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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.) ...

We have 83 tomato plants, nearly all in our polytunnel. After a dismal show in July and early August, they have suddenly produced a kilo a day ...

I have just finished writing A Book for Cooks (published by Merrell this autumn). This is a list of my 101 favourite cookery books (I collect them.) ...

This year we decided to plant a pictorial meadow - pictorial because, though it looks similar to a wild flower meadow, the flowers are not all wild. We were just in time ...

The chives and wild garlic are up and so is the sorrel (buckler leaved, like little medieval shields). Apparently, sorrel is so short-lived that you will never find it in a supermarket ...