The (Moor)Field Guide: 11

Late Autumn, Mid May 2024. The Glasshouse. Veg & Berry Patch, Cut Flower Garden & Orchard Prep for next Growing Season. Propagating Perennials from The Long Border for The Dry Garden.

The Long Border in full autumnal tilt.

Dear friends and lovely readers!

Welcome to late autumn here at Moorfield. The air has thinned and appears in clouds of breath in those early mornings I duck out to the garden, Wednesday bounding along behind me, her nose to the dewy grass while mine runs almost as soon as I step outside. The world turned russet and brass, colours of gold coins and horn instruments, polished timber antiques and reds that have no likeness anywhere else but the leaves they pulse from against the real world, like something unearthly altogether.

Whenever I see it, I want to freeze it there, keep it that highest of frequency’s but perhaps that is what makes autumn so magical, that it comes and goes before you can become too accustomed to it’s beauty, leaving you wanting more for no sooner have those leaves blazed clinging precariously to their trees, do they brown on the ground beneath, or the golden light set aglow all it touches, do grey, bulging clouds smother it with shadow and rain.

So, everyday it is here, I am savouring the beauty of our garden at this time of turning, in a state of most beautiful decay and already, with winter not even upon us my thoughts, and garden tasks, are full with the anticipation of spring. Winter, though I love it’s sparkling white frosts and hanging mists, it’s crystalline light, the excuse for thick woollen blankets by crackling fires and going to bed early with a good story but still, even after we enter our second decade in eachother’s lives, she is a reluctant friend. I know she is as necessary as all the seasons before her but I am a child of the far northern tropics, heat and humidity to me more natural than pinched cheeks and stiff joints, naked branches and stalled growth.

And so I find myself, prematurely of course, beckoning spring long before it has even come into view and distracting myself with this reality with the happy inbetween of autumn, where the anxiety of yet another dry day gives way damp relief and where it is cool enough to plan and plant for spring, daydreaming all the while of what our next here will look like, my choices now, pushing up then. I plant more berries for little Nes whose joy in eating them this frst season they’ve fruited, I bottle in my memory, it will be one of my favourites once she is grown. I pull apart perennials and pluck out new plants growing wherever they landed, I shake crisp seed heads into my hands and fill my pockets, remembering which pocket is which, rudbeckia in my right, agastache in my left.

Enjoy this latest edition of (Moor)Field Guide, when I speak to you next, winter will have arrived and I will bunkered down in the glasshouse writing to you.

Pip, Hugo and family xo

NOTE: I am still without my camera, as many of you know I broke my rathe expensive Canon which I normally shoot on and we were planning to begin filming on when I did. I am told in the next month I will be able to get my replacement but for now I settle for my phone images and video which I don’t love. As soon as it arrives I will not only relish being able to capture higher quality images once again but Hugo and I will begin the video sessions we have planned which take you inside Moorfield a little more intimately and make it easier for us to explain how and what we do, alongside the still images and written word. These mini-movies will live here on Substack, under Moorfield TV. So, thank you for your patience, it’ll be worth the wait.

Now, let’s begin the (Moor)Field Guide.