Bringing a little colour to your life each day - with six things that delight, inform and entertain.
The University of Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest botanic garden in Great Britain and one of the oldest scientific gardens in the world. The garden was founded on July 25th 1621 as a physic garden growing plants for medicinal research.
Pantomime has its roots in 'Commedia dell'Arte', a 16th-century Italian entertainment which used dance, music, tumbling, acrobatics and featured a cast of mischievous stock characters.
Born in 1913, Ralph Hammond Innes was a British novelist who wrote over 30 novels - usually thrillers or adventure stories with interesting and often exotic settings.
Windmills are known to have been used to grind corn in Britain for some 800 years, though they are believed to have originated in the Middle East. It is uncertain how their use spread to Britain, but it is thought the idea might have been brought back by the Crusaders, or that they were an adaptation of Roman water mills. They steadily became familiar structures within the UK.
British theatres revere the tradition of the theatre cat - though now a disappearing one. As rather unusual workplaces, in use for much longer hours during the week than most offices, there has often been provision of residential quarters for the theatre manager. They have frequently been accompanied by a resident feline, charged with keeping the mouse population down.
A beautiful avenue of beech trees, planted by the local landowning family in the eighteenth century, has provided the legacy known as the Dark Hedges of County Antrim - a somewhat eerie landscape to be found near Ballymoney in Northern Ireland.
Six things to delight and entertain you every day.