Gardening
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,…
Making friends with the axeman next door
What happened when I tried American neighbourliness in London
It started with a cardboard box: discovering the joys of indoor gardening
A year or so ago, I inherited a cardboard box filled with plants. It was an offshoot from an enormous…
Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum is very good news - for the Met
About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made…
A Little Chaos review: Kate Winslet emotes her little socks off
A Little Chaos is a period drama directed by Alan Rickman and starring Kate Winslet as a woman charged to…
Why would someone pay hundreds of pounds for one snowdrop bulb? I think I know
The roots of snowdrop fever
Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
Tread carefully! Your garden is saturated with racial meaning – and so is Ikea
Is your life saturated with racial meaning? The most common answer to this question, when I ask friends and acquaintances,…
The gardener-soldiers of the First World War
First, a confession. Even an ardent radio addict can enjoy a fortnight away from the airwaves, disconnected, switched off, unlistening.…
My application to be chairman of the BBC
To: Karen Moran, HR Director, BBC Dear Ms Moran, I have decided to give up on the gardening this year,…
Jacqueline Wilson: 'The first book that made me cry'
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).
The most important gardening book of the year
I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances…
Dear Mary: The rules of wearing a dressing gown
Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume…
Dear Mary: What must I do to reclaim the best poolside chair?
Q. I know this seems petty but last year, on our villa holiday, my brother-in-law always took the best chair…
