It's in my nature, with Clover Stroud

The longing for home, the power of landscapes, and the heady mix of dill, tobacco and vodka

Well this is quite the treat… I am beyond delighted to have a bona fide gem of a special guest this week, who in her signature candour talked landscapes, longing and home with me through the chlorophyll-tinted lens of plants.

As the die-hard among you will know, plants and gardens are a gateway drug for me - a portal that leads to other worlds, people and ideas. And I’ve always thought they’re very autobiographical too – we all have plants we hold a candle to, landscapes that make our hearts swell and green spaces we visit in our dreams and imaginations.

I can’t think of a better person to illustrate this than Clover Stroud. Clover is no stranger to dreams and imagination, and also completely fearless in exploring her own biography with extraordinary honesty. Clover has crafted a unique style of memoir which is both intensely intimate but also universal, celebrating the mundane and the sublime, the very extraordinariness of ordinary life – motherhood, grief, parenting, loss, friendships, domesticity. In her latest book, The Giant on the Skyline, the concept of home and belonging comes under Clover’s deliciously candid and technicolour gaze, inspired by her recent move from a landscape she feels intrinsically a part of, to the swampy alien contours of Washington DC.  Thank you so much Clover.

If you’re not already familiar with Clover’s writing, go find it and add to your summer reading list immediately. She also writes a weekly newsletter On The Way Life Feels, on Substack

LD: What’s your relationship to plants?

CS: I cannot grow plants at all and I am terrible at gardening. I tried a bit during the start of lockdown and had fantasies about being someone who knew how to pot out seedlings and grow chrysanthemums, but I am too impatient and messy to be good at gardening I think. A year ago I moved from my home I deeply love, in south Oxfordshire, to Washington DC. I came here for my husband’s work; three of my children are at state school here in Washington, but my elder two children are at university in England. I miss them a lot, and quite often I come back to England for my work, and I always see them.

Something I’ve especially loved about being in England has been seeing the very seasonal plants, like bluebells, snow drops or cow parsley, which I miss in DC. I am also fascinated by the plants here: the plants that grow on the streets near our house in the northwest of the city are huge, and quite tropical looking. Obviously I can’t tell you what they are as I am no gardener, but I know they make me feel curious. 

LD: Is there a plant-moment in the year that you look forward to?

CS: I love April, when the cherry blossom comes out. It’s my birthday in mid-April, and some of my earliest memories was of blowing out candles on a chocolate biscuit cake my mum always made for me, underneath the spreading branches of a big cherry tree in the middle of our garden. I love the frothy, blousy pinkness of cherry blossom, its unashamed blousiness. Cherry blossom also marks the end of the winter - cherry blossom in the start of spring, that must be one of the best moments in the year, isn’t it? 

LD: Tell me about a plant you remember from childhood?

CS: I was about thirteen, and I didn’t want to go to school. I never really wanted to go to school, honestly. I always wanted to be at home, with my mum, even when I was a teenager. But I remember forcing myself to go to school, and when I came home, Mum had put some primroses and a jasmine plant into a bowl and left them in my bedroom. It was such a beautiful, gentle thing to do, and whenever I see jasmine, I remember that feeling, of returning to my home, my bedroom, the relief of it, and then the sweet smell of jasmine. 

A childhood birthday underneath the cherry tree

LD: What plants evoke a special memory?

CS: I really love fritillaries. They are such incredible flowers. Mum used to take my sister Nell and me to a wildflower meadow near our home when we were very small, to see the fritillaries growing there, a purple haze over the green pasture. When I see those incredible purple flowers, I always think of Mum, and my sister, Nell, too, as both of them are dead. Those flowers make me feel incredibly sad, and also happy, relieved even, at the same time. 

LD: What plant makes you think of home?

CS: Hyacinths, in bowls, on the kitchen table, surrounded by the mess of cereal packets and Lego, make me think of home. 

LD: Is there a landscape or green space that you pine for or that you feel particularly connected to? 

CS: I feel a powerful connection to the landscape of south Oxfordshire and into Wiltshire, where the chalk hills are crossed by the ancient track called the Ridgeway. It’s an intensely human landscape, with standing stones and the white chalk horse at Uffington. This landscape is in my heart, and it’s the landscape I long to return to. That longing for home was the reason I wrote my fourth memoir, The Giant on the Skyline, which is all about home and what it means, whether it’s a physical place, a memory, or our relationship with other people.

LD: What plants or green places make you feel alive?

CS: The Ridgeway, unquestionably. It was such an honour, really, to immerse myself in that landscape to write about it in The Giant on the Skyline. I feel I know it really well; I feel it knows me, too.

The Ridgeway

LD: What plants do you love cooking with?

CS: I love dill! One of the things I really love about Washington DC is that I can buy massive bunches of dill in my local supermarket. I spent quite a lot of time in the Caucasus mountains in my early thirties, which I wrote about in my first book, The Wild Other. It was an incredible, deeply felt and occasionally perilous time, and dill is the taste I associate most clearly with that time. Dill, and tobacco and vodka. 

LD: What plants do you love the smell of?

CS: I love the smell of geraniums. I think geranium oil is so lovely to have in a bath. I also love rosemary. When my eldest son, who is now 23, was born, someone gave me a bottle of rosemary essential oil. I sprinkled it in his cot and had lots of rosemary baths. That smell reminds me of being a new mother, in my early twenties, more than any other, and that was a very beautiful time.

 

LD: Is there a plant that has played a significant role in your work?

CS: Well it doesn’t go over my head that my name is Clover. And I write highly confessional books about all the stuff that’s happened to me. So I guess you could say that Clovers have played a significant role in my work? Would that count?

What plants are you currently growing? 

CS: One day when I’m grown up I’d like to grow some plants. Any plants, I don’t really mind what kind. I’d just like to be able to garden. But my youngest child is only 7. I have five children and I know how much nurturing they need. It’s a while away, as my kids need my attention, but one day, I’ll grow something. I just haven’t figured out what quite yet.