Space and simplicity

I have just finished reading Margaret Forster's book Keeping the world away - a novel about the effect that Gwen John's painting of the corner of an attic bedroom has on the women who hang it on their walls.

It is, in part, a study of the yearning for simplicity and control symbolised by the spare, composed painting.

I enjoyed the book very much and was thinking of it today while I drove though the sublime landscape of deep cleft valleys and deep reflective lochs that is between here and Loch Fyne.

It is a beautiful, beautiful drive, I was on my own in the car and it is quite the most relaxing thing I have done this week. I was going up to The Tree Shop, run by the Ardkinglas tree nursery to pick up some beautiful white birch trees - Betula utilis "Jacquemontii snowqueen" which I am intending to use to make a small glade at this wedding in ten days time. The idea is that it will make the large space a bit more intimate and give a sense of enclosure for the guests who want to sit down after the meal away from the music.

At the moment the state of the house is getting to me. It is completely my own fault so I can't really complain - but I do. It isn't really a case of it not being clean - it is just that we have far too much stuff in a house with no storage and I try to run a business at the same time. Add into this mix we bought kitchen furniture before we have enlarged the kitchen and that we are all messy, messy creatures who can't seem to pick up anything off our seemingly magnetic floors.

The result is a feeling of camping in amidst piles of toppling stuff - it is driving me mad and I now want to move out into Gwen John's little attic with only a chair, a desk and a vase of primroses.

The most uncool post ever!

I have finally got around to buying another copy of Adam Nicolson's book Perch Hill.

I bought my original copy in 1999 or 2000 as part of what Euan refers to as my "stalking" of Nicolson's wife the garden writer Sarah Raven. As far as I can make out, this alleged "stalking" consisted of knowing that she has a cottage on the Sound of Mull, meeting her accidentally a couple of times and buying this book which is about their move to Perch Hill Farm in East Sussex. Perhaps I wittered on a bit as well!

It is at its core one of those "daft city types moving to the country" books, but it is really much more - it chimes with my experience of the seasons, the drive to burrow into a valley, the chill spare reality of mud as well as meadows, the idea that you have to commit to an ideal - Nicolson's "Bright field" - with everything you have.

It is one of the books I re-read regularly. Or at least I did, until I lost it. I know what will have happened - I have a bad habit of forcing people to read books I enjoy, pressing volumes on them as they leave the house. Of course I never get them back and I lose most of my favourite books that way. Now I have it back in my shelves again and have already started the reread.

Flower Confidential Part 1

One of the few advantages of still feeling rotten is that I have had a chance to start reading Amy Stewart's new book Flower Confidential. I had assumed that I would race through it and report today but unfortunately I am still so woozy that I am having to take my time. As I am a "race through it" type of girl it does me good to slow down and it is a book which probably deserves 3 or 4 reports anyway.

Amy is an American garden writer who has already written a couple of books, one on her first garden and the other on earthworms. Flower Confidential shows the journey of a cut flower - from breeding, through growing, packing, sale and finally to vase. One of the quotes on the back jacket is "Amy Stewart understands that a good book can be about a subject as commonplace as the ground beneath our feet - if the author has a passion to share it" and I think that pretty much sums it up. If you like the kind of book that is about cod or lighthouses brought to you with passion, then you will love this.

I came to cut flower growing from the garden side - I grew them for myself, I expanded the patch and sold some on . . . . In many ways I have seen that as an advantage - I have not had to bother with the conventional way of doing it - but it does mean that I have little practical knowledge of what goes on inside the large tunnels of the multinational flower grower. I am finding it all fascinating.

The most fascinating bit so far though appeals to the bit of me that wanted to be an ancient historian when I was little. Like this quote

"Roses are not yet in full bloom here - in fact they are scarce - we could just barely get together the thousand that we sent you . . . even with picking the ones that ought not to be picked till tomorrow. We had all the narcissi you wanted, so instead of the two thousand you asked for we sent four thousand".

This is an extract from a letter written on papyrus in Roman Egypt, shortly before the birth of Christ.

The photo is of my favourite hyacinth - City of Haarlem - exactly the colour of butter.

I have been sorting out the links on the side bar - please let me know if you are not on (I keep forgetting people as I look at blogs through a circuitous route) or if you are in the wrong category.

Another use for buttons . . .

I don't usually copy ideas directly - usually original inspiration bubbles away in my brain for so long that it turns into something completely different.

I have to admit, however, that these button fridge magnets that I have made are a direct steal from Kaari Meng's beautiful book The French-Inspired Home.

The book is based on Meng's Hollywood based shop French General and it is full of the kind of photographs that make you want to move right in. It has a number of craft projects - I would say that the patterns are probably for someone who knows what they are doing as the directions are very basic - but more than anything it made me wish that I had the type of house where a 'gift wrapping station' with spools of ribbon, baskets of silk flowers and SHARP scissors would be a possibility.

Our house is more a "Who has moved the Sellotape now?" kind of place. But now I have no excuse for losing all the drawings that come back from school - they are firmly buttoned to the fridge.