Hints and tips:
...Myrtles, daphnes and even rosemary were iced through, being so wet already all over their top growth. Dahlias, by contrast, were 6 inches or more underground without any branches showing....
...Binding bylaws, affecting leasehold and freehold properties alike, range from restrictions on alterations and noisy activities to the number or even weight of animals on a property....
...The visitors flocking to the trust’s properties — a record 5,500 people visited No 11 last year — reflect this wider revival....
...A mile north of London’s M25 orbital motorway, a deep-set lane through woodland and fields leads to an undulating 240-acre estate in Hertfordshire shared by three Stuart-Smith siblings....
...On a charmed evening at Sissinghurst, in his mother Vita Sackville-West’s marvellous rose garden, Nigel Nicolson once complained to me that the National Trust gardeners had left deadheads on the rosebushes...
...In cities the damage has been less: in my daughter’s warm London garden the myrtles are enviably alive. In my cold country acres, forget myrtles. The death toll has been its highest ever....
...Car parks are overrun, lanes blocked. “It’s just huge numbers of people and it has massive impacts,” she says....
...“Hawkhurst’s Water Lane restaurant and kitchen garden is a favourite, The Cloudberry restaurant in Cranbrook another.”...
...In warmer London you have probably nearly finished it, but out in the country I do not trust Mother Nature....
...He’s about to spend the next year or so trying to get his hands on the keys to a very different property: 10 Downing Street....
...It was decorated with red hearts on sticks and prefaced with gold lettering saying “Trust and Smiles Are Very Precious”....
...Grants start a snowball which private trusts and donors are more likely to join. The result is a measurable legacy. Ten years on, I have just been to Wisley to see how science now fits in....
...It is now owned by the National Trust but remains lived in by its donor family, the Floyds. They run the garden, while the Trust maintains the house....
...My high point in May was a visit to Branklyn Garden, in Perth, to mark the final year of the expert Jim Jermyn’s role as its property manager for the National Trust for Scotland....
...Spreading bushes of rosemary punctuate the walkway from which they are best viewed, together with that Italian staple, myrtle....
...During the lockdowns, the National Trust furloughed six of the eight gardeners and temporarily stopped Sissinghurst’s 50 volunteers....
...Wealthy landowners leased property to the poor, who worked it for a living. Every so often, the owners would increase their rents....
...Baroness Mone had no knowledge of any ‘high priority lane’, and did not play any part in or have any knowledge of PPE Medpro being placed in such a lane....
...But an internal HSBC report seen by the Financial Times indicated that Mone and her children ultimately received £29mn of profits from the contracts through an offshore trust....
...Properties connected to Mone and her husband were raided in April as part of a probe by the National Crime Agency into PPE contracts awarded during the pandemic....
...A sum of £28.8mn was later transferred to a trust whose beneficiaries were Mone and her children....
...At Felbrigg, a National Trust property in Norfolk where I have been a volunteer gardener since January 2000, every winter for the last 20 years or so 90 tonnes of spent mushroom compost has been put on the...
...National Trust gardens tend to homogeneity, but there is nothing alive now to compare with Branklyn....
...In nearby Godmanchester, Farm Hall is a fine Georgian house, dating from 1746 and once briefly owned by the National Trust....
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