Tag Archives: australia

John Glover & his “hideous fidelity to Nature”

WELCOME TO OUR 400th POST! This is an artist’s painting of his own house and garden. Any idea of where it might be? The artist was John Glover who was born near Leicester in 1767 but, despite the very English … Continue reading

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Immortalising the ephemeral: The painter, his patrons and their plants

  I wrote recently about the gardens and the greenhouse that Josephine, the wife of Napoleon, created at Malmaison near Paris.   Employing some of the leading botanists and gardeners in France, and never short of a franc or two, … Continue reading

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The Empress’s Greenhouse

Last week’s post about Josephine and the landscape at Malmaison left out any discussion of the plants grown there, so today’s post is going to make up for that, because  it was plants that really captured her imagination. That meant, of … Continue reading

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Josephine @ Malmaison

The story of how a 32 year widow from Martinique escaped the guillotine and then met and fell in love with the a young Corsican general during the French Revolution is the stuff of romantic novels. It’s one of the … Continue reading

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Lawnmowers on Legs

As regular readers will know many of these posts are sparked by a chance discovery while researching something completely unrelated. Todays is certainly one of those odd quirks of fate. I was looking at an article in a Country Life … Continue reading

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