RUNGSTEDLUND, DENMARK

Arranging flowers on Farah's chest, a brass-studded travel trunk gifted to Karen Blixen by her loyal Somali companion, Farah Aden.

“I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong” wrote the Danish novelist Baroness Karen von Blixen on returning to her childhood home at Rungstedlund after eighteen years living in Kenya. She left Africa in 1931 after her coffee farm went bankrupt and her lover and friend Denys Finch-Hatton died in a plane crash at Voi; he was buried in the Ngong Hills, overlooking Nairobi. Six years later, her beautiful memoir ‘Out of Africa’ was published to immediate critical acclaim worldwide. Blixen lived out the rest of her days at Rungstedlund, writing and gardening. She died there in 1962, and is buried under a beech tree close to the cutting garden she created to grow the flowers for her vases around the house and regular weekend parties. A prolific arranger, Blixen liked her flowers naturalistic, seasonal and freshly gathered from the immediate surroundings, picking from the woods and fields around her home on the Øresund coast, just north of Copenhagen. Now a museum, Rungstedlund still retains the lived-in feeling of a home rich in artistic endeavour and intellectual debate, scented with woodsmoke and alive with the sounds of jazz playing somewhere across the house, creaking floorboards, clinking glass.

I’m sharing here a few outtakes from the Rungstedlund chapter of ‘Naturalistic Flowers: A Year of Plants, Places and People’ that didn’t make the cut and so don’t appear in the published book. Arriving at Rungstedlund and spending time picking flowers from Blixen’s garden, arranging in her favourite vases, among her furniture and possessions was a surreal turn of events and a memory I will treasure. Blixen’s writing lead me to East Africa, a place that has called me back repeatedly over the years and is close to my heart (and featured in an earlier chapter of the book). I spent a fascinating few hours with Helen Olsen, the floral decorator in residence at the museum, learning to make arrangements ‘i-Blixen-stilen’ (in the Blixen style) - asymmetric and textural with a painterly focus on colour and form. For the book I made a fruity, fan-shaped arrangement of apples, Japanese anemones and grasses in the shadowy green room. Hope you enjoy the pictures.