A clean page
A clean page
...a great face oil, a mad Englishman, a superlative chocolate and the story behind The Dark Side of The Moon.
January! A month I have come to love for its freshly laundered promise and optimism. As much as you may loathe a resolution and the incessant talk of them, it’s hard to resist a moment’s reflection on what the last year brought and what the next might have in store. And after the hedonism of December, I relish the collective abstinence of January, the condoned anti-social quiet and gentle pace.
In amongst my lengthy, vague and hard to quantify list of resolutions is a promise to be a bit more consistent with this newsletter, and within that comes an acknowledgement that time continues to not be on my side. So like squats, Spanish vocab and weeding, I’m going to aim for little and more often. In that vein, here is a 2024-style bijou TTAP featuring an article I wrote for the wonderful Up With The Lark’s Christmas Paper and a list of Plant-Based Joy to help you hunker.
Plant-based joy in January
A plant-based night oil that ticks every box – smells good, looks good, is good and doesn’t break the bank. Surprisingly hard to find, but luckily for you, I’ve done it. If like me, you judge books by covers, top marks awarded for packaging I want to keep and that is also refillable. They also have lots of other lovely looking potions with pithy product names which I intend to diligently work my way through. I started with Dream Dream Dream and dreamy dreamy dreamy it is.
Truly, (I know everyone says that but really and truly), the best chocolate in the world, that is now available for delivery from Vietnam to your dining table. Each single origin bar is made with the cacao of a single province to capture the character of each terroir. Founders Sam and Vincent pioneered a new kind of chocolate industry in Vietnam which puts the producers at the heart of the business and Wonka-style, built chocolate factories to match. We were neighbours in Saigon, and it’s such a joy to see Marou find its rightful place on the world stage. Also, check out the packaging.
For anyone thinking about setting up a school Gardening Club this year, maybe this is the prod you need. A very inspiring webinar with six speakers talking about the wisdom they’ve gleaned from setting up Gardening Clubs for kids. I’m in.
Thank you Lucky Saint for making dry Jan a little damp (we tried them all and this is the closest you’ll get to a real life delicious pint) and White Mausu for bringing the party to every bowl of veg
An inspiring and entirely replicable model from an incredible city
A brilliant film that made me question what creativity is in the digital age
Blood oranges – name something more beautiful or appreciated on a grey Jan day? I (bloody) love them, and have been going full tutti frutti with beetroot, hazelnuts and sheep’s cheese salads because #Jan but what I really want to make is something like this with inappropriately enormous dollop of thick double cream.
As if I needed another reason to go to Mexico – the bonkers story of an eccentric Englishman’s quest to create his own kind of paradise “a patch of picturesque insanity” where “MC Escher drawings have come to life and mated with Frida Kahlo’s paintings”.
A dear friend gave me this book for Christmas and despite its name, it’s not just for Christmas – a paean to winter in its glacial entirety. Best enjoyed by a fire or under a heavy blanket.
Happy hunkering xx
Beautiful Mess
At a garden conference in November I came across a wonderful phrase “messy ecosystems, orderly frames”. The title of a research paper (bear with me), it describes how landscape design that improves the ecology isn’t appreciated unless recognisable garden norms are adhered to alongside it – i.e. you can design a landscape that is brilliant for the birds and bees, so long as it is contained within an orderly frame - there needs to be some visual cue that what you’re looking at isn’t just unfettered chaos. Make it pretty.
Ecosystems are messy, tangled webs of life, a labyrinth of mutual give and take and un-sentimental biology. All very well in the actual wild (whatever that is) but in a garden, it’s generally not what people ask for. There needs to be some semblance of order alongside the chaos, a sign that some taming has happened, and that we’re still in control, even if that is a bit of a delusion.
Sounds like a fair deal to me. What I like about this is the admission that beauty and aesthetics are important – maybe even essential. For a long time, the assumption was that what is good, doesn’t look good, and what does look good, probably isn’t that good. But hurrah, at long last, wanting things to look good is not a crime. Beauty is a vital to engagement – if we don’t feel moved emotionally, we are not going to be invested in protecting it. As the wonderful garden designer Alison Jenkins says – beauty is yield. We should be actively designing to harvest beauty as it’s an essential carrot after the toil of creating. But the deal is, you’ve got to have some mess too. And in winter the mess can feel a bit much. The party’s over, the flowers have long since departed and we’re left with collapsed, denuded, sorry-looking plants that you don’t often see on Instagram.
But the mess is where the magic happens, and we have all got a bit uptight about it. The mess of a winter garden is nature in full fettle. It’s the stage in the year where, like us, things retreat and hibernate, preserving and recouping energy levels, on the surface operating at bare minimum. But below deck, the engines are whirring preparing for the gargantuan task of doing it all again come spring. All those wild and frayed edges are the perfect winter retreat for all the bugs and birds that are not able to fly off to the tropics for the winter months. So although it’s not so obviously attractive, it’s absolutely vital that we allow this stage of the cycle to happen. What you just need is an orderly frame.
An orderly frame could arrive in the form of a lovely loose mound of something shaggy and touch-able like Phillyrea angustifolia or Pittosporum tenuifolium (both evergreen, not to be clipped too tightly). A generous dome or two of these will provide heft and form to balance unruly nature doing her thing next door. Or for those who like a costume change, a handsome dollop of Beech or Hornbeam on a lawn or mid-border will do the same, but give a lovely autumn-winter display turning russet brown before eventually dropping their leaves in early spring to make way for that very particular and irresistible shade of new spring green.
Hedges are another underutilised tool that can be deployed to bequeath order – tall ones instead of a fence are an ecosystem unto themselves, low ones act like punctuation in the garden, and evergreen ones create a lovely dark backdrop for seasonal planting. For those that fancy themselves a dab hand with the shears, you can clip them into shapes – undulating curved hedges or even eccentric topiary teapots (probably not for beginners).
A frame might also be a lovely tree, who has been chosen for her gorgeous curves not her more obvious blooms. The silhouette of a tree is one of the few things that benefits from the scrutiny of cold winter light, and often makes the perfect frame – or focal point - to an otherwise slightly dishevelled garden. No garden is too small for a tree, and it’s the best low-maintenance, high-impact option out there.
Much like a bare face or an unfurnished home, the structure becomes important when things are stripped back. Hard-landscaping is much more visible in the winter than in summer when you have a haze of Cosmos to distract you, so use it to create some aesthetically pleasing order in the winter months. Natural materials are not only better for the planet and everyone who lives on it, but they look better too – they will age gracefully and take on a patina that neither money nor time can buy. They don’t have to be expensive - a redbrick path in herringbone is a lovely thing to look at through the grey of winter, as is a hand-made hazel obelisk, even without the clouds of sweet peas.
Gardens are a big opportunity in the UK - they make up nearly 2 million acres of land across the country – a significant chunk that together could be a giant tapestry of mini-messy, healthy and beautiful ecosystems. And if we can find some orderly frames, allowing nature (and the “mess” that comes with it) to flourish, requires little or no compromise from anyone.