What we think of as the quintessential English cottage garden style — mixed herbaceous borders and some pomp and circumstance, and yes, by that we can infer a bit of Elgar and Victoria sponge) — the type of garden praised and replicated across Britain, and adhered to here by a certain type of Irish mindset and the open-garden brigade — is not so English at all.

THE anniversary of a great Welsh naturalist looms; Alfred Russel Wallace died on Nov 7, 1913. The ‘father of biogeography’, independently of Darwin, hit on the Principle of Natural Selection and discovered the ‘line’ through Southeast Asia which bears his name.

Richard Collins looks at Darwin’s forgotten precursors

HARDERWIJK is on the edge of the Veluwemeer, the long neck of the Zuiderzee, at the dead centre of the Netherlands.