Country Life
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The NGS was hit by Covid-19 last summer, but the signs suggest that the 2021 National Garden Scheme openings should go ahead as usual. Annunciata Elwes takes a look at some of the highlights.
The return of National Garden Scheme (NGS) openings is definitely a factor in our hopes for a summer far better than 2020’s, which brought about a hiatus for the scheme for the first time in nearly 90 years. This year’s 3,500-strong leafy throng includes 358 newcomers, of which five are returning favourites.
In Shropshire, Elizabethan Pitchford Hall was one of the original openers in 1927 and has not been seen for 29 years. ‘When Pitchford Hall was reunited with the Pitchford estate in 2016, we moved back into a house that had essentially been abandoned for a quarter of a century,’ explains owner James Nason.
Country Life
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The scene of both Odysseus’s marriage bed and Queen Victoria’s tea parties, treehouses have long enchanted us. Bronwen Riley explores the dizzy heights of tree-top living.
It is hard to think of a dwelling better suited to these socially distanced times than a treehouse. There has been a huge surge in demand for glamping, but treehouses have, quite literally, always been at a higher level of experience.
Less the preserve of the backwoodsman than of the aesthete and aristocrat, they have, throughout history, more often been built for the pleasure or repose of parents than for the amusement of their children.