Gardening
Gardening frenzy
If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…
National review
Why does the state fund theatres and not gardening and bingo, asks Lloyd Evans
Corona-gardening
The American diet was probably at its healthiest in the second world war. Fearing interruption to supply chains, Washington launched…
A great antidote to grief
Viewed from a purely private garden perspective, this has been a ver mirabilis. The blossom has been wonderful and long-lasting,…
Letters
The closing of churches Sir: Stephen Hazell-Smith is quite right in writing that churches should re-open (Letters, 18 April), however…
The charm – and artifice – of the English cottage garden
The confusion is understandable. You arrive at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, keen to experience the quintessential cottage garden —…
Everything under the sun: The glory of garden centres
Don’t you just love garden centres? You have to be mad to go on a sunny Sunday morning in the…
The magic of the Chelsea Flower Show
Chelsea, the most famous flower show in the world, pulled in its devotees once more this week, with its accustomed…
Letters: Of course Brexit is David Cameron’s fault
All Cameron’s fault Sir: In this time of febrile political speculation, there can have been few more arresting subject headings…
Why the National Garden Scheme beats the Chelsea Flower Show hands down
What could be more British than nosying around someone else’s private property while munching on a slice of cake? The…
It’s the Year of the Slug and I’m at war with the slimy little bastards
I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the…
The real stars of Kew’s newly restored Temperate House
The glasshouses at Kew Gardens are so popular that they can be quite unbearably busy at weekends. And why shouldn’t…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
The axeman next door
What happened when I tried American neighbourliness in London
Indoor gardening
A year or so ago, I inherited a cardboard box filled with plants. It was an offshoot from an enormous…
Moving pictures
About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made…
Cold frames
A Little Chaos is a period drama directed by Alan Rickman and starring Kate Winslet as a woman charged to…
Flowering obsession
The roots of snowdrop fever
Yearning for Knole
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
Tread carefully: your garden’s saturated with race
Is your life saturated with racial meaning? The most common answer to this question, when I ask friends and acquaintances,…
Out of this world
First, a confession. Even an ardent radio addict can enjoy a fortnight away from the airwaves, disconnected, switched off, unlistening.…
I wish to apply for the position of chairman of the BBC
To: Karen Moran, HR Director, BBC Dear Ms Moran, I have decided to give up on the gardening this year,…
Another secret garden
Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, first published in 1955, focuses on the roaming children — the ‘sparrows’ — of a shabby street in bomb-torn London. When ten-year-old Lovejoy Mason finds a packet of cornflower seeds and decides to create an ‘Italian’ garden hidden in a rubble-strewn churchyard, the consequences are life-changing for all who become involved. Below is the foreword to a recent reissue of the novel (Virago Modern Classics, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.49).
A choice of gardening books
I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances…
Dear Mary
Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume…
