Embracing winter

4 Apr

back then

I used to really hate winter, especially during what I think of as the ‘corporate years’, where all there was to look forward to was getting up at an ungodly hour in the pitch dark, defrosting a frozen car with anything vaguely scrapey from the glove box or floor (most recently this comprised a wooden spatula and, very ineffectively, a small lead urn - needs must!). Freezing cold hands gripping an unheated steering wheel with the heating blasting whilst queueing on the M62 for hours on end in driving rain, lying snow or occasionally you got lucky enough to be completely dazzled by a blindingly low, sunrise or sunset.

Daylight was glimpsed briefly from behind a computer screen within a strip-light illuminated, air conditioned office full of people coughing and spluttering. The only encounter with actual daylight was during an occasional lunch break dash to the local sandwich shop.

To really rub salt in the wound my birthday is precisely one week after New Years Eve, quite possibly the most depressing time for a birthday. The Christmas decorations have just been packed away, everywhere looks bare, everyone is broke, ill or both and restaurants close to recover from all the festive fun and frolicking. In other words, it was beyond miserable, so I totally get it if you are really not a lover of our UK winter!

But now that I live & work differently, I have the time and space to observe, to notice and really appreciate the true beauty of winter.

Winter is generally considered a tricky time for designing. There are few, if any, flowers in the garden, so the usual suspects to work with are evergreens, berries, dried flowers or seed heads with imported and/or forced flowers.

But this is not where I get my thrills!

You may well know already that I get those from the decaying, the fading and the skeletons. All the things considered ‘past their best’, that people ignore and probably even tread on in their rush to pluck a rogue December flowering rose, or to get inside from the (incessant) rain.

I’m often over-faced and bewildered by the sheer choice of summer flowers and foliages vying and yelling for attention and a real sense of calm comes over me when they all go away. Then the searching and observing can begin in earnest and a cast of thousands reveal themselves - the gnarled, contorted and decaying.

Honestly, I could wax lyrical for hours about all the treasures I’ve found.

In winter, do winter

Instead of trying to make some version of summer, I find the most rewarding way to appreciate winter is to use only what is available and visible at that time and that time only (although I do love to keep a sense of the expired year-round.)

For years I hoarded an oregano stem which had contorted into a beautiful loop, it featured in many of my designs, but I think it’s been thrown away or lost - whichever, I am extremely sad about it - disproportionately so in fact.

Some of my most treasured stems have literally come off the floor or after being cast aside in a clear up - including (I think as I’m not always totally sire what they are!):

§ A trail of nasturtium stem which currently dangles ‘artfully’ over a wall light

§ An iris leaf (?) with the best kink ever

§ A piece of squash stem with such architectural qualities it blow my tiny mind

§ Skeletonised epimedium leaves which I think are just my favourite thing ever.

Land Art

I’ve created huge winter installations using things found on the floor, including two large wreaths on the Terrace garden at Harewood House.

made from foraged and found materials from the woodland floor & even the compost heaps.

Finally, I’ll sign off with an Instagram post I wrote in January 2022:

In defence of January - an unpopular opinion 🤣

Most hate January but I’d like to say a few words in its defence.

I can rise with the sun without needing an alarm and snuggle back into my PJs as soon the early darkness returns, a luxurious slowdown of warming cosiness and hibernation.

But it’s outside where January shares her most precious treasures and I can truly indulge my fascination for the overlooked and ordinary. Peep behind the limelight-stealing first few flowers and backlit seed heads; scratch beneath the surface around emerging bulbs, evergreen foliages and multi-coloured winter stems and January will expose its gloriously complex, soft underbelly of thousands of unseen natural works of art. The partly decomposed leaf, the interesting hues and shades of the soggy or shrivelled overdue-for-compost-heap-leaves; the twisted and contorted shapes of last years stems. Here you’ll find a forgotten sub-culture of detritus and debris that I lose myself in. Exquisite shapes and beautiful shades of death and dying.

Of course I love flowers, they will return soon enough but for now I relish the lack of pressure the flowers can create and spend precious time amongst my little unsung heroes, before heading inside to a huge hug from a mug of overly sweet hot chocolate in my PJ’s. Embrace wintertime and be kinder to January 😆💥