Country Life 18-May-2022

GARDENING is an art, a skill and a science at which we excel. It is one of our country’s greatest gifts to the world. Other nations have other traditions, but English-style gardening is most firmly founded on our love of flowering plants. That’s what distinguishes it from the customs of, say, France and Italy, although, even in those countries, English gardening has made an enormous impact over the past 40 years. Our methods and styles also have their disciples in such countries as China and Japan, ancient civilisations whose own garden traditions are even older—and, each in its way, no less sophisticated and influential than ours. Our gardens are at their most fresh and beautiful right now, as spring transitions into summer. Spring did not arrive on the first day of…

READING about the state of the rivers of the British Isles, with the destruction visited upon them by sewerage outflows, which are often officially sanctioned as illegal, it is tempting to rail against 33 years of privatisation as the source of our current woes. I’m no apologist for the water and sewerage corporations and I am happy they are finally being held to account, at least in part, not only in the court of public opinion, but in the courts of law, which have handed out fines worth hundreds of millions. The truth is, however, that the 1989 privatisation was the last in a long line of bad ideas going back centuries. Those ideas have failed to deal with our sewage in a way that protects the rivers that we love,…

Garden gnomes The much-denigrated gnome is the biggest garden trend for 2022, ahead of urban gardening and pergolas, according to a combined analysis of Google-search keywords and social- media posts Bees and butterflies Frozen-peas giant Birds Eye has pledged to plant 75 acres of wildflowers across the UK in the next three years, starting with a butterfly-shaped area within one of its pea fields in North Yorkshire British plants Plant Heritage is launching its annual Missing Genera campaign at Chelsea in a bid to build National Collections for 12 plant groups, including argyranthemum, campanula and periwinkle (above right) New literature Patricia Lockwood's debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, which explores love, grief and the absurdity of internet living, has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize…

Disconnected farmers Poor broadband and mobile connectivity are hampering food production in the UK, according to the NFU English Nature The Office for Environmental Protection has raised the alarm over the continuing deterioration of England's natural assets, urging the Government to ‘give this crisis the priority it needs' Recycling Household recycling rates in England have dropped from 46% in 2019 to 44% in 2020, widening the gap from the Government's 50% target Climate change There's now a 50% chance temperatures will rise more than 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels within the next five years, according to the Met Office…

ANEW selling exhibition at Farleys House Gallery, East Sussex, sets out to explore the work of Surrealist painter Grace Pailthorpe through a selection of late watercolours from the private collection of retired art dealer Paul Conran. Born in 1883, Pailthorpe worked as a doctor before developing an interest in psychoanalysis and beginning her artistic career in 1935. Pailthorpe believed Surrealism and psychoanalysis shared the common goal of liberating mankind, with art in particular removing ‘all the fetters which prevent full expression’. Today, says Mr Conran, ‘there is massive interest in female artists and their work, particularly the Surrealists—witness Ithell Colquhoun’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale and Eileen Agar’s recent retrospective at Leeds Art Gallery’. Although Agar and Colquhoun exhibited next to Pailthorpe at the first exhibition of Surrealist art in the UK,…

THE Gamekeepers’ Welfare Trust (GWT) is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2022 with the Year of the Gamekeeper and CEO Helen Benson has risen to the occasion by embarking on Helen’s Way, a gruelling fundraising journey across the UK. Together with her Border Terrier, Smartie (above), she is heading south from Castle of Mey, Caithness, to Land’s End in Cornwall, then east to Sandringham in Norfolk, employing any means of transport used by keepers, stalkers, gillies and fishing guides in their work. In her first 500 miles, she has travelled by vintage Land Rover, tractor and even pony and trap—but the hardest journey by far has been by train, as Smartie struggled to negotiate the station’s stairs. ‘Helen’s Way was an idea that was triggered by a tractor run I completed…