February 2023
Acacia - Shop Bought Treats - Courtyards - Morocco - Quick Links
Acacia
It gets to this time of year and my eyes feel starved of colour. I’m all for celebrating seasons and make it my business to find beauty in the desaturated slightly desolate palette of a British winter, but come the end of Feb and my retinas are sore from straining.
In the same way, my body pines for the bracing pep of those heavenly blood oranges that arrive just at the right time, deep in the murk of January, my eyes gallop greedily towards colour in these twilight days of winter. The brash yolky yellow of those early daffodils is enough to make you squint, but so cheering are they, you forgive their gaudy naivety. Acacia dealbata is another who at any other time of year, I would cruelly strike off as too garish, a bit vulgar, hard to find a friend for. But at the end of Feb, in a vase or spied out a window bejewelling the crown of a tree in a cloud of unapologetic golden cheer, it’s like an intravenous hit of sunshine. Plus I have a bit of a soft spot for Acacia, a vast genus of plants in the Mimosoideae family, a few of which have played small but memorable cameos in my life.
Acacia is a four-trick pony often delivering on flowers, foliage, fruit and wood. Flowers vary from the plumes of yellow described above, to altogether less brash lthistle-like lilac buds, to clouds of deep crimson.
Acacia fruits are things of great beauty – they are long, snakey, sculptural creatures and look entirely belonging to another world. The over-sized sculptural seed pods dry and split, revealing the relief of perfectly formed seed beds within. In Vietnam, children use unopened pods as rattles, and I would collect them to use as ornaments and table decorations. Such is my love for them, that my mother had one cast in bronze for my husband and I for a wedding present, and it remains one of my most treasured possessions. Collected in Vietnam, cast in Cornwall it now lives on our mantlepiece in Somerset (it also once doubled as a weapon – that thankfully I didn’t have to use - when burgled in the dead of night with no land-line and a four-month old baby sleeping next door).
The leaves of an Acacia are its style signifier – tiny little things in immaculate pairs lined up in leaflets along a main stem, like a feather that flitters. En masse the effect is shimmery and soft, but with a density and grandeur to it - the overall leaf can be quite big, giving it heft, but little slithers of light get through the leaflets, giving it shimmer. I know this because I spent a lot of time lying on my back in a garden in Saigon looking at exactly this, pondering my place in the universe.
It was shortly after the birth of my first son and we were living in Vietnam. Thousands of miles away from home and very uncomfortable in my new role as mother to a small child, I found a yoga class for new mums and basically attended for the bit at the end where we lay on our back and stared at the trees. There was an incredible Acacia catechu that swayed high above and lots of banana palms that had a wonderful chattering rattle when the wind blew. Lying under a tree remains a deeply comforting and calming go-to when feeling unmoored, banana palms optional.
But there is more! Not satisfied with providing wonderful fruit, foliage and flowers, I recently discovered that the hypnotic Acacia catechu of early motherhood fame, is indeed the source of cutch, a dye that wound up in my garden at Chelsea last year. It comes from the wood which is steeped in water until a syrupy liquid emerges and is used to make rich browns, rusts and oranges. We used it to dye some of the fabric panels at the back of the garden, panels which are in the process of being made into quilted canvases for my dining room.
Sometimes it feels like plants find you. A plant I was entirely ambivalent to 15 years ago, now occupies prime real estate in my memory, my home and my imagination. It’s the window to periods of my life I am both glad are over, but also feel deep nostalgia for. And importantly it’s in season, which my eyes are enormously grateful for.
Shop-bought treats
Like everyone else, I am way more efficient in my mind that I am in reality. Or is it that I am actually quite efficient in reality but deluded in my mind, overesimating what I think I can fit into the slithers of time that slip between having a job, small kids, a family, lovely friends who I like seeing, a new pottery hobby and practising my headstands (new skill, still in the shamelessly showing off about it phase, sorryish). Either way, there is a lot I don’t get round to.
Cutting a few corners is something I have long been comfortable with in other realms – deli-bought puddings always, frozen gyoza from Itsu (thanks Georgia!), clothes folded when a teeny bit damp are as good as ironed in my book – but with gardening I feel the guilt. Maybe it’s because it’s what I do, or maybe it’s because the whole point of gardening is supposed to be about savouring it slowly and patiently watching the natural world unfurl, not just fast forwarding to the nail-biter in the last ten mins.
Alas, I have now let that one go too, and fallen hard for the heady delights of shop-bought flowers. Muscari, Narcissus, Tulips, Auricula, I have indulged in them all this month. Ice blue muscari in place of the ones I didn’t get round to planting. Bunches of Narcissus alongside the few I did managed to shove in a bowl 12 weeks later than planned, so they’re only just flowering now (proof that it’s never too late!). The first British tulips of the season, pretty in pink screaming Spring is very nearly here. And some lovely auricula in an irresistible seventies colourway that I have on my windowsill in the studio, knowing full well I will never be the person that nurtures these dainty little jewels through the winter months. And I don’t intend to stop there. Until my garden can start delivering the goods in late April, I will be grateful to the little veg shop down the road that has done the hard work for me, just as I am to the lady who makes the treacle tarts in the deli.
Courtyards
I am working on a project in Cornwall at the moment for the artist Jeremy Annear. It’s a project in two phases, and the first is restoring a Georgian courtyard to provide an entrance more befitting of the building, which in recent years has been divided up into flats.
There is a something very special about a lovely courtyard - the intimacy, the immediacy, the sense of being protected and ensconced. My trip to Morocco did nothing to temper my courtyard fetish, where there, they play out on a rather grand scale. Tall walls provide much-needed shade, water visual and literal purity and the strong geometry of the paradise garden acts as the perfect foil to the unruly chaos of the souk outside.
Whether you have grand proportions to play with or not, light to keep out or bring in, courtyards can be rich, layered and multifaceted. Here are some mood boards to inspire. For Moroccan inspired garden ideas, read on.
Morocco – design notes
A week in Morocco in February half term is a bit like going into space. Such a delicious and wholly welcome change of scene, it’s hard to describe without sliding into a pastiche of hyperbole and cliché. Where we were staying, a villa built in the 1920s half an hour outside Marrakech, had the most gorgeous gardens, as did lots of the places we went for lunch –Beldi Country Club and Kasbah Bab Ourika.
Here are my geeky notes on what made these gardens work:
1. Repeat repeat repeat. It’s an incredibly harsh climate – very little rain, up to 48 degrees in summer and near freezing in winter. Finding plants that can tolerate this kind of neglect is not easy, and so when you do, you repeat. Here the plants that came up a lot were:
- Cenchrus setaceus a fountain grass that is considered invasive in some countries.
- Rosemarinus officinalis Used as hedging and structural planting – clipped and as mounds. Very effective clipped, even saw a rosemary maze!
- Bourgainvillea Extremely undemanding on the water front, extremely generous on the colour front – can look a bit scrappy when not in flower, but more than makes up for it when it’s show time.
While these are not all plants we would use at home, the point is the same – whether you’re in a big country garden, or a small city courtyard, if you find a plant that likes your conditions and you like it, don’t hold back. Either as a large swathe, or single-species block, or repeated throughout beds, it is a great way to bring cohesion to a garden.
2. Contrast. Agave next to stipa tenuissima, spikes next to mounds, swords next to feathers, static trees underplanted with loose grasses. Always works.
3. Pattern – I’m a sucker for pattern, and but I agree, a whole mosaic feature wall is not going to look great in rural Hampshire, however there are subtle clever ways of introducing pattern without it being overbearing. Limit the colours, and be creative with a single material, using it in multiple formats and laying patterns. Consider using a colour or different format tile as an edging or transition between two zones, or simply to mark out a zone like a subtle rug. In courtyards, tiles running up a wall as a backdrop to planting is really effective, or using an old window frame or decorative panel to frame a door way or view. The goal is to add a layer of texture, not a distracting busy pattern. In the UK where we are not blessed with bright skies and strong shadows for much of the year, this is a great way of creating subtle but discernible interest in the garden.
4. Colour – I can’t come away from Morocco and not talk about colour. This trip, we were not so lucky with the weather – the strong colours of my imagination were more muted and tonal. Which is actually much more translatable to the UK. Choosing a couple of colours and then riffing on these in a spectrum of tones is a lovely way to introduce colour. This trip I saw a lot of glaucous silvery greens, in varying tones, against that famous red earthy terracotta, with the odd orangey flower, Subtle and very effective.
5. Introduce a bit of chaos – in courtyards, (Islamic paradise gardens aside) there is often an element of chaos – it doesn’t feel too planned. It’s a collection of plants, rather than a fully-fledged scheme, in a hotch-pots of pots and containers (although often all the same material). The overall effect is a warm, inviting space, where it wouldn’t matter if you accidentally knocked over your drink, and whoever created it has enjoyed doing so.
Quick links
Alice Vincent’s new book Why Women Grow (in shops and Thursday) has very generously arrived with a new podcast series to match which I have devoured. It reflects the gentle but purposeful rambling that I happily associate with being in the garden, perfectly. It’s also so refreshing to hear from some new people, or familiar people talking on a new subject.
While on audible treats, my biggest brain crush Michael Pollan on Desert Island Discs didn’t disappoint
I was both in love with and then sad about this
For anyone interested in modern agriculture, this is a great site. Based in the US but lots of great info and stories about the modern face of farming.
Made this for a Sunday lunch, and then made again basically just for me
The rarefied and fascinating world of the die hard galanthophile