Country Life 14 February 2024

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside.

Take another little piece of my heart

Carved spoon or bent coin, handkerchief or ribbon: how would you express your love, wonders Harry Pearson

The romance of the rose

With its velvety, softly scented depths, the red rose has long beguiled lovers. Charles Quest-Ritson falls under its spell

Thoroughly good eggs

Tom Parker Bowles savours the unctuous delights of caviar from the mother-daughter team at King’s Fine Foods, ethically farmed and utterly delicious

Taking the rough with the smooth

Famed for their loyalty, rough collies are happy finding hidden sheep, bounding up Munros or simply curling up with children. Katy Birchall meets Lassie

In the hat of the moment

Time was when every gentleman of every background wore a hat. It’s time to fall back in love with bowler, beret and bonnet, recommends John F. Mueller

Interiors

Amelia Thorpe admires the most stylish conservatories

Sir Karl Jenkins’s favourite painting

The composer chooses an ethereal Italian scene that literally reflects his own music

Behind the scenes at the cathedral

Fiona Reynolds explores the environs of St Albans in Hertfordshire, from the longest nave in Europe to the River Ver

A Georgian reinvention

With imagination and style, late-18th-century Marlwood Grange in Gloucestershire has been transformed into a family home fit for the 21st century, discovers Jeremy Musson

The good stuff

Hetty Lintell gets a handle on the most colourful handbags

Music to our ears

As the famous opera house at Glyndebourne, East Sussex, turns 90, the gardens are more glorious than ever. Tiffany Daneff admires a symphony of planting

More pudding, pease

Tom Parker Bowles tucks into the succulent, comforting suet pudding, an old favourite that deserves to return to our plates

More than a pretty face

Admired for his portrayal of dewy eyes and diaphanous fabrics, John Singer Sargent rose to the top of the portrait-painting world. Mary Miers follows his career from peripatetic childhood to Society favourite

And much more besides.