NOW, botany,’ said my host, ‘I reckon it would be first-class cover. Good excuse for being in bad places. Get the act right and the locals would think you were just another barking gringo or gweilo obsessed with their stupid weeds.’ I was tempted to point out that several of his fellow professionals, far from acting, had been serious devotees of botany, but it seemed uncivil to cloud what my host plainly thought was his blue-sky thinking. We were at his club, after all, and he was paying for my pre- Christmas lunch. So I mentioned none of these men who’d taken advantage of their careers in diplomacy and espionage to travel in search of plants—not even the American whose great botanical coup was doing its best at that very moment to bring seasonal cheer to the drab dining room.
His name was Joel Roberts Poinsett and each of his foreign postings was an opportunity to explore a new flora and collect plants for his garden in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1825, at the age of 46, he was appointed the first US ambassador to Mexico. It was in the third winter of this five-year mission that he encountered a species that would make its breeders rich and his name immortal.
He’d gone to Taxco in the southern mountains to investigate the local silver mines that had raised this fine city to glory. There, he found a different treasure. It was a shrub with slender, sparsely branched stems to about 8ft tall. At their summits, golden bead-like florets were encircled by large leafy bracts of a texture more luxurious and a scarlet more vivid than he’d ever witnessed before in Nature.
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin December 11-18, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin December 11-18, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
A tapestry of pinks
THE garden is now entering its season of vigour and exuberance.
Bringing the past to life
An event hosted by COUNTRY LIFE at WOW!house is one of the highlights of a programme that features some of the biggest names in interior design
This isle is full of wonder
GEOLOGY? A bit like economics, the famously boring science? I confess I suffered the prejudice—agriculture and history being my thing, both of them vital in every sense— but Robert Muir-Wood’s voyage through the past 66 million years of the making of the British landscape has biblical-level drama on almost every other page. Flood, fire, ice… or, perhaps, the formation in rock, sand, mud and lava of these isles is best conceived of as fierce poetry.
Empire protest
Without meaning to issue a clarion call for independence, E. M. Forster perfectly captured the rising tensions of the British Raj. One hundred years later, Matthew Dennison revisits the masterpiece A Passage to India
Hops and dreams
A relative of marijuana, hops were a Teutonic introduction to British brewing culture and gave rise to the original working holiday
Life and sol
The sanctuary of the Balearic Islands has enchanted a multitude of creative minds, from Robert Graves to David Bowie
'Nature is nowhere as great as in its smallest creatures'
Giving himself neck ache from constantly looking upwards, John Lewis-Stempel makes the most of a sunny May day harvesting ‘tree hay’ and marvelling at the myriad wildlife including flies and earwigs–that reside on bark
'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything'
Country houses great and small were indispensable to D-Day preparations, with electricity and sanitation, well-stocked wine cellars, countesses to run the canteens and antique furniture to feed the stoves
The darling buds of May
May Morris shared her father’s passion for flowers, embroidery and Iceland, but was much more than William’s daughter. Influential both as a designer and as a teacher, she championed the rights of workers, particularly women, as Huon Mallalieu reveals
Achilles healed
Once used to comfort the lovelorn or soothe the wounds of Greek heroes, yarrow may now have a new starring role in sustainable agriculture
