Marching on
Spring. The verb ‘to spring’ from the Middle English sprygen - ‘to burst or flow forth, to sprout, to emerge, to happen, to become known’. As a noun, from Middle English spryng (“a wellspring, tide, branch, sunrise, kind of dance or blow, ulcer, snare, flock”), from Old English spring (“wellspring, ulcer”)
Spring.
The verb ‘to spring’ from the Middle English sprygen - ‘to burst or flow forth, to sprout, to emerge, to happen, to become known’.
As a noun, from Middle English spryng (“a wellspring, tide, branch, sunrise, kind of dance or blow, ulcer, snare, flock”), from Old English spring (“wellspring, ulcer”) and Old English spryng (“a jump”), from ablaut forms of the Proto-Germanic verb. Further senses derived from the verb and from clippings of day-spring, springtime, spring tide, etc. Its sense as the season, first attested in a work predating 1325, gradually replaced Old English lencten (“spring, Lent”) as that word became more specifically liturgical. Compare fall.
I’m into dictionary definitions the way some people are the shipping forecast. “Viking, North Utsire; southwesterly five to seven; occasionally gale eight; rain or showers; moderate or good, occasionally poor.” Something comforting and peaceful about them.
Spring the season, on the other hand, drags her feet. While winter finally dawdles off, spring makes us wait for her like an impatient lover. Predictably wistful, too eager, looking for signs. The usual thing - watching the clock, worrying if we dressed right. She comes closer inch by inch, painfully slowly, giving in by tiny increments.
When the camellias begin to flower you know you’re in with a chance.
March is first base. The beginning of something.
In any case, it’s a busy month. A month of preparation, planning ahead.
In the garden ‘the big chop’ ensues - cutting back the perennials and giving everything a good old haircut to allow the fresh green shoots to emerge.
It’s cathartic, and extremely satisfying, to strip away all the dead growth and take everything back to ground level.
The beds are given a lovely thick blanket of mulch to enrich the soil around the plants, suppress the weeds (to a certain extent) and to keep the soil damp and cool as the earth begins to warm up.
One Saturday a friend comes over to help for a few hours of (what he thinks will be) ‘therapeutic gardening’.
He brings sweet pastries and we drink coffee in the sun and it feels like spring.
Later, in torrential rain, we tackle the compost bays. Knee-deep, spades in hand, we apologise for the turn of events.
“Never happier than when shovelling shit”- his cheerful reply.
Me neither.
We compost all the perennial offcuts under last year’s food and flower waste. Excitingly we finally have our first big batch of lovely rich, crumbly compost.
It’s very satisfying to have finally cracked this and to be able to properly make use of our household and business green waste.
Certainly not glamorous but it might be one of our proudest moments so far.
I should have taken a photo to mark the occasion. Then again, perhaps not. We got home looking a tad feral.
The annual seeds are sown.
In trays there are Malope, Nicotiana, Helichrysum, Limonium, Tagetes, snapdragons and various perennial seeds.
Direct sown in our tunnels are scabious, cornflower, nigella, California poppies, Nasturtium, Omphalodes, Agrostemma, Phlox, Callistephus, Flax and Gypsophila.
The flowers are coming through now. Slowly. Another couple of varieties every week.
We’ve had a long spell of cold, dry weather and the season is slow to get going this year.
Narcissi, scilla, muscari, anemones. Some incredible hellebores.
We cut a little bunch of narcissi from the polytunnel and put them in a jam jar.
They drive around with us in the van back in London, through rainstorms and dazzling sun, the typical kaledioscope of weather on any given spring day.
They smell like vanilla.
In London the magnolia is in bloom.
After weeks of grey the streets are suddenly awash with these extraordinary blossoming trees.
It’s enough to make you fall in love with the city all over again.
At the studio we have a huge overhaul and spring clean in preparation for the new season.
All the doors are flung open, the windows polished, every cupboard and box is emptied, sorted, dusted and refilled.
An exciting delivery of beautifully aged reclaimed oak arrives all the way from Austria which we are using for cladding - a project we have wanted to do for a long time - and we spend an enjoyable couple of hours admiring each piece and deciding the order in which they’ll be fixed.
Arranging from the garden at this time of the year is very much an exercise in restraint. In making a little go a long way. Right at the beginning of the season still, you may only have one or two stems of each variety. It’s a bit like having nothing in the fridge and having to be inventive to make supper. Actually I love suppers like that. And flowers too.
x2 Forsythia branches
x5 hellebores (four different varieties)
x1 primula
x5 Vinca minor
x1 Fritillaria ‘Ivory Bells’
x 8-10 Scilla mischtschenkoana
The latter is white squill. A exquisite pale blue flower. We planted the bulbs beneath some rambling roses and they are naturalising beautifully, more and more every year.
Also at the studio, planning for our 2023 flower school begins in earnest. We like to start with a big brainstorm of ideas and then streamline from there.
‘Workshop flow’, Jess calls it.
We want each one to be different, to celebrate the materials of that particular moment in the year. We love working out how we can give our guests the best experience - what we’ll talk about, what we’ll make, where we’ll gather and sit and photograph, what we’ll eat, drink, listen to.
We have some great playlists this year. Classical. Jazz. Folk. Country.
See you next month! Excited for Easter and all the flowers to come.
Thank you for reading. A.
Milky skies & netted iris
It’s a colourless February day - a milky sky and everything is just stone and silt, bare branches, low cloud.
But the birds are singing. Maybe I’m imagining it but it doesn’t feel as though the birds have been this vocal in a while. A few days lately it has been sunny, light, a glimmer to the air - you could have been lured into thinking it was spring. Not yet - we learned that lesson last year when all emerging shoots disappeared under a blanket of snow mid-March.
In the garden so much is happening now, even if it is just out of view, just beneath the surface. It makes me think of the metaphor of the swan gliding over a flat pond. All seems calm and serene, though below the water-line there is a wild mayhem of peddling and effort and churned bubbles.
In the GARDEN
It’s a colourless February day - a milky sky and everything is just stone and silt, bare branches, low cloud.
But the birds are singing. Maybe I’m imagining it but it doesn’t feel as though the birds have been this vocal in a while. A few days lately it has been sunny, light, a glimmer to the air - you could have been lured into thinking it was spring. Not yet - we learned that lesson last year when all emerging shoots disappeared under a blanket of snow mid-March.
In the garden so much is happening now, even if it is just out of view, just beneath the surface. It makes me think of the metaphor of the swan gliding over a flat pond. All seems calm and serene, though below the water-line there is a wild mayhem of peddling and effort and churned bubbles.
We harvest the first sparse offerings of the season. In tunnel one the Iris reticulata are flowering - ‘Painted Lady’, ‘Alida’ and ‘Clairette’, planted by Jess back when I was sheltering from autumn storms in Greece. The last two are sweetly perfumed and the darkest blue reminds us of our grandmother; it was her favourite colour.
The first few anemones are blooming too, so frail their petals are almost translucent. Lots of hellebores in muddy taupes, plum and black. Galanthus (snowdrops) including ‘Sam Arnott’ which we collected from the Chelsea Physic Garden last year after the annual talk by Joe Sharman. Also ‘Flore Pleno’ - very perfumed and with a rosette centre - and ‘Nivalis’; the name comes from the Greek words gála or "milk", and ánthos "flower" and the Latin nivalis "resembling snow". They are just heavenly - pure poetry. We dream of a bride one day ordering a tiny, intricate bouquet of snowdrops tied with silk; hard to imagine anything more beautiful, seasonal or meaningful than that.
Elsewhere the narcissus, tulips and alliums are shooting up, the ranunculus looking happy and healthy for the most part. We prune the roses back. Scores of new plants arrive weekly, seeds are sown - calendula, scabious, rudbeckia, phlox and Californian poppies. Successional sowings of sweet pea seedlings shoot up in their root trainers, flaming reds specially sown for a late May bride (whispered to, cajoled). Everywhere things are budding - the lilacs, honeysuckle, raspberry canes. Signs of hope and promise.
In the STUDIO
It feels good to be back at work after a few weeks away. For us January is a carefully guarded month of hibernation and recuperation. Time for catching up with friends, cooking and road-trips, reading the piles of books we collect throughout the year and that stack up beside the bed unfinished, long walks, drinking whisky by the fire in the evening. Jess returned from her travels in India, browner and somehow lighter too; the break did her good. This time away has become completely necessary to us to get the distance we need from the day-to-day running of the business, to re-set and re-energise, come up with new ideas. I used to loathe it, now I love this time of the year - the drawbridge up, the gentle pace.
Sometime around the 1st of February, every year, there is a surge on the wind that speaks of change. New beginnings; time to get back in the saddle. There’s always a lot to do before the season begins - staffing, logistics and design planning for spring and summer events, a backlog of quotes and proposals to work through, maintenance work at the studio, setting up systems to make things easier for us all in the heady months ahead. The studio remains closed but although it isn’t visible yet we’re gaining momentum behind closed doors. As always the pattern and pace of our work exactly mirrors what is going on in the garden
In the studio we dust off snips and press the first cuttings; preserving them to use later in the year for stationery and table settings. We open the doors wide and let the fresh air sluice through. Sit in the sunny little garden out the back, surrounded by pots of emerging tulips, muscari and narcissus. Throughout the month we’ll be ticking off jobs: sweeping and de-cobwebbing, plastering and painting a new wall, dropping off any unused props at the charity shop. It’s like getting into an old car and letting the engine warm up slowly. We’re looking forward to firing up and being off again - so many new and exciting avenues to explore this year.
Next month we are heading to Japan and then on to South Korea to teach our first workshop of the year on Jeju Island. If you have any tips of gardens to visit, or great places to eat in Tokyo, Kyoto or Seoul we’d love to hear your recommendations!
We’ll be posting a monthly journal from the garden and studio here on the blog this year, along with a photographic series of the gardens we visit and are inspired by (stayed tuned for some glorious Rajasthani gardens next week that are sure to warm the cockles).
We’ll also be sending out a quarterly seasonal newsletter with updates, upcoming events, pop-up shops, workshop dates and more. If you’d like to be kept in the loop please sign up at the bottom of this page. We promise we won’t send you any junk.
In the Ether
A few things we’re loving at the moment…
R E A D I N G - Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, The Land Where Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee and Natural Selection: A Year in the Garden by Dan Pearson
L I S T E N I N G T O - Goldfrapp (Supernature) and Moloko (Things to Make and Do) and the Pardon My French Podcast with Garance Doré
C O O K I N G - Anna Jones’ Smoky Corn Chowder from The Modern Cook’s Year, and Dahl Makhani
B U R N I N G - cedar-scented incense sticks from Flint, Lewes and Cire Trudon’s Ernesto candle
A V I S I T T O - Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams at the V&A (on now until 14 July)
