The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 56
As the season beckons the garden to sleep back at Moorfield, we are deep in the season of personal growth on the other side of the world. 10.05.2025
I am sat beside a window waking slowly to the canopy of newly unfurling leaves of an ancient beech tree, it is luminous lime, backlit as it is by the early morning light and it’s subtle dance in the gentlest breeze is set to the song of a handful of unfamiliar sonnets. I am yet to recognise the bird calls of East Sussex, I wonder if that will have changed after a week in a garden considered one of the most biodiverse places in the United Kingdom, located a 20 minute drive from here, where mum’s home will be for the next week in a converted original fire station in the heartbreakingly bucolic town of Benenden. This where I am staying before heading to the accommodation arranged for me by Great Dixter, the garden I will be disappearing into for the next seven days of what one could only call a horticulturist’s idea of heaven.
For now I drink a strong coffee, the past 48 hours peeling off me, of long haul flights, humid layovers in far more tropical places, the usual car hire debacles inside international airports at dawn and the navigating of 8 lane freeways out of London alongside fleets of dwarfing semi-trailers. We abandon the fastest route for the most picturesque, that might give us some real sense of where we have come to.
Race lanes of bitumen become verdant narrow tunnels of hawthorn in flower and oak trees in fresh spring leaf, a show of twinkling lights for mile upon mile (which we quickly convert to kilometres in google), made of the sunshine through their overhanging branches has us sighing every few minutes. Roads roll over and through the undulating landscape, sunk down some of the way into the rich agricultural terra firma, where hand laid stone and the root systems of centuries old trees, the two sometimes knitted together by time, hold back the embankments of the country lanes. I keep thinking how much I want Hugo and Nes to see this, and I comfort my heart which misses them terribly already, that within a week, they will.
There are villages we happen upon that have us passing through slack-jawed, holding our breaths in awe, our hearts hastening at the almost wrenching charm. At times it makes my eyes water, the comeliness of it all and I wonder if somewhere, deep down in my DNA, afterall this is where a great deal of it has woven together over the last thousand years to eventually arrive me, its latest iteration, here in the year 2025, to be in this place, even if only as a visitor now. It is not lost on me that amongst the people we pass, there blood will hold the same genetic markers as my own, made strangers over centuries, social upheaval and the waves of migrations that set in motion that saw us, family, land on far off shores.
From weaving fairytale lanes of thatched rooves, roses and pubs dating back to the 1300s, dotted with drinkers enjoying golden lightly fizzing ales in the warming sun underneath Union Jack bunting, celebrations for 80 years since VE Day having just ticked by. Medieval main streets populated by kids in twos and threes, chatting over one another in tartan blazers, pleated skirts and loosened school ties, ambling unaffected through ancient history that houses their grocer and shoe shop, bookstore and bakery, so commonplace it is for them to live amongst such architectural bounty. Tudor “black and white” buildings, wonky and sloping in disconcerting directions, stand up for their thousandth year despite, stone and clay laid in painstakingly decorative patterns, their beauty making you gasp and gush simultaneously.
We ride a few gutters and the edges of islands, sleep deprived as we are driving the narrow lanes that connect the labyrinth of hamlets and towns in the ginormous Mercedes SUV we’ve been given to compensate a mistake on our car hire provider’s end. We manoeuvre it down roads best suited to one mode of transport, preferably of the equine variety if one wishes to use both lanes provided, or one average sized piece of farming machinery, of which we better fit this category, feeling not much smaller than the bailer that causes oncoming traffic to slam on their brakes around countless blind bends. Though we have several near death experiences and narrowly avoided expensive side swipes of vegetation, in the moments inbetween, I can feel my shoulders dropping at last and the stored tension in my body, leeching from my skin and with every exhale of relief to be here and traversing through such loveliness.
These past few weeks have been, well, a bit of shit storm, to be honest, perhaps the last couple of months to be more precise. The garden is fine, it’s always fine, just ticking along doing its thing, autumnal shifts in full swing as I leave it for the seasons last month before winter. It feels like I have been saying this for years, I know, that things have been chaotic, because in truth, I have been but rather than curse it, I know that that is just what life looks like at times, when you’re squeezing every last drop from it, that is in fact, often what growth looks like.
Leaving behind Little Oak to start again at Moorfield is growth but even before that, leaving behind my corporate career to pursue a life in plants was growth, everytime I have ever taken stock, devised what’s not working and pivoted to release that expectation of myself and follow a path that felt more aligned with who I was becoming, has been growth, and growth is rarely pretty, or painless, or easy, or fast……but it is essential.
A few years ago I found a saying that I have shared here before and I am now opening the book I am writing with it. So perfectly it sums up my journey into gardening and the road I took to get to know myself better and to realise I was simply returning to who I had begun life as, before the layers of experiences untethered me to my core self. It made me recognise that in order to grow I had to abandon ideas of control and perfectionism, a family trait, and I had to embrace being uncomfortable, exposed and open and not just on the odd occasion but often.
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction”. Cynthia Ochelli
We are not dealing with anything unique, it is just life stuff, the stuff you’re all dealing with, or have dealt with, no doubt and it all feels big because it is relative to each of us. Sometimes it actually is just BIG stuff. Hugo and I will go toe to toe with uncomfortable, downright stressfull too, it is our wheelhouse to fight for what we want, we grew up in those worlds so it is second nature. We do it, so that Nes has to less. Regardless, this does not mean it doesn’t rattle us and we have wobbly days where we think, we wish we could be happy not doing the things we do but then we know, that would be hard as a daily commitment, resisting who we are and what truly fulfils us, and not simply some hard moments in a life that is largely happier for it.
So, as life is pegging lemons at us, we drive windows down to the airport, throwing caution to the wind (not actually, it was 4 degress outside). Beautiful destinations await us, the best food will be relished, the most wonderful architecture will be marvelled at, landscapes will be passed through and leave their impression on our future thoughts, we will show our little girl the art of the Greats in the most revered galleries and the art of the nobodies, splashed across ancient stone walls still with something to say.
The history of our world will be ambled through in an era those times could not have ever fathomed possible and it will be grounding, how infinitesimal we truly are. I will drift, disbelieving, through the gates of my most admired gardens in the world, and I will leave back through them, full to overflowing with everything they teach me. For years to come, I will draw on these days for inspiration, for courage, for joy and for stories.
As mum and I pull in front of the towering man-made walls of Knepp Castle garden, my first garden visit on this botanical adventure, with it’s ancient heavy timber gate, with a tiny door cut into it with a heavy, rusted iron clasp, it creaks appropriately, as I have to bend fully over to crawl through to the wondrous world on the other side. I know something waits for me there. I can feel it. I know as I step through, I step into a new chapter of growth in my own life, a chapter of great learning and evolution in my understanding of gardens, and how I garden. I know the impact this trip will have as the sun breaks through the clouds as I straighten up and put my face to it, emerging through the protective walls to a very new garden, in a very old place, a very new ethos in the foundation of a very old world and I am struck by the importance and necessity that is change. Change that is forward moving, change that is evolution, change that is growth, be you a plant, or a person.
Come grow with me! Pip xo
The story of the visit to Knepp Castle will be realeased as part of The Garden Gadabout section, here on our Substack.
Where to find out more about where I am going and how you can follow along….
Will travel for gardens!
As autumn settles in here in the Southern Hemisphere my focus is in fact on a European late Spring, and what to pack to…
A little Moorfield Autumn Gallery….
The Garden Video Diary News…..
We will be releasing a video upon on our return which will open with the month leading up to our trip (April) and our month in the UK and Europe (May), so a double whammy, covering the gardens we experienced, with a look at the perspective with which we left Moorfield behind, beginning to shut down for the winter and what persepctive we’ve gained and what we decide to bring back to Moorfield after visiting so many of the world’s best gardens. These gardens also include many that are entirely organic and are also, biodiversity hotspots, which Moorfield is (organic) and will hopefully, one day become (richly biodiverse). In the interim paid subscribers who would normally have access to the monthy video diary will have access to a whole bunch of video, written and photographic content of this trip, and there is more about that in the section below, Will travel for gardens!
You’ll find Garden Video Diaries uner The (Moor)Field Guide section, HERE.
A look at our most recent Garden Gadabout story…..
The Garden Gadabout
I once thought it quite serendipitous that at the moment Hugo and I left Tasmania and our much loved Little Oak, that one of the gardens I had found the most inspiring since leaving my corporate life to dedicate it to horticulture, was coming onto the market. To me, this garden had it all, it was perfectly in balance to the landscape it sat amongst while entirely different to it, they sat harmoniously together, structured and carefully designed, and yet effortlessly whimsical, romantic even without being frivolous. It was both ornamental and productive and the two things were seamlessly blended, luxuriantly planted in parts and masterfully restrained in others. It was no wonder that it pulsed off every magazine and book it had ever featured in and there were many, and off my screens, where I had feverishly followed everything its creator shared.
Wonderful read Pip, what a fantastic adventure with your mum! Looking forward to seeing and reading about it ✨
Wonderfully joyous. Look forward to all your tales of adventure 👏💐