Leslie's Blog

St George’s Day and the countryside has never looked better. The air is cleaner, the racket of cars, lorries and planes has almost vanished and nature is taking control ...

British houses and gardens have never, I suspect, been tidier. The lockdown removes all the excuses about not having enough time to go round making rooms neater ...

Columbine Hall achieved a major step forward when a photograph of the 1390s jettied house, surrounded by its moat, made the front cover of Country Life ...

April has been a good month here at Columbine Hall. We have just got our copy of the new Suffolk:West volume of The Buildings of England, compiled by Dr James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner ...

If you look on the new Invitation to View website, you will see a photograph of our most recent painting - a watercolour showing 13 of Hew’s antique keys in realistic detail ...

The opening season is about to start on May 1. This means, after months of untidiness, we have to get the house organised for visitors. Actually, not that hard after several years’ practice but what gets out of hand are the books ...

Houses where people live, as opposed to the National Trust or statelies which never show you the real living rooms, change the whole time. We buy new things, we change the colours of the walls, we move the furniture around ...

When we bought seed for the new flowery meadow to be sewn in the New Orchard, the website told us that the annual mixture of seeds would produce a brilliant show from mid-May to the cold weather of November ...

ow about this? The Independent has voted my recent book, A Book for Cooks published this autumn by Merrell, one of the 50 best books out this season ...

Columbine Hall has a very large chimney, built, we think, in Tudor times. Our builder once reckoned that it might be made up of no fewer than 10,000 small, hand-made bricks (this does seem unlikely.) ...