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Hall Farm Cottage
Their English Country Cottages I instantly fell in love with the sash windows, the long path to the front door, the enclosed garden and the seclusion of the cottage Eighteen months before Anna and her partner Andrew had sold their respective houses and started looking for a home together, Anna had spotted this gem of a cottage but dismissed the cottage as out of her price range. Fortunately when they…
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Cosmic Cosmos
This is one of my favourite Summer blooms and even better, it’s one of the easiest flowers to grow from seed. Also, they grow densely and have a good vase life. It’s always the flower I recommend people giving a go, and now is the time to start thinking about growing them. I therefore thought it would be useful to summarise how I grow mine. How do you grow them? I usually…
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Lucy Hoyle Cooks…Wild Garlic and Spinach Soup
When I told my daughter (aged 7…) what recipe I was doing this week for Rebecca, she looked at me with such disdain I thought I had some of the soup attractively dripping from my mouth-but no. Apparently soup is reeeaaalllyy boring Mummy, why aren’t I doing a more exciting recipe like normal!? Well, I started, this has seasonal ingredients in…and she was gone. I had bored her with my…
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The Old Forge Cottage
Their English Country Cottages A real labour of love and one we thought we understood when the 57 page survey came back on the house but looking back now I think we were blindsided by the beauty! Five years ago serial renovators Amanda and her husband Niall decided that they had one last project left in them. Enter The Old Forge cottage, dating back to to app. 1425 with dead…
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Embracing Evergreens
One of the things I love about Instagram is the ability to be able to look back through my pictures and see what my garden looked like in previous years. While Spring and Summer is when the garden really bursts into activity, I love the slow decline and the stillness that Autumn and Winter brings. Structural plants really come into their own throughout the Winter months, and I believe them to be an…
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Risotto with crispy chorizo, red pepper, spinach and feta
Risotto is an absolute favourite in our house. One of my pantry staples is a bag of arborio rice. Risotto is a dish that you can basically throw anything at, conjuring up a delicious bowl of creamy tasty rice from whatever is in the fridge, which is exactly how this recipe came about. These are all flavours that we know work: chorizo and red pepper, spinach garlic and then the…
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Welcome To My English Country Cottage
In May 2020 our little thatched cottage was featured in Period Living Magazine. It was the culmination of 7 years of creating a family home with my “effortless rural style” – I have taken this as a positive comment on my interior design style rather than a reference to the lack of housekeeping, muddy wellies and occasional strange smell and have created a website to write about interiors, gardening, recipes…
