HOME & GARDEN
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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 […]
