gathered: hellebores

I have always loved having a bit of the outdoors, indoors. Flowers in season even if just tiny posies, but also foraged finds - feathers, lichen, twigs, pebbles - lovely, gathered things that connect me to the landscapes I love. I am really trying to declutter stuff we don't love anymore from our home, so there is room to properly enjoy these small collections that do matter to me. I thought I might share what I collect, snip and enjoy each week here on the blog under the title 'gathered', and I hope it encourages us all to feel that just a few simple blooms really can be so worth the minimal effort involved? It is also, I suppose, part of my goal to make this year more mindful, and the ritual of growing, finding, collecting and displaying is a simple way to bring pleasure and calmness into the week - a bit of margin from all the busyness and deadlines that can take over. It means that I have an easy way to deepen my connection with the seasons, and relishing what makes each month special is in essence about noticing more keenly and finding gratitude in simple things which just seems to make life so much happier? There are lots of hashtags over on instagram that celebrate a similar intention, take a look at #natureinthehome #wanderandgather #thenaturetable  #stylingtheseasons if you are interested, and do please join in with my #naturenotes_february for a monthly collection of my seasonal finds and those of anyone else who would like to share their photos or sketches?

This week, it is all about enjoying the hellebores while they are still carpeting the small woodland part of our garden. They have been in flower for weeks already and I know they won't be around much longer so I am picking a few each week, and popping them in tiny vases to enjoy. The trick with hellebores is to cut them just before they start producing seed, and keep the stalks very short, scalding the stem ends in boiling water for about 10-15 seconds, shielding the flowers from the steam. This way they last a few days rather than drooping within hours. The shortness of the stems means you actually see their beautiful faces!

I would love to hear about any of your flowers or other finds this week, and I hope they give you lots of pleasure in your home. 

flowers in the house

During a rare sunny moment between scudding, grey storm clouds, I whipped out my camera to take a some pictures of the few flowers in our house - just in time for Jane's monthly floral shindig. It is slim pickings in the garden this time of year, and although a few purple anemones are bravely unfurling in the swathes of mud, I found a few lovely long stems at a flower shop in town and couldn't resist. So I popped them in a white jug along with some green hellebore florets from the garden.

I have been loving the snowdrops beginning to carpet our little woodland area and a few of them always look so pretty in a tiny clay pot I think. They are cheering up our north facing kitchen.

Wishing you all a lovely week. I am full steam ahead with jewellery work, but plenty to do to get the garden ready for Spring too. It feels good to get my hands in the earth again.

an unbeatable floral duo for January: hellebores and snowdrops

Just when it seems the garden will sleep on forever, the unbeatable, unbreakable duo of hellebores and snowdrops pop up in my woodland garden. They are so faithful, so tough, so beautiful. My go-to plants for January floral therapy!

The only help they need is a little dividing and replanting for the snowdrops every five years or so and a chopping back of the huge amount of hellebore leaves in December, so the new shoots can emerge all gorgeous and Venus-like, unhidden by an unruly mop of old leaves. Anyway, that is what has worked for me.

Have you got any January wonder going on in your garden, would love to know? xx

flowers in the house

January is a toughie of a month for flowers in the house - the pine-y Christmas loveliness, all that spicey greenery brought-indoors-to-warm-the heart have been cleared away, and although there are excitements brewing in the garden with the hellebore and snowdrop buds beginning to push through, there is not enough of anything much to pick in the garden. A little bit of foliage here and there but nothing really exciting enough to point a camera at.

So I am making do with honesty seedcases, all light and ethereal,  for a touch of pretty here and there. Honest is a useful flower in itself, white or purple clouds of blooms, and easy enough to grow with a bit of direct sowing of seed - they are biennial so plant the seeds in about may/june for flowers at about the same time the following year. In my opinion they are totally worth it for these gorgeous, shimmering seedcases alone.

I also have a pot of hyacinths on the kitchen table, with little green buds that almost look good enough to nibble on, (I won't!!), a daily reminder that the year is turning and despite being mid winter, things are stirring beneath our feet, life is brewing and new things are happening. Always good to be reminded!

There are more flowers in the house over the pond at Jane's, go take a gander! Have a lovely week.

last flowers standing

These were literally the last few flowers left standing in the garden that were worth picking - the Wild Acre cut flowers are done for another year. But it is 29th October so I really can't complain. The velvety plum colours of the dahlias, penstemon (Garnet), annual scabiosa, cosmos and teeny clippings of achillea and sedum are a surprisingly gutsy farewell, no going out with a whimper around here!

There were also a small handful of Graham Thomas roses still struggling through the wet weather, I popped a few in a little cream jug, but I don't think they'll get to wednesday. Enjoy the moment though, no? (And it has reminded me of how much I love the unlikely combination of yellow and grey.)

For more late season floral loveliness, pop over to Jane's who is still bravely hosting the knees-up despite the impending hurricane Sandy and a migraine storm of her own.

last little jugful of Indian summer

The golden Indian summer we were enjoying seems to have been chased off by a fury of wind and rain that is lashing against the window panes as I write. As fast as you can say applecrumblewithcustard we have taken to lighting the woodburner as it turns dark and I am in the market for a new pair of wellies.

Which has all left me woefully unprepared for Jane's monthly flowers-in-the-house shindig. It is just too ghastly to contemplate cutting flowers in the rain and muddy flowerbeds while my sweetpeas and anemones from last week finally hit the compost heap at the weekend.

So my rather paltry offering this time, is the remaining jugful of white cosmos, not looking their perkiest    after four days, but still a poignant little reminder of warmer days in the garden and that gorgeous summer sunshine that has finally said its goodbyes. A last little flowery image of summer....

I'm also sharing this post over at Flower Patch Farmgirl. Do you know her? She writes like a dream.

end of summer flowers

Today it is windy and cool and I am back in skinny jeans, a long sleeved t-shirt and checked shirt - it all feels like a bit like autumn is on its way.

The colours in the garden are slipping into the russets, rich burgundies and deep pinks of autumn too - the sedums doing their annual flush into gorgeous rich pinks and the dahlias flowering their nearly black hearts out. It means lots of lovely new flowers for the house and to make up into bouquets.

A strange perk of the topsy turvey weather this year is that I have sweetpeas still in flower - I have never had sweetpeas and dahlias out together, but am enjoying the treat!

So there's plenty still to pretty up the house, and if you want to see what some other lovely flower fans are picking for their vases, head over to Jane's flower party, and say I sentchya'! :)

flowers in the house

Woah, it has been a tough morning at Wild Acre.

Two large steel wires were removed from my youngest son's wrist without any anesthetic. I freely admit, having seen x-rays of them passing through both broken bones in his little forearm, this has been a morning I have been dreading.  We set off this morning via the village shop where we bought a football mag and a paper bag of sweeties, because when you aren't really feeling the courage to face the fear, you really might as well fling footie mags and sweets at it instead.  The strawberry shoelace was a good distraction and I am proud to say he was stoic to the last, and the surgeon was fast and efficient and kind. And I didn't end up out cold on the floor, which was a bonus.

I can't help thinking of kids and their parents who have to go through painful procedures on a regular basis - they are properly heroic, and those mums, who I know like me would so desperately rather have these things done to their bodies not only to spare their kids the pain (although clearly that is the primary reason) but to spare themselves the horror of watching by helplessly. I do so hope they get support from the hospitals...

Anyway, after all that, a congratulatory milk shake in town for the young fella and some time in the garden were very welcome. And the perfect moment to breathe out, look at the July loveliness all around and take a few shots of flowers in the Wild Acre house for Jane's flower party.

In the house, the flowers are super simple at the moment - don't get me wrong I love full on arrangements, but actually, the really simple, to the point of spare, ones are what really float my boat because they look so carefree and artless and nonchalant - they seem to speak of summer meadows and waysides and a snip here and there in a garden and that simplicity is so restful. Here are remnants from some pruning - a few roses in an antique lemonade bottle. What's not to love really, and the lack of any other flowers makes one really notice the colours and shapes, the curl of the petals and the swoony graduations of those sunset-y tones.

I'm guessing those hot corals and cool aquas are on the opposite sides of the colour wheel, but I love the combination. The other surprise I am loving is garden grown gypsophila, so reviled for its horrid, crispy little blooms and dodgy smell in florist shops, but garden grown, fresh and arching and full of life, arranged/plonked all on its own, well I rather like it even if the fashion police jail me forever. To be honest the annual elegans variety is the most beautiful - much larger flowers and softer appearance but the Spring deluges here did for my seeds sadly.

So here is to the simple, pared back moments of pleasure we can take when the seas feel a little rougher than normal -  here is to a cup of tea on the garden steps, smelling the flowers and watching swifts swoop over the barn roof, here is to a rose in funny little bottle, to squeezing the hand of someone who really needs it, and to the long awaited smile in the eyes of some one you care about. These moments matter don't they, because how else is the heart to be replenished but by Love?

Cambridge, rubies and flowers

We are in the middle of a Spring heatwave, a whole week of periwinkle blue skies and peachy breezes. It is blissful, and I am finding it hard to concentrate on anything but being outside.

But it has been a busy few days in some ways.

Last thursday I found myself to be on a train, on the short journey to Cambridge to meet a fairtrade ruby dealer. As you do. If you had told me 7 or 8 years ago when I was was still up to my armpits in nappies and calpol, that was to be the case, I would have definitely laughed out loud and quite possibly taken a swig of calpol for good measure! The dealer was a really nice chap with an incredible story to tell of establishing a fair trade mine in Tanzania. The rubies were gorgeous, the tanzanites so blooooo, but it was a few little teal grey spinels that grabbed me most. They came home with me.

And, another thing, I do really love Cambridge. My dad went to Magdalene College (which is so exquisite I feel a little wobbley whenever I see it, with the amazing Pepys library full of beautiful, beautiful books and manuscripts), but it isn't just his rose-tinted specs that influence me. It is just so choc full of stunning buildings.

St Johns, pictured above was founded in 1511 by the mother of Henry V11. So. A youngster compared to some of the oldests colleges  - St Peter's is the oldest, founded in 1284.

This amazing round church was built in the 1130s and was originally a wayfarers' chapel on the old roman road. It is still in use today as Christian history centre.

Everywhere there are beautiful things to gaze at, wonderful independent bookshops, boutiques and cafes - with the river meandering through, punts and all....sigh. The only downside? It can be pretty crowded and congested, how rude of people to love it as much as me!!

Students biking to lectures fill the roads and on every railing it seems, notices for concerts, plays, public lectures and art events.

It makes me wish I had worked a little harder in my lower sixth, I was far to busy falling in love to work much for most of it, - what a place to be a student! Although looking up at all those learned men carved into the stone of the city, I wonder whether the pressures and the brilliance at every turn would have intimidated me if I had managed to scrape in?

It is strange (and I guess fundamentally useless!), to wonder what life would have been like in different circumstances, do you ever do that? I do it with no longing or regret just curiosity sometimes.

Anyway it was all looking impossibly beautiful on thursday, and I visited a few stockists with Wild Acre jewellery in mind, a little nosey around, my head full of plans and hopes!

This weekend the sun shone without a break and we had our first lunch outside. I love this moment in the year, and everywhere I look, green shoots are heading upwards. I direct sowed a few packets of hardy annual seeds for flowery loveliness in the summer, but the rest I keep til well into April when frosts are less common and they have a chance to lap up increasing amounts of daylight. Really just a quick flounce about with a rake, a sprinkle of water, and a scattering of seeds, pushed in a little bit so they don't get blown away or eaten by birds. Not exactly an arduous task to ensure armfuls of gorgeous flowers in a few months time. I am a truly lazy gardener, and this is maximum result for minimum time, money and effort, and I am totally converted to filling gaps with annual flowers - I love the meadowy types like ammi and orlaya (both cowparsley-esque), calendula, annual scabious, cosmos (frost tender so not planted yet), nigella and euphobia oblongata and bupleurum for foliage. Simples.

There isn't yet much colour in the garden - the woodland is seeing most of the action, little patches of creamy woodland anemones (hoping to pinch some more from the thousands in my in-laws' garden!;) ), the last of the hellebores, a few muscari and narcissi and masses of bluebells poking their green tips through the earth. Just enough for a few little posies around the house and some pussy willow to herald spring.

Jane, my lovely flower friend the other side of the pond, hosts a monthly flowers-in-the-house fest, pop over and say hi!