Latest news with #JosephPaxton
Daily Mirror
17-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
Strawberries will grow better in your garden if you do one simple thing
Don't lose your prize crop of these quintessentially British berries to common pests and gardening pitfalls with easy steps that even experts love Life in the garden is getting busier as plants and flowers burst into life, bees start buzzing, the dawn chorus breaks the silence each morning and common pests are flying and crawling around again. But let's not lose early crops to hungry visitors - there are plenty of tried and tested tactics to ward them off. With strawberries, for instance, when fruit starts to develop, cover the soil around the plant with black plastic or straw - this will prevent the fruits from making contact with the soil and rotting. Then use environmentally friendly methods to keep slugs away - one of the most effective can be extremely satisfying (if you're not scared of handling the critters) – is to just pluck them off after dark with the aid of a torch. And use nets to protect fruit from birds. Here are my other jobs to do in the garden this week: On sunny days, it can really heat up in the greenhouse. Use shading when necessary and keep everything watered daily. In the veg garden you can sow outdoor courgettes, runner beans, French beans, sweetcorn and marrows as well as successional sowing of radishes, lettuces and spring onions. Thin out seedlings sown earlier. Plant outdoor tomato plants and pinch out side shoots. Inspect gooseberries for sawfly, remove if found and prune current season's growth back to five leaves. This shouldn't remove any developing fruit which grows mainly on old wood. If you haven't been sowing from seed, there's a huge selection of flowering plants available in garden centres now – plug plants are good value and will leap into growth in the heat. Aphid watch – especially if you have lupins and roses. You can remove by hand or with a hose. If you like it to look manicured, lawns will need weekly mowing so make sure you have a compost bin or area to put clippings to good use. Or ditch the lawnmower and let the bees feed on the daisies and clovers. Breathtaking gardens that anyone can visit Watching the VE Day commemorations made me consider a garden, which while being rejuvenated took on a deeper meaning – for lives lost in The Great War. It's on a hillside near Mevagissey in Cornwall and for decades it was lost, overgrown and forgotten. The Lost Gardens of Heligan now span over 200 acres with productive gardens, formal layouts, subtropical valleys and woods. But its story gives it such emotional weight. The Heligan estate belonged to the Tremayne family for more than 400 years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, successive generations developed it into a showpiece of Victorian horticulture. There were pineapple pits heated by horse dung, melons, espaliered fruit trees, and glasshouses believed to have been designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. At its peak, the estate employed 22 full-time gardeners but in August 1914, everything changed. Thirteen of those gardeners enlisted to fight in the war and only four returned. Before leaving, several of them signed their names on the wall of a small lavatory behind the greenhouses – now known as the Thunderbox Room – beneath the words: 'Don't come here to sleep or slumber'. It was an informal roll call, left behind when none of them knew if they would come back. With the workforce gone and post-war society shifting, Heligan entered a long period of decline. By the 1920s, the Tremayne family had moved, and the house was let to tenants. The gardens became wild. glasshouses collapsed, borders disappeared, and structures were swallowed by vegetation. That might have been the end of the story, if not for a chance encounter in the early 90s. Tim Smit, an archaeologist turned music producer, had moved to Cornwall. He met John Willis, a Tremayne descendant who had just inherited the land, and together they began exploring what remained. What they found stunned them. Under the overgrowth were walls of espaliered fruit trees, rusting tools hanging in place, and the Thunderbox Room, with the names still faintly visible. It was clear Heligan was more than a lost garden. It was a site of memory. And so began one of the largest garden restoration projects in Europe. The team had little to go on – no complete planting plans or working drawings –but they pieced things together from zinc plant labels and estate documents. They rebuilt the pineapple pits using horse manure as heat, restored heritage apple orchards, and replanted the walled vegetable gardens. Today, Heligan includes several distinct areas. The Sundial Garden is enclosed and packed with traditional perennials and heritage varieties. The Italian Garden, with its formal layout and lily pool, brings a more structured feel. The productive area – the kitchen gardens and melon yard – now supply the on-site cafe with seasonal produce. Plant of the week: Syringa 'Little Lady' The lilacs are beginning to bloom and release their intoxicating scent. While it's true they're not much to look at most of the year, they make up for it with their fragrant flowers. If you're a lilac lover but have limited space, here's a compact variety which grows to around 4-5ft in height and can be grown in a pot. The pale lilac flowers are fragrant and do best in full sunshine The Jungle is perhaps the most striking area. A deep valley with a subtropical microclimate, it is home to tree ferns, gunnera, bamboo, and palms. A raised boardwalk and rope bridge allow visitors to walk through the canopy. Further afield, visitors can walk through woodland to find sculptures like the Mud Maiden and the Giant's Head, or explore wildflower meadows and wildlife areas now part of Heligan's ecological mission. The estate has become a model for regenerative land management and low-impact horticulture. In 1997, a Channel 4 documentary and bestselling book by Tim Smit helped bring Heligan to national attention. What made the story compelling was the sense this was also a war memorial – a tribute to those who worked there. The Thunderbox Room is now officially recognised by the Imperial War Museum as a living memorial, and on Remembrance Sunday, the estate holds a moment of silence. Heligan receives over 300,000 visitors a year, but is grounded in its purpose: to honour the people who made the garden, and to keep their legacy growing. it is a working garden, where tools are used, produce is grown, and the past is deeply felt. It's a reminder that history doesn't always need a statue. Sometimes it's enough to bring something back to life.
Daily Mirror
17-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
Breathtaking forgotten gardens anyone can visit with unexpected bonus
The Lost Gardens of Heligan have a tragic history that makes a wander around its beautiful 200-acre plot, with its formal layouts, valleys and woods, deeply poignant Watching the VE Day commemorations made me consider a garden, which while being rejuvenated took on a deeper meaning – for lives lost in The Great War. It's on a hillside near Mevagissey in Cornwall and for decades it was lost, overgrown and forgotten. The Lost Gardens of Heligan now span over 200 acres with productive gardens, formal layouts, subtropical valleys and woods. But its story gives it such emotional weight. The Heligan estate belonged to the Tremayne family for more than 400 years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, successive generations developed it into a showpiece of Victorian horticulture. There were pineapple pits heated by horse dung, melons, espaliered fruit trees, and glasshouses believed to have been designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. At its peak, the estate employed 22 full-time gardeners but in August 1914, everything changed. Thirteen of those gardeners enlisted to fight in the war and only four returned. Before leaving, several of them signed their names on the wall of a small lavatory behind the greenhouses – now known as the Thunderbox Room – beneath the words: 'Don't come here to sleep or slumber'. It was an informal roll call, left behind when none of them knew if they would come back. With the workforce gone and post-war society shifting, Heligan entered a long period of decline. By the 1920s, the Tremayne family had moved, and the house was let to tenants. The gardens became wild. glasshouses collapsed, borders disappeared, and structures were swallowed by vegetation. That might have been the end of the story, if not for a chance encounter in the early 90s. Tim Smit, an archaeologist turned music producer, had moved to Cornwall. He met John Willis, a Tremayne descendant who had just inherited the land, and together they began exploring what remained. What they found stunned them. Under the overgrowth were walls of espaliered fruit trees, rusting tools hanging in place, and the Thunderbox Room, with the names still faintly visible. It was clear Heligan was more than a lost garden. It was a site of memory. And so began one of the largest garden restoration projects in Europe. The team had little to go on – no complete planting plans or working drawings –but they pieced things together from zinc plant labels and estate documents. They rebuilt the pineapple pits using horse manure as heat, restored heritage apple orchards, and replanted the walled vegetable gardens. Today, Heligan includes several distinct areas. The Sundial Garden is enclosed and packed with traditional perennials and heritage varieties. The Italian Garden, with its formal layout and lily pool, brings a more structured feel. The productive area – the kitchen gardens and melon yard – now supply the on-site cafe with seasonal produce. The Jungle is perhaps the most striking area. A deep valley with a subtropical microclimate, it is home to tree ferns, gunnera, bamboo, and palms. A raised boardwalk and rope bridge allow visitors to walk through the canopy. Further afield, visitors can walk through woodland to find sculptures like the Mud Maiden and the Giant's Head, or explore wildflower meadows and wildlife areas now part of Heligan's ecological mission. The estate has become a model for regenerative land management and low-impact horticulture. In 1997, a Channel 4 documentary and bestselling book by Tim Smit helped bring Heligan to national attention. What made the story compelling was the sense this was also a war memorial – a tribute to those who worked there. The Thunderbox Room is now officially recognised by the Imperial War Museum as a living memorial, and on Remembrance Sunday, the estate holds a moment of silence. Heligan receives over 300,000 visitors a year, but is grounded in its purpose: to honour the people who made the garden, and to keep their legacy growing. it is a working garden, where tools are used, produce is grown, and the past is deeply felt. It's a reminder that history doesn't always need a statue. Sometimes it's enough to bring something back to life. Plant of the week: Syringa 'Little Lady' The lilacs are beginning to bloom and release their intoxicating scent. While it's true they're not much to look at most of the year, they make up for it with their fragrant flowers. If you're a lilac lover but have limited space, here's a compact variety which grows to around 4-5ft in height and can be grown in a pot. The pale lilac flowers are fragrant and do best in full sunshine Jobs to do in the garden this week... On sunny days, it can really heat up in the greenhouse. Use shading when necessary and keep everything watered daily. In the veg garden you can sow outdoor courgettes, runner beans, French beans, sweetcorn and marrows as well as successional sowing of radishes, lettuces and spring onions. Thin out seedlings sown earlier. Plant outdoor tomato plants and pinch out side shoots. Inspect gooseberries for sawfly, remove if found and prune current season's growth back to five leaves. This shouldn't remove any developing fruit which grows mainly on old wood. Growing strawberries – when fruit starts to develop, cover the soil around the plant with black plastic or straw - this will prevent the fruits from making contact with the soil and rotting. Use environmentally friendly methods to keep slugs away and nets to protect fruit from birds. If you haven't been sowing from seed, there's a huge selection of flowering plants available in garden centres now – plug plants are good value and will leap into growth in the heat. Aphid watch – especially if you have lupins and roses. You can remove by hand or with a hose. If you like it to look manicured, lawns will need weekly mowing so make sure you have a compost bin or area to put clippings to good use. Or ditch the lawnmower and let the bees feed on the daisies and clovers.
Telegraph
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Britain's new symbol? An extraordinarily expensive box
From the top of a building bursts a large, glowing sun. Nearby, a group of geodesic domes are being consumed by shrubbery, like a kind of feral Eden Project. Ahead stands a transparent box, inside which is a second building, a bottled miniature Colosseum. This is not a cheese dream. This is Expo 2025, in Osaka, which opens tomorrow, and these are, respectively, the pavilions belonging to the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. But why? What even is an Expo? What began in London as the Great Exhibition of 1851 has since grown into an international extravaganza, held at irregular intervals. The edition in Osaka will be the 36th. These days, the organisers refer to the Expo as a 'gathering of nations', around 160 of them, although early pavilions functioned more as shop windows of industrial and cultural might, rather than symbols of global togetherness. The Great Exhibition, for instance, sold the achievements of Britain's Industrial Revolution to the world. Joseph Paxton 's cast-iron and glass Crystal Palace set the benchmark for technologically audacious and architecturally spectacular pavilions – though so rushed was its conception that Paxton, with just nine days to produce a design, ended up hurriedly doodling it during a meeting, after which it was constructed and opened within a breathless nine months. Yet that building would represent the spirit of the age, and as successive Expos have come and gone, each has tried to encapsulate the global moment in a different way. Paris 1889 saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Like the Crystal Palace, it was designed as a temporary structure, though imagine if it had been scrapped. The world would have lost the symbol of a bold, modern France, one that still astonishes today: a Jules Verne fantasy made iron, engineering as art. Nineteenth-century Expos (known in the US as World's Fairs) were sold with posters showing wafty Pre-Raphaelite women representing the spirits of elemental forces, summoning the power of the new from their classical bosoms. Progress was dressed up in faux-classical drag to disguise the truth of clanking industrial grime or the shadows of empire. But all that changed quite abruptly with Chicago 1933. No dusty centurions or drifty muses there. The poster showed a starkly graphic image of a globe trailing whoosh-lines – a planet that might also be an atom – representing the Expo's stated theme, 'A Century of Progress'. And in the depths of the Great Depression, this became the first Expo to fully exploit the potential of modernist design. Out went reworkings of classical and renaissance buildings: instead, we got a forward-looking panorama, typified by the Chrysler Motors building, reminiscent of an art-deco cinema. You might have thought that Paris wouldn't have needed another Expo landmark, but for its 1937 fair, a half-mile-high observation tower was proposed, whose spiralling concrete ramp would have allowed you to drive your Peugeot more than halfway up its colossal height. The tower was never built, and in the event, the Expo was dominated by two other ominous structures: those of the Soviet Union, bearing Vera Mukhina's enormous sculpture of workers brandishing a hammer and a sickle; and Germany, a bombastic neoclassical tower by Albert Speer, which he topped with an eagle and a swastika. Global conflicts took their toll, but Expo 58, in Brussels, was a return to outlandish form. Here, the atom was your friend, so much so that it was celebrated in the Atomium, nine atoms blown up – as it were – into a sculpture of hollow metallic spheres, the highest containing a restaurant suspended over the city. And if you liked a bit of modular design, Expo 67, in Montreal, was the one for you. Canada's pavilion was an upside-down pyramid; the US's was a huge dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, with a monorail that passed through it. Britain's effort was a gleaming white brutalist-style ziggurat by Basil Spence, the architect of Coventry Cathedral. It was one of many buildings that would later feature in sci-fi television series such as Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, where they looked at home among the spaceships and boiler suits. In case you're wondering, you can't just create your own Expo. You have to get it recognised by the Bureau International des Expositions, or BIE, one of those curious global bodies, like the World Bank or Fifa, which seemingly float above the inconvenience of everyday life. The BIE began with 12 member countries in 1928; today, there are 184, showing a shift away from the Great Power dynamics of the inter-war years to something truly international. And this isn't a toothless organisation. The New York World's Fair of 1964 was never officially recognised by the BIE, after some disastrous negotiations by Robert Moses, the city's all-powerful planner, who dismissed them as 'a bunch of clowns in Paris'. As a result of the BIE's snub, only six countries participated that year, the fair being dominated instead by domestic corporations. IBM's 'egg' was designed by the superstar architect Eero Saarinen and his design friends Charles and Ray Eames, who also provided an innovative 3D film experience shown on numerous oddly shaped screens: half funfair, half spy-movie brainwashing booth. Whether or not it had the official imprimatur, it was the very epitome of a mid-century Expo. Osaka's most recent Expo was in 1970, when it had a psychedelic hangover-from-the-1960s Yellow Submarine vibe. (A spherical concert hall inspired by the experimental music of Karlheinz Stockhausen? West Germany, take a bow.) But what of its 2025 extravaganza? The logo, a ring of red spots with what look like eyes, is the 1970 design come to life in the age of AI. The theme is 'Designing Future Society for Our Lives', which, we're told, 'makes individuals think how they want to live' – my immediate thought was of eating crisps on the sofa while watching Antiques Road Trip – 'and how they can maximise their potential'. (Er, maybe not.) The aim is to provoke discussion about how the post-pandemic world might reconstruct itself sustainably. As a result, the pavilions are rather more lightweight than some of the grandiose creations of the past. Britain's, designed by WOO Architects, is a rectangular box with walls of perforated aluminium panels, paying homage to the punchcards of the pioneering mathematician Ada Lovelace – though they're more immediately reminiscent of a small demountable Debenhams store. Many of the other designs resemble items of furniture from Wayfair blown up to improbable size. The Czechs' is the kind of chandelier you might find in the restaurant of a medium-sized provincial hotel; Singapore's is a large windowless ball; Japan's circular timber structure recalls the temporary stadium used for Abba Voyage (this is not a criticism). Meanwhile, Norman Foster's firm has produced such a sober, villagey design for Saudi Arabia that it threatens to allude to real life. In an Expo? Puh-lease. Bahrain's may be the most beautiful: the Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh has produced a kind of ghost ship with struts of wood. And just in case you were worried that Expos had given up on the James Bond dream, the whole show is contained in a vast wooden ring constructed on an artificial island. In today's unstable world, Expos connect us back not just to other periods of instability and conflict, but to a bubble of optimism that reality cannot burst. If we all lived in Expo-world, it would be a shortcut to a headache, sure. A kind of Las Vegas designed by school children; a place that defies logic and realism, and instead aims to be beautifully, pointlessly extraordinary. It might have begun as a form of Industrial Revolution showboating, but the modern Expo feels more Eurovision than Great Exhibition, a gloriously camp exercise in national rebranding, rather than a showcase of international subtleties. There's even an Expo museum in Shanghai, for the purpose of giving the city's old 2010 Expo buildings something to do. It's a retirement home for Expos, those mayflies of the global village. Let's hope that Osaka's will be one to remember. Expo 2025 runs in Osaka, Japan until October 13
BBC News
14-02-2025
- General
- BBC News
Somerleyton Hall's rare glasshouses saved by £120k grant
Glasshouses believed to have been created by the Crystal Palace designer Sir Joseph Paxton have received a £120,000 grant towards their restoration. The "rare survivors of Victorian innovation" are part of a Grade II* listed walled kitchen garden, built in about 1846 at Somerleyton Hall, in Somerleyton, glasshouses, which include two peach houses, were put on Historic England's At Risk register in November. The funds been awarded by the organisation. Somerleyton's head of gardens and conservation Simon Gaches said the news was "very exciting, not just to have safe and beautiful working glasshouses, but also to be able to share the history". Somerleyton Hall - which Historic England described as the "one of the finest Victorian stately homes in the country" - was owned by Sir Samuel Morton Peto, an engineer and railway pioneer, before it was bought by carpet manufacturer Sir Francis glasshouses, which are showing signs of structural vulnerability and brickwork decay, "form part of one of the finest Victorian kitchen gardens in England", it added. A charitable trust will be established to maintain and manage the building. The plans include restoring the peach houses as working plant houses, using the ridge and furrow glasshouses for educational activities and creating new spaces within the walled kitchen garden already has a keen group of 14 regular volunteers. Hugh Crossley, the 4th Baron Somerleyton, said: "We are indebted to the team at Historic England for the guidance, expertise, support and this vital grant that paves the way for the long-term restoration and care of our glass houses."Tony Calladine, Historic England's East of England regional director, said: "Their connection to Sir Joseph Paxton makes them particularly special. "This funding will help save these rare survivors of Victorian innovation for future generations to explore and enjoy." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
