Challenged to prove her claim that an 18th-century diet was better than today's, for a full year Fiona J Houston recreated the lifestyle of her 1790s rural Scottish ancestors in a basic one-roomed cottage, cooking from her garden and the wild, often entertaining family and friends, and surviving on her own resources. She learned lost crafts and skills, making nettle string, quill pens and ink as well as cheese and ale, lighting her fire from flints, and dressing in hand-sewn period clothing, with nothing but an old range stove and candles for warmth and light. This beautiful, quirky, illustrated title tells her extraordinary story and is packed with historical anecdotes, folklore, practical gardening info, seasonal menus, recipes, wildlife notes and more. Includes linocuts, photos and historic engravings.
Based on Catherine Carton's popular blog and vlog channels, Dainty Dress Diaries contains a variety of afternoon craft projects, recycling and upcycling ideas, gardening tips and sewing inspiration.
The instantly recognizable English cottage garden encapsulates that delightful mix of scented climbers, drifts of flowers inter-mingled with herbs and vegetables, fruit trees and traditional features. Much loved and copied throughout the world, it is uniquely individual. With no strict rules to adhere to, it is a garden style that is both informal and functional, celebrating fragrance, flowers and seasonal interest at its heart. The old cottage style of gardening, that blended planting to create a flowery yet productive plot within a small space, is still highly relevant and easily transferable to today's modern garden, whether it be a city courtyard or a large garden in the country. Appropriate for gardeners of every level of ability, The English Cottage Garden covers all aspects of designing a cottage-style garden; from choosing the right trees, climbers, shrubs and perennials to creating an authentic cottage feel to the planting It also covers the use of colour within the garden; how features can establish a framework and create focal points; and why companion planting is essential to this style. Illustrated throughout with a wealth of photographs showing gardens, planting combinations, colourful border schemes and individual flowers, this book is an essential read for anyone interested in the quintessential cottage garden.
In the right dose, everything is a poison. Even love . . . Jessamine Luxton has lived all her sixteen years in an isolated cottage near Alnwick Castle, with little company apart from the plants in her garden. Her father, Thomas, a feared and respected apothecary, has taught her much about the incredible powers of plants: that even the most innocent-looking weed can cure -- or kill. When Jessamine begins to fall in love with a mysterious boy who claims to communicate with plants, she is drawn into the dangerous world of the poison garden in a way she never could have imagined . . .
Seaweed And Eat It is the foodie's answer to The Dangerous Book for Boys, and a nostalgic journey of rediscovery for the whole family. Part cookbook, part natural history guide, with tasty recipes, fascinating folklore and inspiring ideas for seasonal feasts, Seaweed leads the reader through the process of identifying, learning about and cooking unusual and native wild foods. From discovering edible wild plants and flowers, to creating delicious seasonal feasts, Seaweed puts the fun into foraging and injects a sense of adventure into preparing dinner. For anyone interested in the origins of their food - or who's shocked by the price of elderflower cordial - this inspirational cookbook will ensure mealtimes are never dull. This revised edition is black and white.
Presents a guide to growing heirloom plants, and introduces a wide range of regional styles, flowers, herbs, vegetables, and fruits, along with advice on how to plant and cultivate them.
'A gold mine of gossip with a cast of thousands' GUARDIAN The unexpurgated diaries of one of the greatest, most talented, and wittily flamboyant characters of the 20th century - with a new introduction by Stephen Fry 'Compulsive reading' SUNDAY TIMES '19th February 1956. A A Milne has died. Lord Beaverbrook has not ... Larry is going to make a movie of The Sleeping Prince with Marilyn Monroe, which might conceivably drive him round the bend' '28th February 1960 Princess Margaret has announced her engagement to Tony Armstrong-Jones ... He looks quite pretty, but whether or not the marriage is entirely suitable remains to be seen.' Noel Coward was a renowned actor, dramatist, director - and star. His incredible zest, versatility and unrivalled wit are revealed in these diaries, with a cast of characters ranging from The Beatles to the Queen, Churchill to Marilyn Monroe. Touching, funny and revealing, THE NOEL COWARD DIARIES is a superb account of one of the greatest entertainers of all time.
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.
