Fully revised and updated with the best new cultivars The lush, sculptural hosta is loved by gardeners for its ability to both combine well with other plants and project a strong presence when planted alone. The New Encyclopedia of Hostas—the second edition of Diana Grenfell and Michael Shadrack's classic work—provides growth and cultivation information for seven hundred cultivated hostas. Detailed, easy-to-read descriptions include growing tips, recommendations for landscape use, and suggestions for companion plants. Clear cultivation advice is provided, including recommendations for hostas that succeed in challenging environments, such as the warmer regions of the United States. Captivating photographs show hostas up close and in a wide range of different garden situations.
The core of this encyclopedia is a fully illustrated collection of the world's finest hostas, with a full description and color photo for each of 750 plants.
Boasting diverse leaf shape, size, color, and texture, it is no wonder that hostas continue to reign as the most popular perennial plants in North America. Not only are they the supreme plant for shade, but they also can be used in the landscape either as striking specimen plantings or as accommodating companion plants. Few pests bother them, and little maintenance is required, making hostas even more attractive to busy gardeners. Each year a staggering number of new hostas are introduced. To assist gardeners and landscapers in selecting the right hosta for a particular situation, veteran plantswoman Diana Grenfell has teamed up with distinguished photographer Mike Shadrack in selecting 280 of the best hostas. Ranging from tried and true favorites to cutting edge newcomers bursting with potential, each plant has been handpicked for its superb performance in the landscape. An additional 545 hostas are briefly mentioned.
Hostas are irresistible. Their sculptural leaves and appealing textures make it difficult to stop at one, and it is easy to fill a garden with them. Help is at hand with this attractive guide to the popular new small hostas that take up less space and are ideally suited to container cultivation. They can be used on their own or with companion plants to make charming displays on the patio, porch, or even windowsill. Many small hostas are simply scaled-down versions of classic hostas, while others offer distinctly new attributes in terms of color, leaf shape, and patterning. Like full-size hostas, small hostas can be upright, flat, or cascading; there are varieties that are full of substance, and others that are fine and delicate; there are green ones, gold ones, blue ones, variegated ones, and splashed ones. Some are better garden plants than others, and a valuable function of this book is to showcase the very best of the new introductions. Photographs of the hostas in garden settings show how admirably they respond to imaginative display in a wide range of situations including waterside, woodland, and rock gardens. Beautifully illustrated and highly informative, this handpicked selection of diminutive hostas will inspire hobbyists and gardeners alike and provide inspiration for new planting schemes.
Fully revised and updated with the best new cultivars The lush, sculptural hosta is loved by gardeners for its ability to both combine well with other plants and project a strong presence when planted alone. The New Encyclopedia of Hostas—the second edition of Diana Grenfell and Michael Shadrack's classic work—provides growth and cultivation information for seven hundred cultivated hostas. Detailed, easy-to-read descriptions include growing tips, recommendations for landscape use, and suggestions for companion plants. Clear cultivation advice is provided, including recommendations for hostas that succeed in challenging environments, such as the warmer regions of the United States. Captivating photographs show hostas up close and in a wide range of different garden situations.
Lady Diana Cooper was a star of the early twentieth stage, screen and social scene. This first instalment of her sparkling autobiography tells of her upbringing, her beautiful artistic mother and aristocratic father, her debut into high society and the glittering parties - 'dancing and extravagance and lashing of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses' - which were interrupted with the outbreak of the First World War. This volume ends with Diana's marriage to the 'love of her life', diplomat and politician Duff Cooper.
In Missing Parts, a powerful and thought-provoking novel, the unbreakable bond of friendship is tested when Lacey Pierce encounters her childhood best friend, Mimi Faraday, in a Boston homeless shelter. The story delves into the complex factors that contribute to resilience in the face of mental illness and life’s challenges, exploring why some individuals thrive while others struggle. Lacey and Mimi’s story begins in a charming New England town during the transformative 1960s and 70s, where they attend a prestigious prep school. After Mimi’s wedding to Chapin, the couple embarks on a life of community service in Newfoundland, while Lacey joins the Peace Corps in Africa, all young, idealistic, and full of promise. Fast forward to the summer of 1995, when Lacey’s world is shaken by the discovery of Mimi among the homeless at a soup kitchen in a Boston cathedral. After a quarter-century in Newfoundland, Mimi has returned to Boston, destitute and living in a halfway house for abused women in Cambridge. The novel masterfully traces the parallel journeys of these two women over the intervening decades, revealing the twists and turns that led them to their current circumstances. Missing Parts is a standalone fiction that explores the enduring power of friendship, the impact of life’s choices, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Through Lacey and Mimi’s story, readers are invited to contemplate the complex interplay of factors that shape our lives and the lives of those we hold dear.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction • A sweeping and beautifully rendered exploration of home and yearning, following the fracturing of a family upon the demise of its patriarch "Each character here is richly and deeply drawn...This is a novel that encourages us to stand in life’s burning doorways, and to think long before we walk away or walk through.” —New York Times In the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, consuming Grenfell Tower and many of the lives within it. Across town, an earlier spark has caught fire. A cigarette left burning in an ashtray. A table strewn with post-it reminders and old newspapers. And one Cornelius Winston Pitt—estranged husband, complicated dad, and Pitt family patriarch—takes his final breaths alone. These twin tragedies open Diana Evans’s A House for Alice, an aching portrait of a family of women shaken by loss and searching for closure. At the novel’s center is Alice herself, the Pitt matriarch who, after fifty years in England, now longs to live out her final years in her homeland of Nigeria. Her three daughters are torn on the issue of whether she stays or goes, and while youngest sibling Melissa also grapples with the embers of her own failed relationship, the Pitt family’s foundational pillars—of trust, love, and cultural identity—begin to crack. Intimately drawn and set against a fraught political backdrop, yet equally full of hope, humor, and humanity, A House for Alice traces the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and uncovers the secrets we keep from those closest to us.
Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. Formidable and manipulative, her attentions to the king brought her wealth, power, and status. Her daughter Violet Trefusis had a long tempestuous affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, during which Vita left her husband and two sons to travel abroad with Violet. It was a liaison that threatened the fabric of Violet's social world, and her passion and recalcitrance in pursuit of it pitted her against her mother and society. From memoirs, diaries, and letters, Diana Souhami portrays this fascinating and intense mother/daughter relationship in Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Her story of these women, their lovers, and their lovers' mothers, highlights Edwardian - and contemporary - duplicity and double standards and goes to the heart of questions about sexual freedoms.
Edith Cavell was born on 4th December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, and shot in Brussels on 12th October 1915 by the Germans for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border. Following a traditional village childhood in 19th century England, Edith worked as a governess in the UK and abroad, before training as a nurse in London in 1895. To Edith, nursing was a duty, a vocation, but above all a service. By 1907, she had travelled most of Europe and become matron of her own hospital in Belgium, where, under her leadership, a ramshackle hospital with few staff and little organization became a model nursing school. When war broke out, Edith helped soldiers to escape the war by giving them jobs in her hospital, finding clothing and organizing safe passage into Holland. In all, she assisted over two hundred men. When her secret work was discovered, Edith was put on trial and sentenced to death by firing squad. She uttered only 130 words in her defense. A devout Christian, the evening before her death, she asked to be remembered as a nurse, not a hero or a martyr, and prayed to be fit for heaven. When news of Edith's death reached Britain, army recruitment doubled. After the war, Edith's body was returned to the UK by train and every station through which the coffin passed was crowded with mourners. Diana Souhami brings one of the Great War's finest heroes to life in this biography of a hardworking, courageous and independent woman.
This book Food in a Planetary Emergency is a timely overview of the current food systems and the required transformations to respond to the challenges of climate change, population pressures, biodiversity loss and use of natural resources, such as soils, water and phosphorus. This book takes a planetary health perspective which explores the links between natural systems and human wellbeing implying that there is need for united actions to achieve important environmental and population health co-benefits. This book outlines that the foundation of planetary health is sustainability. It addresses environment and climate change emergency as a global agenda, however, emphasises the urgency of the sustainability perspective which integrates a wide spectrum of issues that require integrated solutions to offer better prospects for humanity. This book drives this argument further through the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) where food is not just SDG2 but transcends all 17 goals. This book tackles the problems of food production and consumption at a global, industry and individual level linking it to topics related to the natural environment, climate change, waste, marketing, new ways of producing food and providing alternative proteins, mitigating non-communicable diseases, flexitarianism and the role of Generation Z in the emerging dietary choices. This book benefits readers with understanding the importance and intricacy of their dietary choices at a point in time when our planet is facing an emergency triggered by long-term dependence on fossil fuels and artificial fertilisers but also by the ways we have provided food. However, this book also delivers the message that safeguarding and sustaining planetary health is possible.
Why do Brits call their flag a "Jack"? How did the leek become a symbol of Wales? Does the Tube run 24/7? Who was the Widow of Windsor? Can you take part in a coronation? What was a Greenwood marriage? Was the Giant's Causeway built by an Irish giant? Which British literary figures won the Nobel Prize for Literature? How can you register a record in the Guinness Book of Records? What is the emergency phone number in the UK? Providing well-organised material on the UK's history, geography, literature, royalty and society, Diana Cordea's "Britain Revealed" is a condensed and easy to read book about all things British. It is an excellent user-friendly reference for prospective visitors to the UK, Anglophiles, or readers wishing to know and understand popular British culture. Most importantly, "Britain Revealed" is aimed at teachers of English as a foreign language, who wish to make their English and optional classes more exciting. The plethora of information provided in this comprehensive teaching aid can be adapted to various levels of language proficiency and can be used in various classroom activities. Focusing on essential questions concerning British culture and civilisation, this volume is also attractive to learners, who will thus have the opportunity of brushing up on their English in a versatile and practical way.
England, 1805 Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope is ruined and everyone knows it. Back in Town for the first season since her downfall, Willa plans to remain firmly on the shelf, assuming only fortune hunters will want her now. Instead she focuses on her unique tea blends, secretly supporting a coffee house which employs poor women and children. If her clandestine involvement in trade is discovered, she'll be ruined. Again. No one is more shocked by Willa's lack of quality suitors than the newly minted Duke of Hartwell. Having just returned from India, the dark duke is instantly attracted to the mysterious wallflower. His pursuit is hampered by the ruthless Earl of Bellingham, who once jilted Will and is now determined to reclaim her. Caught between the clash of two powerful men, a furious Willa refuses to concede her independence to save her reputation. But will she compromise her heart? Each book in the Accidental Peers series is a standalone story that can be enjoyed out of order. Series Order: #1 Seducing Charlotte #2 Tempting Bella #3 Compromising Willa #4 Engaging the Earl
This last volume of Lady Diana Cooper's memoirs covers the years of the Second World War and its aftermath, when her husband Duff Cooper served as Minister of Information and then in various diplomat posts around the world. We accompany the Coopers on their travels from the Dorchester Hotel during the breathless days of the Blitz, to a happy sojourn farming in Sussex, to Singapore and Algiers and eventual retirement to France, all told with Diana's unique perspective and enchanting style.
An extraordinary life in the shadows of war and a Century in the making. Diana Mackintosh came of age to the drone of sirens alerting the people of Malta to the arrival of relentless flights of belligerent German and Italian menace – the bombers she first imagined as a swarm of black flies, pests that stung and cursed her Mediterranean homeland. The three-year onslaught never took a day off; it was endless, but supplies were not. The hope of a shipment of high protein became an ongoing dream. The only time Diana wasn’t hungry was when she slept. Her story of that time, and in 2020 she is one of the very few remaining who experienced it first-hand, makes it clear why Malta was collectively awarded the George Cross, the highest British civilian honour for heroism. Of course, as she argues, no one was trying to be heroic, but somehow they helped reverse the fortunes of the Second World War in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Now at the age of 101, Diana is also celebrated for her children’s achievements — she helped her eldest son, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, and worked as his unpaid secretary — and for a life in the wings of British cinema, Hollywood and theatreland. Spitfire Girl recounts Diana’s extraordinary life, more than a century in the making.
Changing Women, Changing History is a bibliographic guide to the scholarship, both English and French, on Canadian's women's history. Organized under broad subject headings, and accompanied by author and subject indices it is accessible and comprehensive.
We live in a world that most regrettably, despite its potential in terms of beauty and variety, has been and is still dominated by multiple outbreaks of violence. For the last hundred years and more, people have been forced into situations in which they have lost everything that they had held dear, often including their mental health.
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