Late December and Mother Nature sprawls unconscious, magnificently exhausted by her nine-month orgy of blossom and bloom. Many gardeners use this time of respite as a period of reflection, a time to review the successes and failures of the previous year and to plan for the next. These ‘gardeners’ think that because not much is [...]
Archive for December, 2009
Prometheus Pyrphoros
Posted in Uncategorized on December 29, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Here’s a fine day — let us kill something
Posted in Garden History, Garden Theory, tagged Victorian on December 16, 2009 | 6 Comments »
And so on to the Victorians, high-minded and heavily moustachioed exporters of British culture par excellence, and more specifically onto The Victorian Gardening Childhood, one that I missed by only century. Thank God. I have long believed that the dominance of the British Empire was a not a consequence of industrialisation, navel supremacy or even [...]
Great Gardeners of History #1
Posted in Garden History, Great Gardeners of History, tagged Gardens, History, Petrarch, St Fiacre on December 10, 2009 | 5 Comments »
The Early Middle Ages are widely reviled in gardening circles (I have found out at great cost). Spiteful criticism by rent-a-gob garden polemicists of the 1300’s has lead to an ill-thought-out, but almost universally swallowed consensus, that this was a period barren of any insightful design, lazy in hard landscaping, and slapdash in its planting. [...]
London’s Blighted Heart
Posted in Uncategorized on December 5, 2009 | 5 Comments »
As my confidants know all to well, I have deep and fond feelings towards Fulham Palace. My girlfriend and I once crashed an art opening there and spent a fine evening wandering around late medieval galleries while drinking as much free wine as our stomachs could stretch around, it was blissful. Now, it is a [...]
