s 1908 Robert R. Blacker House, Passadena, the contents had been asset stripped by a subsequent owner and one would like to think that they got nowhere near the $698,500 now reached by the

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monumental hanging lantern (Fig 6) from its entrance.

The Lloyd Wrights were headed by another ceiling light, from the 1902–03 Francis W. Little House, Peoria, Illinois (Fig 5) , which made $2,903,500. It is said that, when viewed with reflected light, the shimmering glass creates a mesmerising kaleidoscopic effect. After a visit to Europe, Lloyd Wright’s style became much more Modernist and, here, a 1912 clerestory window (Fig 4) from the Avery Coonley Playhouse, Riverside, Illinois, ($177,800) was a precursor of Mondrian’s geometric paintings.

Given these last items, it can be no surprise that there was plenty of Tiffany in the collection, all of which I liked far better than the silver centrepiece featured here on April 26. Prominent was another very impressive lighting fixture, the 12-light Turtle-Back and Lily chandelier (Fig 7 ) ($406,400). This time: ‘The geometric registers of leaded glass elegantly transition from shades of fiery

orange and golden yellow to chartreuse green and sky blue.’

Given the amplitude of the Wolfs’ collecting, this selection does it no justice, especially as they had already donated so much to museums.

Pick of the week

One 33-lot session was devoted to Joy Wolf’s handbags, with a few Hermès scarfs; she was evidently a devotee of the fashion house, as 19 of the 29 lots to sell were its Kelly and other bags. Because of Hermès’s marketing strategy, which allows only favoured clients to acquire a Kelly, probably after a longish wait, there is an eager demand for second-hand vintage examples. The basic trapezoid shape comes in several sizes and a variety of materials, of which the most prized is the Niloticus crocodile. The star of Wolf’s

foncé matte Niloticus crocodile Kelly pochette (above), discreetly embellished with small diamonds and white gold, which dated from 2006. This had been estimated to $25,000, but sold for $40,660. The cheapest bag was a 1970s Gucci blue lambskin doctor’s bag with gold, estimated to $700 and sold for $889.

Next week Clock these

Fig 3: Pencil and gouache drawing by Winslow Homer. $95,250

Fig 5 left: Ceiling light by Frank Lloyd Wright. $2,903,500. Fig 6 middle: Greene & Greene hanging lantern from Passadena. $698,500. Fig 7 right: Tiffany Turtle-Back and Lily chandelier. $406,400

Fig 4: Illinois clerestory window by Frank Lloyd Wright. $177,800

The plays that turn full circle

Works by Maugham and Coward retain their sparkle for today’s audiences and the sparring match between Burton and Gielgud is rekindled in style

DO we unduly patronise the drama of the past?

Is there a tendency to dismiss all drawingroom comedy as dated? Having seen vibrant revivals of one play by Somerset Maugham and two by Noël Coward, I would say the answer to both questions is yes.

I was struck by how warmly audiences responded to the plays and how they belied their reputation as gossamer trifles.

Maugham’s The Circle, written in 1921, is Tom Littler’s first production as the artistic director of the Orange Tree, Richmond, and turns up trumps. Set in the Dorset home of a stiff-backed MP, Arnold Champion-Cheney,

the play asks whether each generation is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. The action revolves around the arrival of Arnold’s mother, Lady Kitty, who 30 years before abandoned her husband to run off with her lover, Lord Porteous. When Arnold’s young wife threatens to do the same with her own admirer, it seems the pattern will be repeated.

The point of the story is that Lady Kitty and Lord Porteous are hardly enviable role models —she is a vulgar chatterbox, whose soul, it is said, ‘is as thickly rouged as her face’, and her onetime lover is now a grumpy misanthrope—but Maugham was a wily dramatist who springs

surprises. You assume his spokesperson is Arnold’s cynical father, Clive, who has many of the wittiest lines and who seeks to prevent the younger generation repeating the follies of the past, but Clive turns out to be a reprehensible old roué and, in many ways, a total fool.

What is astonishing is to find the piece performed in Richmond by the kind of cast that would once have graced the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Jane Asher is a delight as Lady Kitty in that she shows the painted monster she has become and suggests the Society beauty she once was.

Clive Francis as her ex-husband delivers bon mots, such as ‘I am

never cross with a woman under 30’, with crisp aplomb and ultimately reveals himself to be a sickening sugar-daddy. Nicholas Le Prevost grunts hilariously as Lord Porteous and Peter Ashmore as the pompous Arnold and Olivia Vinall as his flyaway wife show why theirs is hardly a marriage of two minds. It is a production that makes me long to see more Maugham on stage.

One scene in The Circle shows Arnold nervously facing his sexually skittish mum. That kind of edgy mother-son relationship lies at the heart of Coward’s The Vortex, written three years after Maugham’s play and now vigorously revived at Chichester

Mark Gatiss is a remarkably true-to-life Gielgud (left), ably partnered by Johnny Flynn as Burton (right) in The Motive and the Cue

Festival Theatre. The last act, in fact, is given over to a confrontation between the incurably vain, vivacious Florence Lancaster and her nervy, drug-dependent son, Nicky. As played by Lia Williams and Joshua James—a real-life mother and son—the scene has a scorching intensity and what comes across in Daniel Raggett’s production is that the house of Lancaster is doomed. The scene’s power is reinforced by the play being given without interval. Occasionally, I feel Mr Raggett subordinates Coward’s dialogue to Jazz Age frenzy, but there are fine performances from Richard Cant as an epicene party animal and Hugh Ross as Florence’s quietly dignified husband.

There is more Coward at London’s Donmar Theatre, where his 1930 hit, Private Lives, has been intelligently re-appraised by Michael Longhurst. The big surprise is how self-regarding the central couple, Elyot and Amanda, actually are and how violent their relationship is. Stephen Mangan has been criticised for underplaying Elyot’s charm, but I felt he brought out brilliantly his snappish bad temper; Rachael Stirling suggests that Amanda is capricious, mercurial and not a little crazy. This is Coward played for emotional reality, rather than some faded notion of style, and all the better for it.

As an addendum to Coward and Maugham, I suggest dropping in to see Jules and Jim at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Timberlake

Wertenbaker’s adaptation of the 1953 novel, famously filmed by Truffaut, Stella Powell-Jones’s immaculate production and Patricia Allison’s performance as the pivotal figure in a triangular relationship vividly highlight the waywardness of sexual passion.

Passion of a different kind is on display in Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre. Directed by Sam Mendes, this is a stirring account of the off-stage drama that ensued when John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in a Broadway production of Hamlet in 1964. Both agreed that the production should be staged in rehearsal-room clothes, but concurred about little else. Gielgud, the great classicist, yearned for Shakespeare’s musicality and Hamlet’s inward reflectiveness; Burton, the supreme modernist,

wanted a Hamlet of fire, spleen and action. The tension between the two men was well documented, not least in the engrossing Letters from an Actor by William Redfield.

This is Coward played for emotional reality and all the better for it

The book is a source for Mr Thorne’s play, which I enjoyed hugely with a couple of caveats. It suggests rehearsals were exclusively a contest between Gielgud and Burton, whereas Mr Redfield’s book implies the whole company was worried by Gielgud’s vagueness. Mr Thorne also could have shone more light on the other distinguished actors in the cast, such as Eileen Herlie, Hume Cronyn and Alfred Drake. Instead, he dwells on the frustration of Elizabeth Taylor, imprisoned in a luxurious hotel suite when her husband is in rehearsal, and on the battle royal between Burton and Gielgud.

Johnny Flynn conveys well Burton’s sonorous tones, implacable Welshness and love of life, but the undoubted star is Mark Gatiss as Gielgud. He not only gives us that famous cello voice, but uncannily captures the

actor’s strange mix of benignity and distance: even the slight tilt of the head, as if he is surveying humanity from a great height, is exactly right.

If Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most famous play, Cymbeline was dismissed by Shaw as ‘stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order’. You would not think that watching Gregory Doran’s production—his 50th for the Royal Shakespeare Company—in the main house at Stratford-uponAvon. This bizarre mix of ancient Britain, Renaissance Italy and Augustan Rome is presented with exemplary clarity and builds to a heart-stopping scene of reconciliation. Amber James is a touching Imogen, Alexandra Gilbreath a brilliantly Disney-esque Queen and Jamie Wilkes a memorably devious Iachimo, ‘slight thing of Italy’. By presenting the play in three distinct parts—The Wager, Wales and The War—Mr Doran makes sense of its rambling plot and reminds us that the British theatre needs more urgently than ever his profound passion for, and understanding of, Shakespeare (Books, April 19).

‘The Circle’ until June 17 (020–8940 3633); ‘The Vortex’ until May 20 (01243 781312); ‘Private Lives’ until May 27 (020–3282 3808); ‘Jules and Jim’ until May 27 (020–7287 2875); ‘The Motive and the Cue’ until July 15 (020–3989 5455); ‘Cymbeline’ until May 27 (01789 331111)

Real-life mother and son Lia Williams and Joshua James bring fiery intensity to Coward’s The Vortex Marc Douet; Helen Murray; Ellie Kurttz

More Maugham, please: fine performances in The Circle of 1921

Crossword Bridge Andrew Robson

A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened. Solutions must reach Crossword No 4780, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, May 23. UK entrants only

ACROSS

1 RAF officer S? (8,6)

9 Exceed distribution of rum on Tube (9)

10 Immature insect right in centre of volcanic discharge (5)

11 Claiming no connection with pig eating outside (9)

12 District accommodating new stadium (5)

13 Policeman arrests these extremists? That’s open to dispute (11)

17 Somehow his best deal is set up (11)

22 Bracing sea air initially overwhelming district (5)

23 Finding of girl’s lines about sheltered bay (9)

24 Aggressive dog possibly taking beer half-heartedly (5)

25 Laurel, say, has aspirations regarding light open carriages (9)

26 Statement of opinion concerning stage show, perhaps (14)

DOWN

2 Small group having a couple of pints before film (7)

3 Yearbook a girl is able to set up (7)

4 Eye specialist including copper in old register (7)

5 Lobster Neal cooked with gusto (9)

6 NW Asian member a man welcomes in French (8)

7 Constant English chap protecting seabird (7)

8 Scour lists kept by church? (7)

14 Forgetful Liberal leaders in clear-cut surroundings (9)

15 Key question involving king’s attendant (7)

16 Bird-handler’s shot of crane crossing lake (8)

18 Ninepin in burlesque beginning to tickle the French (7)

19 Lad entertaining strong desire to be medic (7)

20 Old jacket seen in Sutton, but not in Luton? (7)

21 Left in charge of old colonnade (7)

SOLUTION TO 4779

ACROSS: 1, Paramedic; 5, Asset; 8, Essence; 10, Up front; 11, Emasculators; 14, Ticket; 15, Cross-eye; 16, Aberrant; 18, Carnal; 19, Unverifiable; 23, Enthral; 24, Sunlamp; 25, Rummy; 26, Ransacker. DOWN: 1, Present day; 2, Researcher; 3, Dwell; 4, Clutter; 5, Afforestation; 6, Scot; 7, Tote; 9, Nuclear energy; 12, Penny black; 13, Bell pepper; 15, Cat; 17, Needler; 20, Ibsen; 21, Tear; 22, Item.

The winner of 4778 is Mrs D. Ellinor, Lewes, East Sussex

THE timing of declarer’s mistake was all-too familiar on this week’s pair of deals. On our first, you have bid aggressively to Six Hearts after West has overcalled One Spade. West leads the five of Spades and you play dummy’s ten, East playing low. Plan the play.

After a spirited Three Club bid by North on slender assets, you, as South, find yourself in a thin 3NT.

West led the Queen of Spades, East winning the Ace. Plan the play.

At the table, declarer let the ten of Spades hold. He drew trumps in four rounds and, with fingers crossed (although there was no way to succeed by now), led over to the Ace of Diamonds to lead to his King of Clubs. No good— West won the Ace and cashed the Queen. One down.

With West rating to hold the Ace of Clubs for his bid, declarer must look for another way to make his 12th trick. Dummy’s fifth Diamond will provide a length winner if the suit splits 4-3, but to set up and enjoy that long Diamond, declarer must be very careful with dummy’s entries.

Declarer must overtake the ten of Spades with the Ace at trick one (key play), so that both dummy’s King-Knave of Spades will be crucial later dummy entries. At trick two, he cashes the Ace of Diamonds and ruffs a Diamond. He crosses to the Knave of Hearts (the 4-0 split is no big deal) and ruffs a third diamond. He draws trumps (throwing Clubs), then finesses the Knave of Spades and ruffs a fourth Diamond (with his final Heart).

All that remains is to cross to the King of Spades to enjoy the fifth Diamond, his extra trick. He gives up merely the last trick to the Ace of Clubs—slam made.

At the table, declarer played low on East’s Ace of Spades. Espying dummy’s short ten, East switched to the Queen of Hearts. Declarer won and tried a Club to the nine. East won the ten and led the Knave of Hearts, pinning that ten. Declarer won, crossed to the Ace of Clubs, led a Diamond to the Queen and, without a re-entry to dummy, cashed the Ace of Diamonds, hoping East’s King would fall. It did not and declarer went three down.

You should unblock the King of Spades under East’s Ace (key play), enabling you to reach dummy via the ten of Spades. You win East’s Queen of Hearts switch and lead a second Spade. West may rise with the Knave to lead a second Heart.

You win, cross to the promoted ten of Spades and lead a Diamond to the Knave. You return to the Ace of Clubs and lead a second Diamond to the Queen. The Ace now fells the King and you have nine tricks.

On both this week’s deals, declarer’s error came at trick one—the knee-jerk play robbing dummy of an entry. And note, on the second deal, East can scupper you by refraining from playing his Ace of Spades on his partner’s Queen—now you can never reach dummy in Spades for your crucial second entry.

Spectator Joe Gibbs

Bring back the Dymoke

IT was only when the Amazon herald in a white van delivered two crowns in a box that I knew my queen was coming home to the Highlands. She had threatened to prolong a visit to London and bag an early place in the Mall. Her siren friends had urged her to stay and play. The craic would be pure magic, they said. And it may have been more lively than in our village of 1,100 souls where bunting fluttered outside only one brave dwelling, but I plied her with emotional blackmail. Surely, I wheedled, when your grandchildren ask you how you spent this day, you will want to say it was with him who plighted you his troth in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, as fate would have it?

We settled on Kirsty and Huw as our telly ciceroni. The ladiesin-waiting—we’ve stayed with that rather than Queen’s companions —scrambled onto our laps. A little breach of protocol you might say, but you expect that of a terrier bitch pack. And thus we immersed

ourselves in the pageant and spectacle of that rare day.

Of particular fascination was the almost fetishist succession of objects presented to The King: rod, sceptre, orb, ring, armills, stole and gauntlet, each touched reverently by the royal hand. This, they said, was a slimmed-down ceremony, an hour shorter than Elizabeth II’s. Given our new monarch’s interest in history and culture, I bore hope he might restore some of the traditions last seen at the coronation of George IV.

In those days, a banquet was given in Westminster Hall afterwards. Like his predecessors as Archbishop of Canterbury, I hoped to see Justin Welby present The King with a mess of dilligrout, a watery porridge with plums. That would rekindle a tradition begun by Willie the Conqueror who acclaimed that dish a Good Thing, in Sellar and Yeatman speak.

In the procession up the aisle marched the hereditary King’s Champion, Francis Dymoke, an office held by his Lincolnshire

family since the Norman conquest. A contemporary champ merely shoulders the Royal Standard, but in days of yore his role was more demanding. After the first course, a heritage Dymoke would clatter into Westminster Hall on a charger

The knight reversed his charger. Good luck with that in full armour after a snifter

caparisoned as for a tourney. His arrival was signalled by two trumpeters, two esquires held his shield and lance and various Lords High this and that escorted him. A herald called upon ‘all persons of any degree whatsoever to declare themselves and fight if they disputed the claim of the new sovereign to ascend the throne’.

With that, the Dymoke threw down his gauntlet. Cue, perhaps, the release into the hall of the CEO of Republic, kept kettled up in a police van like a ferret in a sack.

After hearing the Dymoke’s challenge thrice, the King drank to him from a gold cup. This he handed to the champion, who drained it and kept it as his fee. Declaring ‘Long life to his Majesty the King’ and bowing, the knight reversed his mettled charger back down the long hall to the entrance. Good luck with doing that in full armour after a snifter.

The dignity of the Dymokes never quite recovered from the coronation of James II when, in a moment worthy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Dymoke of the day flung his gauntlet down with such vim that he followed it with a crash onto the stone (‘It shouldn’t happen at a coronation’, April 26 ). He lay on his back ‘like a winded beetle’. The Queen snorted and the King rocked.

Next week Jason Goodwin