Hints and tips:
...In February Kilmacurragh has a fine crocus meadow, now even richer with forms of Crocus vernus....
...It feels not unlike a safari camp: new construction is strictly limited here, so guests stay in 16 removable wooden lodges, temporarily anchored in mountain meadows....
...Hampshire county council has shown far wiser patronage over the past 40 years....
...They also think they will be restoring Britain’s lost “heritage” by laying out a small meadow of their own....
...Last year’s pilot scheme was a storming success, raising £40,000 from participants. This year, the plan is even more ambitious....
...The species Rosa glauca has been an unexpected failure but 40 of the others have flourished, including some of Austin’s own English roses....
...The only way in is via the two-lane Highway 128 that threads through its redwoods and apple orchards. Give or take a logging truck, it’s very much off the beaten track....
...Heading straight for the colchicum meadow, I thought it even more charming....
...Manchester airport is a 40-minute drive. What The house was built in 1845 and has seven bedrooms. There is also a self-contained cottage....
...About 40 years later, the same crocus was discovered in the same bulletin by Harriet Rix in Devon, my indomitable companion on our ride last year into the high floral meadows of Kyrgyzstan....
...The drive to Auckland airport takes about 40 minutes. What A concrete and cedarwood house with four bedrooms, spa and infinity pool....
...The fourth and last ferry, from Walberswick to Southwold, shuts at 5pm and is still 40-odd miles away — 40 flat but largely off-road miles that will take us through an area of outstanding natural beauty...
...We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the Queen’s Head, an old pub down a back lane in Little Marlow that we shared with the village cricket team....
...Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, by Christopher de Hamel, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 640 pages John Banville is author of ‘The Blue Guitar’ (Viking) Photographs: Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen...
...Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first, by Frank Trentmann, Allen Lane, RRP£30/Harper, RRP$40 Ours are consumer societies....
...It is wholly untrue that flower-gardening is stuck in a rut and that nothing has happened except dry summers in the past 40 years. Options have multiplied....
...More than 40 species are known in China alone, including three in Tibet and a deep maroon one found near Mount Everest....
...A new “flowering carrot” is on sale this year called Daucus carota Dara, a variation on the flowering carrot that is probably prolific in your “wild flower meadow”....
...meadow in Cambodia....
...The meadow always has been a managed environment: hay must be harvested and rabbits controlled....
...In urban areas the dominance of impervious surfaces means that between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of rainfall runs directly into the nearest drain....
...With the river on our left, the town at our backs, very quickly we are in open countryside and quiet water-meadows....
...I will be imitating the idea next year, using 40 or 50 shocking purple colchicums in 20 random groups in rough grass....
...Depending on the weather between now and then the flowery meadow may or may not still be strutting its stuff....
...But I do not think, either, that a wildflower meadow is “essentially a lawn that has been allowed to grow wild”....
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