In this bumper 140 page issue no 5 of the BoBT magazine Nicky Haslam finds his maximalist heaven in the East Anglian Fen-lands and Luke Edward Hall takes his Olympus camera on a busman’s holiday to Renishaw Hall, seat of the luminously aesthetic Sitwell sibs, Will Le Clerc opens the doors of his jewel-box of a house on the Kentish coast and Charlie McCormick and Ben Pentreath post picture postcards from the Orkneys.
Alec Cobbe’s cabinet of curiosities jostles with memorials of Prospect Cottage and Derek Jarman’s magical practices, a remembrance by his friend Simon Costin. Rupert White explains how to tell a fairy from a pagan.
Selina Blow leads a whistle-stop tour of her ancestral home, Hilles House, and confides the story of her extraordinary life in fashion (Luke Edward Hall takes the pictures). Howard Sooley shares images and memorials of his dear dead friend the plantswoman Valerie Finnis, who snapped portraits of ‘Garden People’ like nobody else’s.
The Land Gardeners preach their gospel of soil. John Alexander Skelton shoots his new collection XX in Spitalfields
In Upper Onny, Shropshire organic farmer Diana Moores herds the cattle and saves the local pub – and way out west, near the Lands End the Eddy brothers still farm between sea and standing stones, just as their grandfather did, Fairy-tale-teller Sylvia Townsend Warner rounds it all off with a story of horrid enchantment, introduced by Jason Goodwin.
