Tea at Trianon: The Gardens at Ready Token House

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 12, 2022

The Gardens at Ready Token House

From Country Life:

Retaining the Arts-and-Crafts elements of a 1920s garden, the owners have added a sympathetic new terrace, as well as returning the surrounding fields to meadow, finds George Plumptre. Photos by Mimi Connolly. Recently, there have been quite fanciful ideas circulating about rewilding. If you believe some people, in the not-too-distant future, tracts of the British countryside could look like a mixture of the western US and the African savannah, with wolves, lynx and bison emerging from dense forests, rivers dammed into lakes by families of beavers and swathes of grassland and scrub bush populated with bustards, cranes and wild boar.
At Ready Token House in Gloucestershire, Mark and Tabitha Mayall have introduced an altogether gentler style of rewilding, creating the perfect habitat for a host of native wildflowers and a range of small creatures — many endangered — in particular butterflies.

When they bought the property in 2015, to one side of the house and garden was some 60 acres of sheep pasture. They negotiated with the tenant farmer to stop the sheep grazing and returned the whole area to permanent meadow, where a rich array of wildflowers has rapidly established itself.
Ready Token’s elevated position is confirmed by the spectacular views to the southeast, which, on a clear day, reveal White Horse Hill 30 miles away. It also means that the not-too-fertile soil over underlying Cotswold Jurassic limestone is an ideal base for wildflower meadows, naturally limiting grass density and allowing for a wide variety of both grasses and wildflowers to get established and thrive. The hands-off management regime of recent years has brought spectacular results, with both the variety of plants and insects, and the quantities of individual ones increasing dramatically. (Read more.)