Autumn equinox
Autumn - nature’s sigh of relief. After the September equinox the summer race is abruptly over, change on the wind. As the season begins to darken, there is a lightness that comes with letting go; the final dance at the end of the night, the swan song. Energies swirl around through shapeshifting September days. There’s the ascendancy before the tipping point and then, when the crest of the wave breaks a sense of abatement, but also renewal.
IN THE STUDIO
From our foam-free installation workshop; beech, elder & viburnum foliage with dahlias, Japanese anemones, garden roses, grasses & hops on the vine
Autumn - nature’s sigh of relief. After the September equinox the summer race is abruptly over, change on the wind. As the season begins to darken, there is a lightness that comes with letting go; the final dance at the end of the night, the swan song. Energies swirl around through shapeshifting September days. There’s the ascendancy before the tipping point and then, when the crest of the wave breaks a sense of abatement, but also renewal.
In the early mornings before work I walk the dog across Bushy Park, between copses of ancient oak trees, sunbeams slanting through the mist, deer making their strange, prehistoric mating calls across the mown paths and windswept grasses. The landscape is shifting, prairie-coloured, the air smells of smoke and warm hay. As the month goes on, leaves begin to fall and the wind picks up, swirling them around the tussocks, peppering the river with ochre and copper. We stand on the bridge watching them float by. I feed Mavis blackberries from the brambles; she wrinkles her nose if they are too sour and spits them out into the grass. But she likes the sweet ones. Sometimes in the studio we find her salvaging blackberries from the green waste.
Snippets from the perennial beds for an autumn masterclass in London; ferns, pansies, chocolate cosmos, pennycress & gaura
Ceramic Urn | Borage, roses, zinnia, cosmos, dahlia, nicotiana & grasses
Urn of dahlias, miscanthus, lisianthus, centaurea & autumn leaves
Every year I think this moment is pure and utter magic, when the colours turn, even though I know that it is simply that the leaves, their veins closing up, are slowly starving of water and minerals, the chorophyll fading. I know this and yet every year I feel there is something so painfully romantic about it. Perhaps we just look for metaphors in the natural world to make sense of our own beginnings and endings.
It is my favourite time of the year to live in London; the city is so beautiful now. The street-lamps, red brick buildings, bridges. The melancholy parks, all skittering leaves and waning roses, tangles of dusty colours and fluff, acid hits of lime and dark berries. Mackerel skies reflected in the river.
In the studio we’re taking time to savour the last month of the growing season. Our rhythm is dictated by the garden, the business orbiting around it. We go up and down with the weather, harnessing and responding to the different energies each season brings, working hand in hand with them. Every project in these last few weeks is a product of this exquisite, stormy period between summer and winter, a cocktail of turning leaves and fruit, the feathers of grasses, the last flushes of flowers from plants that have given their all. For a wedding in Hampshire there are blackberries and sloes, elder and pale roses. For a class in London we harvest peony leaves that have turned a coveted nude-pink and pair them with limelight hydrangea and metallic fronds of Panicum squaw. One afternoon Yukiko shows us pictures of her favourite garden in Kyoto, thickly carpeted with red maple leaves. I come home to my flat and anxiously peer out of the hall window - my acer is still green, only the tips beginning to darken. When they finally fall it will be the beginning of winter.
Autumn wedding arrangements for Claire & Greg on their wedding day in Ovington, Hampshire
Armfuls of amazing Hydrangea Paniculata from The Real Flower Company
IN THE GARDEN
Becky, Jess & Yukiko tackling Tunnel Two!
Delphinium, cosmos & centaurea still going strong
In a gardener’s world it is the start of a new year.
This month we’ve all been hard at work turning the garden around for a fresh start, thinking ahead to spring. Taking out old crops, turning beds over, tilling the soil, planting seeds and hundreds of ranunculus and anemone corms for spring 2020 weddings and workshops. Early in the month we ordered large quantities of organic compost packed with sheep’s wool and bracken - a real treat for our hard-working beds.
Outside the perennial and annual beds are still going strong, giving us weekly bucket-loads of zinnias, dahlias, cosmos, borage, rudbeckia and centaurea and we’ve planted up several new varieties of frothy, feathery grasses. Exciting plans are being drawn up for a garden extension over the winter… more on this soon…
IN SUSSEX
A couple of weeks ago a creative autumn shoot took us happily back to the garden in East Sussex where we held our annual retreat in June. How much it has changed in three months! - the colours and textures so different to the lightness of early summer. We teamed up once more with friends and collaborators Heidi, Kristin, Sarah and Annie. It is always such a pleasure to create beauty with these girls! And not forgetting Josh who gamely assisted, carrying camera equipment and heroically wafting bonfire smoke…
Credit Kristin Perers
It was a perfect September day, smoky and mellow, the paths down to the dell carpeted with lilac cyclamen. It made me think of this poem, ‘Song of Autumn’, by Mary Oliver…
In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
Head-piece of berries, seedheads & grasses. Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Heavenly snippets from Sarah’s garden.
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Lunch at the Woodshed.
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Autumn Shoot at the Woodshed - thanks and credits go to:
Photography: @kristinperers
Setting: @secret_garden_at_the_woodshed
Vessels: @_viv_lee
Fashion Styling: @flint_lewes
Floral Styling: @aesmeflowers
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms by Naoko Abe
L I S T E N I N G T O - Counting Crows: This Desert Life
F O L L O W I N G - @anjadunk | @brunettewinebar | @james.mc.grath
E A T I N G - Tomatoes from the garden. Mum’s elderflower cake
V I S I T I N G - Polesden Lacey, Surrey
Late August
Late August, and the seasonal barometer prevaricates daily between high summer and early-onset autumn. It has been a month of workshops at Aesme, with three wonderful groups of florists visiting from Seoul, each for a three-day intensive class on garden-inspired floral design
IN THE STUDIO
Late August, and the seasonal barometer prevaricates daily between high summer and early-onset autumn. It has been a month of workshops at Aesme, with three wonderful groups of florists visiting from Seoul with Flower Workshop Korea, each for a three-day intensive class on garden-inspired floral design for weddings. These workshops are a luxurious and immersive deep-dive into arranging flowers in the most naturalistic and seasonal way possible - lots of dahlias, rudbeckia, scabiosa, tobacco flower, garden roses and phlox this month - with textural shrub-foliage, foraged clematis vines and grasses, and plenty of scented herbs, fruits and vegetables - apples, tomatoes on the vine, artichokes and beans. It is such a treat to really revel in these materials and experiment with them, coming up with a different colour palette for each class, pushing the boundaries of what we feel is familiar or safe. It’s a fantastic time of the year for this - the leaves beginning to turn and some of the rusty tones appearing - mouthwatering mingled in with the softer shades of summer - bronze with lime and peach, caramel with lilac, blush with gold.
Sharing our flowers, watching other people discovering and enjoying them, has to be the most enjoyable aspect of the job, particularly when we have grown the majority of them from seed, bulb or tuber, and nurtured the plants towards a fruitful harvest. Especially when many of the students are working with particular varieties for the first time. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation in the studio, which we love and find infectious, and it makes us want to push the boundaries with what we grow the following year.
I’m always struck by how much people love using weeds, vines, grasses, vegetables and fruit just as much as they enjoy the flowers themselves - its those textural elements that bring an arrangement alive and fill the studio with fluffy, frothy works of art - each one an architectural sculpture, and so detailed, so colourful. It definitely isn’t the easy option, growing and gleaning your own materials, especially alongside design work for events and running regular classes. I’d go so far as to say that it may be the hardest form of product sourcing. But that direct connection with the source itself - the soil, the plants that give us these treasures every week, the weather, is integral to what we do here at Aesme, and the special experiences we want to provide for our students and clients.
IN THE GARDEN
At the farm our cutting garden is in peak production mode. This is the time of plenty, of harvests and corn dolls and receiving, after all the months of tending and nurturing and encouragement. The time of the year when people are gifting and trading the fruits of their labours - tomatoes for courgettes and rosemary, a bowlful of butterhead lettuce, just cut. A friend gives me a precious bagful of macadamia nuts picked from the tree on the ranch where she grew up in California. This is the most pleasurable way of living and eating - practical, frugal and generous at the same time.
The roses have eased a little now between flushes but our main ‘cut and come again’ crops, which include dahlias, phlox, scabious, rudbeckia, cosmos, nicotiana, daucus carota, calendula, borage, amaranthus, zinnia, Californian poppies and everlastings, are flowering prolifically along with successional plantings of hardy annuals like agrostemma and sweet peas. The herb beds have been full and luscious, the perennial beds yielding achillea, echinacea, chocolate cosmos, gaura, fennel, verbascum, campanula and spires of dainty thalictrum flowers.
Around the garden the hedgerows are beginning to glimmer with blackberries, hawthorn and rosehips and the scratchy outlines of drying umbels. We pick raspberries and whitecurrants from their canes to eat while we are cutting and fill little pots with ripe tomatoes, their sharp scent filling the tunnel. The garden is full of butterflies and drunken bees and the occasional sound of seeds showering from brittle pods, a sure sign that summer will soon be drawing to a close. Waiting just around the corner are days of morning fog and mellow afternoons filled with drifting bonfire smoke, when the leaves spin from chartreuse to titian red as if licked by flames, and finally to a dry cinnamon brown, crisp underfoot. For now we hover on the bittersweet bridge between two seasons, looking ahead, and looking back.
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree | Modern Nature: Journals, 1989 – 1990 by Derek Jarman
L I S T E N I N G T O - Miles Davis : Kind of Blue | Madeleine Peyroux : Dreamland
F O L L O W I N G - @coyotewillow | @lagrottaices | @hortusvarius
C O O K I N G - Pear salad with gorgonzola & walnuts by Deliciously Ella | Roast tomatoes on toast with tarragon & thyme by Gill Meller | Cromer crab in Norfolk
V I S I T I N G - Wiveton Hall Garden, Norfolk & Colby Woodland Garden, Pembrokeshire
Bearded iris, peonies and peas
It’s been a busy and productive month in the studio with weddings every weekend, a steady flow of beautiful flowers coming in and out and the constant to-ing and fro-ing of vessels and buckets and plants. May is perhaps our favourite month, fast-paced and flashing by so quickly, yet at the same time strangely long and drawn-out - the flowers of late spring - tulips, anemones, the last of the narcissus - giving way to peonies, clematis and bearded iris.
We’ve so enjoyed working from some very colourful and creative briefs this month. Autumnal rusts and berry tones for a wedding on the Kent/Surrey border with a beautiful blowsy blossom and hawthorn arch. A long aisle of Italian alpine meadow-inspired arrangements (to reference the groom’s heritage) in the Nash Conservatory at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. A Chinese-Jewish wedding at the extraordinary Sezincote House (a two-hundred year old Mogul Indian palace on an idyllic country estate in Gloucestershire, built by an English aristocrat for his homesick Indian bride), with a rambling clematis and wild rose briar chuppah, oodles of lush table arrangements and hundreds of metres of twisting, curving leafy vines across the clear marquee ceiling. Last weekend, a church wedding and reception at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds with abundant urns, table arrangements and a marble mantelpiece laden with peonies, bearded iris, spilling with tiny blue Lathyrus flowers on twirling vines.
In the STUDIO
Vessel | Korean ceramic tea bowl & kenzan Materials | Ranunculus, Saponaria, sweet peas & pennycress
It’s been a busy and productive month in the studio with weddings every weekend, a steady flow of beautiful flowers coming in and out and the constant to-ing and fro-ing of vessels and buckets and plants. May is perhaps our favourite month, fast-paced and flashing by so quickly, yet at the same time strangely long and drawn-out - the flowers of late spring - tulips, anemones, the last of the narcissus - giving way to peonies, clematis and bearded iris.
We’ve so enjoyed working from some very colourful and creative briefs this month. Autumnal rusts and berry tones for a wedding on the Kent/Surrey border with a beautiful blowsy blossom and hawthorn arch. A long aisle of Italian alpine meadow-inspired arrangements (to reference the groom’s heritage) in the Nash Conservatory at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. A Chinese-Jewish wedding at the extraordinary Sezincote House (a two-hundred year old Mogul Indian palace on an idyllic country estate in Gloucestershire, built by an English aristocrat for his homesick Indian bride), with a rambling clematis and wild rose briar chuppah, oodles of lush table arrangements and hundreds of metres of twisting, curving leafy vines across the clear marquee ceiling. Last weekend, a church wedding and reception at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds with abundant urns, table arrangements and a marble mantelpiece laden with peonies, bearded iris, spilling with tiny blue Lathyrus flowers on twirling vines.
Vessel | Low & wide Japanese ceramic bowl & kenzan
Materials | Grasses, nandina, ranunculus, ferns, the last of the tulips
Exquisite bearded iris cut from the garden
Vessel | Large & shallow resin bowl | Materials | Hawthorn, Fritillaria Imperialis, iris, tulips, corncockle & alliums
For the Baylight Foundation x Natoora supper club at Walmer Yard in Notting Hill during London Craft Week
Materials | Cabbage & variegated tulip leaves, clematis, Californian poppy, Ornithogalum nutans (milky bellflower)
Alpine-inspired aisle arrangements for Hannah & Gianluca in the Nash Conservatory at Kew Gardens
Antique cast iron urns full of spring flowers for Anna and Andras’ wedding at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds
Clematis & strawberries in stoneware bottles for Natoora x Baylight Foundation supper with Chef Dan Cox of Crocadon Farm
Hannah’s bouquet contained corncockle, Marguerite daisies, Californian poppies, Aquilegia & sweet peas
Materials | Faded ‘Coral Charm’ peonies with Saponaria, iris, elderflower, clematis and dog rose briars
Installation | The chuppah, dressed with clematis vines, hawthorn, spring blossom, sweet pea and potato vines, and garden roses, for David and Tash’s wedding ceremony, in the ornate curved Orangery at Sezincote House
Laying up the tables for D&T’s evening reception dinner at Sezincote House. The floral colour palette was creams, blush, coffee, rusty orange and pops of bright red to reference the bride’s Chinese heritage
In the GARDEN
Preparing the largest annual bed for cutting from high summer
The garden has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few weeks with the help of Becky who is a recent addition to our growing team, assisting with cutting for weddings and events, maintenance and turnaround between crops. Once over the tulips were whipped out and replaced with annual seedlings - stocks, runner beans and Nicotiana (tobacco flower), and lots of seeds direct-sown to cut from later in the summer. Two new long beds have been planted up with dahlias. In the tunnels the sweet peas, calendula, Californian poppies and corncockle have been flowering like mad, the ranunculus waning and soon to be replaced with sea lavender and straw flowers. Every week there are new varieties showing - this week the bearded iris and first flush of roses have been gently brought back and coo’ed over at the studio. And the nigella are just starting now too - African Bride, Sativa (black cumin) and Hispanica, which are the colour of dark blue denim.
One of the most exciting things for us this year is growing crops of different varieties specifically for our clients within a particular colour palette. The red sweet peas (Air Warden, Winston Churchill and Red Ace) that we grew for David and Tash’s wedding at Sezincote - sown from seed on Christmas Eve - started flowering just in time and we were able to cut long, whole vines for them with these hits of beautiful scented red flowers. For Anna and Andras, who had a white/buttercream and peach palette with accents of blue, we cut Lathyrus sativus azureus and Californian poppies like wrinkled silk rosettes.
Our first roses are fairly short-stemmed at the beginning of the season but we cut them into crates filled with jars of fresh water and bring them back to the studio regardless - so useful for low bowl arrangements and small clustered vessels for table styling. We use many of the weeds that we pull up in our designs too - speedwell, hairy bittercress, shepherd’s purse, forget-me-nots, jack-in-the-hedge. At the moment we have a real problem with invasive creeping buttercup but the upside is a profusion of glistening, sunny flowers just when you are searching for that hit of yellow. Herb Robert is an old favourite – it grows everywhere around the garden, and at the moment is a nude pink turning to flaming red. We pull it up by the root, soak it, store it in buckets of water and use it for filling the base of arrangements; a touch of vermilion when you want to spice things up a bit. We don’t discard the stunted, strange (sometimes slightly freaky) plants in our garden; it’s a bit like nose-to-tail eating in a restaurant; there’s a use for everything, weeds and weirdos alike.
If you’d like to join us for a day in the studio we have a A Day’s Flower Arranging Workshop coming up next month on Wednesday 17th July, 10am to 4pm. We’ll have an abundance of freshly cut flowers, foliage, fruits, vegetables, herbs (and decorative / edible weeds!) from the garden in an array of delicious colours to arrange with and we’ll be covering garden-inspired bouquets and table centrepieces (using the chicken-wire technique). Further details and tickets are available here.
Hyacinth, magnolia, hellebores
It’s been a month of strange timing and judgements calls. The balmy days of late February were followed by the tail end of a storm, whipping through the treetops and rippling the tunnel roofs. Capricious spring weather.
In the GARDEN
It’s been a month of strange timing and judgements calls. The balmy days of late February were followed by the tail end of a storm, whipping through the treetops and rippling the tunnel roofs. Capricious spring weather.
Tulip ‘Concerto’ flowering in one of the tunnels, and dahlia tubers going into their pots.
In the outside beds the hellebores are still flowering happily along with scilla, snowdrops and the beautiful wood anemone nemerosa, an incredibly delicate and soft variety. To hedge our bets (last year having had late snow) in the autumn we split our bulbs, planting half in the tunnels and half outside, including replanting many of last year’s tulips and narcissus bulbs (which we stored over winter in the shed) in the smaller tunnel for an early crop. As luck would have it, encouraged by the warmer weather many of these are already flowering and we will no doubt be missing a number of our early flowering varieties while we are overseas - such is the heartbreak of leaving a garden you so lovingly tend! So far we’ve cut ‘Concerto’ - a creamy yellow tulip with a black centre like a bumblebee’s bottom, narcissus ‘Actea’, ‘Elka’, ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘Jenny’ and pleasingly long-stemmed anemones, along with masses of heavily scented apricot, pink and white hyacinths.
We trialled ‘Multiflora White Pearl’, ‘Gypsy Queen’, ‘Aiolos’, ‘Pink Festival’ and ‘White Festival’ hyacinths this year; after a disconcertingly quiet winter they suddenly popped up in the new year and grew very happily in the tunnel.
A final push last week saw the final (for now at least) section of the cutting garden transformed from an ill-planned and weedy area to four new long beds. Into one of these have already been planted new shrubs including Nandina, Pittosporum and Spiraea and the others will be filled with a mass of colourful dahlias come early summer.
Seeds sown this month - Nicotiana, including our favourite ‘Apple Blossom’ from last year and a new variety we’re excited about called ‘Tinker Bell’. Also tomatoes, stocks - lots of whites, apricots and pale pinks - and Malope.
We’re looking forward to welcoming Becky to the team in May who has spent the last few years as a chef on sailing yachts (so a seasoned early riser and used to being out in the weather!) She will be working on regular maintenance and helping to cut flowers ahead of our weddings and workshops. The garden, which has gradually grown from an allotment-sized plot (and before that a large bramble patch) to just over a quarter of an acre, is intensively planted and we are hoping it will be an extremely productive operation this season. While we’ll still be very involved we’re excited to see what a difference an extra pair of hands makes - to the garden and to us!
In the STUDIO
This month we’ve been preparing the studio ahead of another busy year. The ‘season’, by which I mean the hustle that begins in April and goes on until late October, kicks off again as soon as we get back from the Far East so we’ve been working day and night to make everything ready. Finishing the studio garden, painting and polishing, restocking sundries and props. It’s going to feel so good to open our doors again and we can’t wait to welcome all our visitors this year.
Pops of colour for a spring drinks party in Soho; one and a half metres of tulips, Cornish narcissi,and alliums, with butterfly ranunculus and Fritillaria Uva Vulpis & Meleagris dancing above.
We’re also soon to be joined by Yukiko, a florist from Japan, who is coming on board our team and will be working with us in the studio from next month as well as some talented new freelancers assisting on our events and a few lovely volunteers lending a hand in exchange for learning the ropes and having some creative time with the flowers. The studio will be a productive and industrious place this season! Looking forward to long, light days fuelled by iced coffee and good music and flowers everywhere you turn - the best kind of days.
Magnolia in bloom at Kew Gardens. On the right: Magnolia heptapeta ‘Yulan’.
It has been a knock-out year for the London magnolias. We were lucky enough to catch them fully blown at Kew Gardens recently, some blooms the size of large dinner plates and almost frighteningly perfect - like leaves of velvet, streaky pink or as white as snow. Many had been battered by the buffeting winds, the grass strewn with a carpet of jettisoned petals.
Light spring arrangements to dress an apartment in Kensington for an interiors shoot earlier in the month designed by Olivia Outred. Featuring tulip ‘Verona’, velvety brown Iris tuberosa (widow iris) from Cornwall and Primula ‘gold lace’.
With the warmer weather and weeds beginning to encroach again down at the garden we’ve been experimenting with using foraged stems in bouquets and arrangements. Rosettes of Cardamine hirsuta (hairy bittercress, which is edible as a bitter herb and apparently very good in small doses in salads) or Prunella vulgaris (self heal) look beautiful in low bowls as an alternative to moss and Sinapis arvensis (charlock) as fillers for hand-tieds. We’re so drawn to the ‘waste-not-want-not’ approach and ridding ourselves of a hierarchical attitude when it comes to the materials we use. At our core we are celebrating the fleeting beauty of nature and one of our founding principles at Aesme was (excuse the pun) ‘digging deeper’. This is why we established our cutting garden in the first place, because we want a direct relationship with our produce that goes beyond just buying and selling. The ingredients we use tells the story of the season, the weather, they are deeply evocative and we are nurturing them or finding them and using them carefully and with consideration for the other elements they are put with. Like a chef taste-testing recipes - it’s all about the combination of one ingredient with another, the preparation and then the execution. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Adding in extra colour or texture is like adding seasoning - the bright, sour flowers of the charlock in the bouquet above and below are like a hit of citrus in a creamy dessert when added sparingly to the paler tulips, but they would be too much with other more dominating colours. Weeds are too often overlooked and an untapped resource for new and interesting ingredients. We’re going to be researching them, harvesting them and arranging with them a lot more this year.
Left: a small bowl arrangement of yellowing anemone leaves, rosettes of hairy bittercress and Narcissus ‘Elka’.
Right: a bouquet of tulips, Narcissus ‘Wedding Bell’, Anemone ‘Coronaria The Bride’ and charlock.
Some of you may have seen on ‘Instagram Stories’ that Jess and I are currently in Japan. I am writing this update from Kyoto where it is 6.00am. We have been longing to visit Japan for many, many years so it is a dream come true to finally be here, to see some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, and draw inspiration from Japanese design and aesthetics at the source - the attention paid to every minute detail here is astounding and touching in equal measure. We already feel an affinity to certain aspects of the Japanese art of flower arrangement, Ikebana - the emphasis on seasonality and the artful treasuring of a restrained selection of ingredients. It will be fascinating to take a class and begin to explore the history of this ancient art form and spiritual practice further.
We’re back to Tokyo at the end of the week and from there fly to Seoul to spend a couple of days visiting the flower market and then on to Jeju Island to teach a 3 day workshop. We knew that there would be so much to share from this trip that it would warrant its own blog post so stay tuned for this next month!
In the Ether
A few things we’re loving at the moment…
R E A D I N G - The Photographer in the Garden by Jamie M. Allen & Sarah Anne McNear, In Praise of Shadows by Junchiro Tanizaki and the Monocle travel guides on Tokyo, Kyoto and Seoul
L I S T E N I N G T O - Billie Eilish, Yo Yo Ma
E A T I N G - Delicious seasonal meals at Savory, Kyoto and Bistro Rojiura, Tokyo
V I S I T I N G - The Camellia Show at Chiswick House & Garden (on until 31st March 10am - 3pm), the Magnolia at Kew Gardens
