IT'S possible to feel cheated by I spring. It's supposed to be when everything begins again; there are lambs in the fields, snowdrops in the woods and goslings are marched up and down the riverbank by their dutiful parents. However, it isn't a time of abundance in the way that autumn is. In late September, everything comes to a rich culmination: the last of the grain is brought in, salmon run up the rivers to spawn, squirrels scamper madly around London parks and busily bury nuts. For many, the pleasurable business of pickling begins. All creatures great and small know that the weather is on the turn and we've got to make the most of Nature's bounty.
And then comes that late-autumn calm. Everything is done and a pall of tranquillity is cast over Britain in a way that doesn't happen at any other time of year. All of a sudden, holidaymakers empty out of the country's most beautiful places and are replaced by wintering birds. Great flocks of pink-footed geese, several thousand strong, fly down the eastern seaboard, where they will spend our coldest months feeding on sugar-beet tops and stubble fields by day before drifting out onto the mud when evening comes. Denys Watkins-Pitchford ('BB'), the great wildfowler and author, called pink-footed geese the 'hounds of heaven'. I witnessed a conversation the other day between two contemporary nature writers about whether, if BB was alive today, he would have been keen on shooting. These sorts of propositions can be irritating-it's as if sensitive modern authors wish to erase parts of writers of old and then claim the etiolated version for themselves. I suspect BB would still love wildfowling if he were around now.
この記事は Country Life UK の November 01, 2023 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Country Life UK の November 01, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Put some graphite in your pencil
Once used for daubing sheep, graphite went on to become as valuable as gold and wrote Keswick's place in history. Harry Pearson inhales that freshly sharpened-pencil smell
Dulce et decorum est
Michael Sandle is the Wilfred Owen of art, with his deeply felt sense of the futility of violence. John McEwen traces the career of this extraordinary artist ahead of his 88th birthday
Heaven is a place on earth
For the women of the Bloomsbury group, their country gardens were places of refuge, reflection and inspiration, as well as a means of keeping loved ones close by, discovers Deborah Nicholls-Lee
It's the plants, stupid
I WON my first prize for gardening when I was nine years old at prep school. My grandmother was delighted-it was she who had sent me the seeds of godetia, eschscholtzia and Virginia stock that secured my victory.
Pretty as a picture
The proliferation of honey-coloured stone cottages is part of what makes the Cotswolds so beguiling. Here, we pick some of our favourites currently on the market
How golden was my valley
These four magnificent Cotswold properties enjoy splendid views of hill and dale
The fire within
An occasionally deadly dinner-party addition, this perennial plant would become the first condiment produced by Heinz
Sweet chamomile, good times never seemed so good
Its dainty white flowers add sunshine to the garden and countryside; it will withstand drought and create a sweet-scented lawn that never needs mowing. What's not to love about chamomile
All I need is the air that I breathe
As the 250th anniversary of 'a new pure air' approaches, Cathryn Spence reflects on the 'furious free-thinker' and polymath who discovered oxygen
My art is in the garden
Monet and Turner supplied the colours, Canaletto the structure and Klimt the patterns for the Boodles National Gallery garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.