Which English landscape garden is this? Some lesser known Capability Brown site? Or perhaps one by one of his contemporaries? Off the beaten track somewhere or just a hidden corner of a better known one?
Wherever you’ve guessed I suspect you’re probably wrong. It’s not Brown or indeed even 18thc….
The title of this post conjures up a horrible idea! What’s wrong with flowers being the colour they have always been? Yet for centuries the world has been trying to find new colours [and indeed shapes, sizes and almost any other feature you care to name] and if they can’t be found then manipulate them into existence, first by natural selection, then by deliberate hybridising and most recently by genetic means. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the blue rose.
However maybe it is worth remembering in the Victorian language of flowers, blue roses meant a quest for the impossible or unattainable! Will 21stc science change that? Continue reading
Just a few questions as the introduction for today’s post.
What do you know about gnomes? How are they different to dwarves? Elves? Goblins? Pixies? Leprechauns, Boggarts? Or any of the other small folk who live in our imagination and stories…and maybe are out there in real life too if only we knew where to look?
How big are they? Where do they live? What do they do all day long? Why haven’t I ever seen one?
How did they ever get into our gardens? And how did they become such popular garden ornaments?
Well that’s a lot of difficult questions to answer… but in this post I’ll attempt to answer at least some of them…and in the process probably tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the origin of garden gnomes….
Where is the oldest extant garden complex in the world? To be honest I don’t know – let me know if you do – but today’s post is about what must be one of the contenders for that title. It probably dates from about 1550 years ago – not the 1550 of Tudor England but more than a thousand years before that.
Unsurprisingly the site it forms part of is on the UNESCO World Heritage list but weirdly the gardens aren’t mentioned on UNESCO’s description. I was reminded about it when I was looking through some old photos the other day and memories came flooding back – particularly of the panic of vertigo trying to climb to topmost level .
So where is the garden at Lion Rock?
from Britannia & Eve 1st March 1953
A recent email from my friend Twigs Way had the headline “This is just SO quirky . .” Clicking it open I found a hyperlink and the message: “thought I would send it to a fellow lover of the ‘strange world of garden history’ ”
The link was to a short piece of newsreel on Pathe News dating from 1952 but neither of us had heard of the subject of the clip and nor had any of the local county gardens trust researchers that she’d asked, so, of course, that was a good excuse to start me off on another of life’s little research byways.
And what’s it all go to do with Cussons Imperial Leather? Continue reading
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