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February 4, 2016 Gardens: plants that live on air
Something in the air: Tillandsia plants have specialised hair-like structures on their leaves that act like sponges. Photograph: Alamy James Wong Over the past 20 years, a growing body of scientific evidence has suggested that simply being around plants can have an important impact on mental and physical health. Even while sitting at your desk, […]
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February 4, 2016 Gardens: all hail the vulcan palm
Branching out: the stately vulcan palm. Photograph: Joel Sartore/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative James Wong For houseplant obsessives like me, offerings in garden centres can be a bit samey. In the face of two decades of declining sales, retailers are sticking to an ever-shrinking palette of safe options. But every so often you come across a […]
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February 4, 2016 Gardens: chamomile lawn
Gardening can be expensive. Even if you side-step the ready-grown plants at the garden centre and start from scratch, some seeds can cost as much as £1 each (think F1 hybrid tomatoes). Others, such as the tiny dust-like seeds of begonias, can literally sell for more than their weight in gold. For plant geeks on […]
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February 4, 2016 Gardens: grow a mini grove
As an urban gardener with a tiny plot to play with, poring over the fruit tree sections of the gardening catalogues can verge on heartbreaking. But if you long to fit more in than the textbooks recommend, a novel technique adopted from commercial agriculture called high-density planting might be your salvation. The idea is simple: […]
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February 4, 2016 Gardens: drug therapy for plants
With spring just around the corner, now is a great time to get an early start on taking hardwood cuttings, like figs and roses, as well as sowing seeds of long-season crops, such as chillies and aubergines. If you are keen to up your chances in the dark days of February, there is an easy […]
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HOME & GARDEN 
February 4, 2016 Flower power: the gardens that caused modern art to bloom
In Seebüll, in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein, not far from the Danish border, the wind ruffles the reeds of the low-lying marshes reclaimed from the sea. The trees bend on the horizon like crouching animals. A low autumnal sun gleams over barrel-shaped red barns. All is quiet. The man who made Monet: how […]
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February 4, 2016 Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse review – ravishing visions
Renoir painted Monet painting his garden in 1873. The two pictures hang next to each other at the start of this exhibition. With their abundance of red dahlias and creamy clouds, their blue-shuttered houses and soft summer light, each painting looks remarkably like the other – except that where Renoir portrays his friend, Monet is […]
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February 4, 2016 Are these PoMo palaces really worth saving?
Postmodern architecture in Britain closely matched the career of Margaret Thatcher. Its first flickerings were in the mid-70s, about the time she became leader of the opposition, followed by the style’s first substantial works during her first term as prime minister. By the time she left office in 1990, PoMo was on its way out, […]
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February 4, 2016 A concrete future
For me the most exciting building in any town is always the brutalist one. It is architecture on heat: it struts, invites you to rub its porridgey skin and goggle at its projections. There is a reason that music videos are shot in them, rather than in drab supermarkets. Over the past couple of years […]
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NEWS 
February 3, 2016 Business Books Are Virtually Worthless Without This
I love reading business books. You love reading business books. But all that reading is nearly worthless if you don’t apply what you’ve learned. And unless you’re writing something down, you’re not applying most of what you learn when you read the latest book by, say, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Collins, Clayton Christensen or even […]
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CLOTHING 
February 1, 2016 Kendall and Kylie Jenner Debut Their Clothing Line! Check Out the 12 Cutest Looks From the Collection
Kendall and Kylie Jenner are staking a claim in the fashion world with their new line, named — what else? — Kendall + Kylie. The ready-to-wear pieces retails for anywhere between $68-498 and will be available in “luxury retailers” like Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue in February. “It has been both of our dreams […]
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COMPUTERS 
February 1, 2016 Ex machina: are computers to blame for market jitters?
Photo Credit: pixabay 7.2K Total Views Recent turbulence in the share markets has caused some experts to point the finger of culpability at computerised High-Frequency Trading. There are few complaints about HFT when computers push share markets up, but in the ebbing tide of today’s markets, it’s blamed both for exaggerating the share market dive […]