Dear Readers,
Welcome to our new format, we hope it finds you ready to settle down with a good cuppa or a glass of something stronger in a favourite comfy spot.
I show up here to be truthful about what gardening has done for me, what it has meant, how it changed me, and us, and our approach to life. This is not the first place I have told this story but it is the first place I have been able to tell it properly. I show up here to be truthful about what it really takes to create the gardens we have and do, as we did at Little Oak, like we do here, at Moorfield……with not a lot of time, or money but all the enthusiasm and all the knowledge that having done this before, affords us.
I offer you two perspectives into this garden.
The first is the “The Journal”, writing that captures the emotional journey that creating or tending a garden can take one on and expresses my relationship, our relationship to our gardens and all they’ve helped us to process and understand, relinquish and rouse. We know first hand from years of telling our story to others and hearing back from them, that gardens mean so very much more to the people who make them and enjoy them, than just plants put in the ground. “The Journal” is what you have received today and will alternate with our other offering.
And that is, “The (Moor)Field Guide”, an intellectual look at what we do and how we do it here, the bits and bobs you can use in your own gardening endeavours and while much of this is available anywhere and everywhere, this is our particular take on them based on our experiences of creating large food and flower gardens, organically, with a few added extra’s to ensure it is valuable for you as gardener’s. The first (Moor)Field Guide will be released next Friday, and every other Friday after that.
Thanks for showing up here to follow our story, we hope it brings you joy, a chance to reflect, or learn something new, or both, a chance to see yourselves in us or escape into a world nothing like yours. Just thank you for being here.
Pip and Hugo xo
I wander in the dropping light, all is backlit golden and the air is a dance of wee winged creatures that glow like tiny drifting stars. I spot my first ladybug on the new maroon and deep green rose growth, the leaves as glossy as her vermillion shell with black spots.
A smile is pulled up from down in my depths, waiting down there all winter, wide as it is, stretching in the sunshine across my face. I sigh and the breath seems to exorcise something from within me, my shoulders drop and I am present in the moment with my little friend, not away in thoughts of what has gone or what might come. I am present often these days, it’s been this way for years now.
There is a happiness that this time of year, Spring brings that few things can meet the potency of; my child’s laughter, her embrace, a room full of friends, good food and music, the ascension of a plane or taking to the open road for adventure with my little family. Those moments I watch Hugo from afar, going about his day, in quiet gratitude……and watching the gardens we create together, become their own little worlds.
I tell my little lady bug friend who I crouch down to watch, to tell her friends about this new garden she has found. I tell her I have planted lots of things they will like. Achillea, Scabiosa, Alliums and that soon they will flower. I tell her I will plant more year after year, Sweet Alyssum, Queen Anne’s Lace, Cornflower, until they cannot want for anything else. I tell her to tell all the little things of this world, that they are welcome here, the creepy crawlies too. If they all come, there will be balance between them.
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