IN Ian Fleming’s 1963 novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond visits M at his home, ‘a small Regency manor-house on the edge of Windsor Forest’. Entering the study, he finds his chief at a ‘painting-table up against the window, his broad back hunched over his drawing-board, with, in front of him, an extremely dim little flower in a tooth-glass full of water.’ Giving ‘the flower one last piercingly inquisitive glance’, M rises ‘with obvious reluctance’. He has been disturbed in the depths of his hobby: painting meticulous watercolours of one group of plants exclusively, ‘the wild orchids of England’.
M greets Bond with a tirade about the novels of Rex Stout, whose detective-protagonist Nero Wolfe keeps tropical orchids in a glasshouse on top of his New York brownstone: ‘“How in hell can a man like those disgusting flowers? Why, they’re damned near animals, and their colours, all those pinks and mauves and the blotchy yellow tongues, are positively hideous! Now that”—M waved at the meagre little bloom in the tooth-glass —“that’s the real thing. That’s an Autumn Lady’s Tresses—Spiranthes spiralis”.’
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Don't rain on Venus's parade
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A rural reason to cheer
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My heart is in the Highlands
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Put it in print
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The rake's progress
Good looks, a flair for the theatrical and an excellent marriage made John Astley’s fortune, but also swayed ‘le Titien Anglois’ away from painting into a dissolute life of wine and women, with some collecting on the side
Charter me this
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Hey ho, hey ho, it's off to sow we go
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Floreat Etona
The link with the school and horticulture goes back to its royal founder, finds George Plumptre on a visit to the recently restored gardens
All in good time
Two decades in the planning, The Emory, designed by Sir Richard Rogers, is open. Think of it as a sieve that retains the best of contemporary hotel-keeping and lets the empty banality flow away
Come on down, the water's fine
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