In Northamptonshire, our cottage garden might have been advertised as holding the National Snail Collection; the molluscs used to emerge from crevices in the walls with specially fortified shells. The chief characteristic of our Pimlico yard — to call this space, overlooked by beetling terraces, a garden would be overdoing it — is Stygian shade.
I look up from our bench and feel I might as well be at the bottom of a well. ‘In Heaven’s light we live again,’ sings the prisoner chorus in Beethoven’s Fidelio; I feel much the same when I go onto the street. We buried our cat here, but did not — could not — return for some time. Not due to an excess of sentiment, but because we’d let the basement flat.
Recently, I’ve been out with trug and secateurs. When we came to the house, a gardening friend pulled no punches: ‘The walls simply scream “Paint me white and put up some trellis”.’ That was more than 20 years ago. Now, the white brickwork may be blotched and the trellis may be rotten, but they’re covered in climbers, mostly jasmine — delicious on the nose, although tending to block out the light. Over the weekend, I spent some happy hours hacking back and I couldn’t help marvelling at how much vegetation a very small space can produce — and how many new plants it’s possible to squeeze in.
Spectator: Alas, poor Percy
Lucy Baring mourns the family cat.
Country mouse visits the Royal Bath and West Show
Country mouse admires the prize-winning cattle.
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'The whole house shook. Everything was white. For four months, it felt as if we were on Mars': The story behind one of Hampshire's most breathtaking gardensWhen Kim Wilkie sculpted a tiered grass amphitheatre behind this 17th-century house, the garden finally settled into place, as Non Morris discovers.
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'I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed': Inside Jane Austen's Winchester home, the house where she penned her final words and drew her final breathJane Austen spent the last days of her life in rented lodgings in Winchester, Hampshire. Adam Rattray describes the remarkable recent discoveries made about the house in which she died.
