Bitten by the bug

Take a good dollop of Victorian innovation, add a fistful of classics, season it liberally with creative genius and you’ll cook up the very British art of literary illustration. Carla Passino charts its history and discovers that it still thrives

Modern high streets are dotted with coffee chains, cafes and tea shops of all kinds, but in the late 19th century the tea shop was a groundbreaking innovation. A genteel alternative to bawdy pubs or t

The Tower at Vita’s home, Sissinghurst Castle ...

Have you ever been tempted to collect old, or perhaps contemporary, quilts? As with any collectable, rare and desirable examples can cost significant sums of money. However, despite an increase in pop

Originally a means of keeping a living record of garden plants, our 722 National Plant Collections–of everything from Abies to Zingiber –set the gold standard across the world. Charles Quest-Ritson meets some of the expert collection holders

For almost 30 years, Valerie Finnis was a distinguished and charismatic teacher at the Waterperry Horticultural school for Women, near Oxford, founded in 1932 by the fearsomely smocked and gaitered Be