Kelly’s country Kelly’s country


Spring flowers lift the spirits. Flowers are available from around the world at any time of year, but nothing beats the ones that are springing up in the garden and the countryside now. These early blooms, from the


violets in the hedgerows to the daffodils in the garden, are vital for insects and bumblebees. The first of the queen bumblebees are emerging from their underground hibernation, and they are in need of nectar to stock up. I love to grow showy double flowers but have plumped for singles recently because they provide far more pollen and nectar. Just as engaging as the


flowers are the names. Arum maculatum? Or ‘Cuckoo Pint’ to you? I know it as ‘Lords and Ladies’ and love it for its glossy, exotic appearance. It has a host of other names, apparently more than any other British flower, and most of them refer to one thing: Sex! How about Cardamine pratensis? To me that’s Lady’s Smock, named in Tudor times for its resemblance to that very thing. Another name, Cuckoo Flower, was coined because it flowers with the first call of the cuckoo.


Primula veris? The cowslip.


From three cultivated plants purchased six years ago, I now have hundreds in our garden and they are a real boon to the bumblebees. And the name? It comes from the Old English for cowshit! Where there’s muck, there are flowers.


Kelly Holman Kelly@thehopefultraveller.co.uk 16


Different types


Old fashioned type-writers may be cumbersome to store, but they could be about to become a savvy purchase for collectors.


n the London Science Museum there are 200 typewriters. In case there are some readers who still use them, perhaps one should explain that these are not being used by 200 secretaries, but curated as exhibits from a bygone age when their invention and use so transformed office work that women (known as ‘type-writers’) were for the first time able to earn their own livings and be independent.


I


When this happened, some old fogeys and control freaks were outraged. In 1885 the New York YWCA offered typing lessons for women, causing an outcry that it would lead to women being hedonistic and selfish, even immoral. If only! My faithful Olympia portable, £18 new in the 60s, earned its lodgings (it was kept in the oven for easy access) for 25 years. It never made copy disappear nor behaved unpredictably. When using a computer became inevitable, it was retired to a box under a pile of clothes. Getting rid of it would be unthinkable, but typewriters do take space. And while some of the early ones might be decorative with painted gold flourishes on black it would take a large room to keep it merely as an ornament.


In other words, old typewriters are not really collectable. But that does not stop some people, especially in America, from collecting them and this would be a good time to start because, as a glance through eBay shows, old typewriters of numerous styles and makes are now going cheap. This will not always be the case. They are what dealers call ‘sleepers’. Not only did typewriters give employment to millions of women,


by Yvonne Thomas


they were cleverly and ingeniously designed during a vibrant period of invention and competitive manufacturing in Britain, the USA and Germany, and they transformed office practice. Then quite quickly and suddenly, they disappeared. The last typewriter to be


manufactured in Britain was made in North Wales at the end of last year: an electronic Brother. It was donated to the Science Museum which already had an exact copy of the first typing


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