Professor M gardens on the greensand ridge in Bedfordshire and tells me she is plagued by rabbits.
Tag: Belvoir Castle (Page 1 of 3)
I return to my recent communication (note 296) in response to a particular query from Miss P of Harlaxton who asks what grounds I have for supposing that the Dukes of Rutland drew their sense of themselves from the deep, and probably imagined, past.
Captain Ken, being a bicycling man, is forever in pursuit of some new place in which to try his skills, be it the screes of a mountain slope or the dense undergrowth of a distant forest and he now returns from the United States with a renewed disdain for the familiar well-trodden paths of custom.
The lakes at Belvoir Castle, drawn by Nick Haycock; outlines added by the editor.
An unexpected but nonetheless welcome slew of fresh post has washed across the breakfast table, leaving in its receding tide the wrack of those questions that arise unbroken and yet entangled in the miasmic effusions of that Zeno of mystery, the lake-maker Capability Brown.
The most prominent amongst them was captured a fortnight ago by Mr R of Islington, who has not been alone in asking: if Brown made his lakes by damming up a valley, how much did he have to excavate?
Capability Brown was no dandy but a diamond-decent down-home sort of chap and when Mr C of Essex asked me what that great master of gardening Capability Brown might have learned from Kent, I took it to my companions at the Tatler’s Waste-bin who wondered whether he had the county in mind or the man said to have been his master, that coiffed stylist, William Kent.
Mr Honey, who had been walking the grounds of Temple Newsam, happened, on his return, to call out ‘When’s tea?’ in a very echo of a similar question put to me by Miss E of Llandudno. It was a fine spring day and he had all justice on the side of his appetite, which has never held back in its demands, yet was I minded to hold the crumpets till I had told him a tale of that great lover of lardy-cake, Capability Brown, whose landscapes are said by many to have been led directly to the invention of tea-time.
I was delighted to meet Dr S, whom one seldom meets outside his native Surrey, striding amongst the glorious hedgerows of paschal Buckinghamshire. As two people will who share a common interest, we fell to a discussion of the ridings, as they were designed by that king of the English countryside, Capability Brown.
Mr G writes from Wolverhampton has asked me whether Chillington has the second biggest (after Blenheim) of the lakes constructed by Mr ‘Capability’ Brown, himself a man of unquestioned parts..
Mr Honey has joined me in my country place and just now, stretched out under an apple tree and sucking on a straw, he gives a passable impression of rural content.
I find myself caught in a dilemma in respect of the plants used by the King’s gardener Capability Brown. On the one hand, Dr L writes from Essex to ask for more practical detail, as she is encouraging her students to consult the Brown Advisor. On the other hand Mr R of Finsbury Park, London, would prefer a deeper, more abstract, probe into the meaning of the formidable Capability Brown, if there be such.