The Orchard Studio

Distant memories

Although I am trying to fully embrace the whole winter thing, particularly the pre-Christmas hysteria which descends upon Bath as reliably as the cold, I do find myself longingly looking at some of my shots from this summer.

So I thought I would put together a montage of some of them to cheer myself up!  Not that I am particularly miserable, there is so much to be done and i am also working on new projects for early next year, but I miss the long days and the brief moments of warm sunshine. I am not a winter person at all! 

I also don't want to wish my life away by hoping for winter to pass quickly, and I think with having had a bad back for ages and not getting out much that some brisk wintery walks might do me good!  Especially now that they have been prescribed as an ideal way to help my back to heal.  I managed to injure myself in September and have been recovering since, but happily things are improving and I will be back planting and pruning early next year.

Gnome sweet gnome

It is time to come clean about my gnome collection. This is Colin, smoking his pipe and hanging out in the herb garden. Named after someone I know. I have just written a new article for Bath Life about gnomes so my *ahem* interests will become widely known!

Seriously though. I love these little chaps and I've had a few in the garden as a joke. More recently I've started buying these ceramic painted gnomes, manufactured in Germany and about fifty years old.  They are congregating in our hallway at the moment, garnished with toadstools and dried allium heads.  They do make me smile every time I arrive home.

They are becoming very popular, I think because they have a nostalgic kitsch appeal and they are also very much part of the whole surburban middle England gardening vibe.  To most people they are the epitome of bad taste, but I think they are jolly and funny and I love it when people spot mine in the garden and are appalled!

This is Arthur, he keeps things nicely swept!  Recently acquired from Michele at Cowboys and Custard.  She is a bad influence on me. 

My collection stands at around 15 gnomes now and at some point soon I am going to have to stop because I won't be able to get in the house!

The Women's Farm and Garden Association

My debut article has come out in the Bath Life Magazine, sadly no link to that, but I will scan it at some point!  I've been really pleased with the layout and treatment of the article and am looking forward to seeing the next one, on the Botanical Gardens, out next week.

In the meantime, I have been writing about the Women's Farm and Garden Association, a wonderful old organisation which provided me with my excellent horticultural training about eight years ago.  Yesterday I revisited my training garden which is in Bath.  My teacher, Susan Fremantle, is an amazingly knowledgeable woman and runs a wonderful vast garden, set in a valley called Hill Lodge. The garden is set up for teaching horticulture, having all manner of gardens within a garden, including orchards, cottage garden, huge herbaceous borders, vegetable gardens, a lake, a coppice, a bog garden, an alpine border plus a very lovely rose pergola.

While I was still working there the garden was accepted into the National Gardens Scheme and the first day open was a day to remember!  Panic stations as we hoovered the lawns and dusted the roses! We knew that every pernickity gardener from around would be coming to criticise and point out weeds we had missed! 

Anyway, it was lovely to go back and see how mature the garden has become and to say hello to old favourites. Things are still incredibly busy at the Orchard Studio, with new commissions coming in and I am also working on current projects.  We are frantically landscaping, planting, designing and consulting for new projects next year!  Thankfully we have had a lovely warm and long Autumn which has meant that we have been able to plant more than usual.

These old photos are from the 1930's and 1950's and show women being trained in gardening skills with the WFGA at the training garden which used to be at Swanley College.

The Botanical Gardens in Bath

I have been in love with the Botanical Gardens at Royal Victoria Park since I moved to Bath nearly fifteen years ago.  I have spent hours wandering around the gardens, I walk Ned there, my daughter used to trundle around the lawns when she was tiny and I have even had a blind date there years ago!  These days I tend to stare at the trees and take lots of photos.  I love the quiet and the peace of the place and if I get there early or late tend to get the place to myself.

 

I got there early this morning to take these shots as I am writing about the gardens for a magazine and the light was so fantastic.  Everything had dew on it and the spiders had woven their cobwebs on everything.  When I got back in the car I had a spider in my hair.  Not ideal. 

This place is beautiful at any time of year and being only ten minutes from where we live, I feel particularly lucky to have this place on my doorstep.  The only downside to the gardens is the multitude of squirrels living there. In themselves ok if you like grey squirrels, but Ned, my dog, would give almost anything to get his paws on one, so sometimes walking him there is an ordeal.  Today I left him at home! Imagine trying to take photos with a yapping dog on the end of the lead?

Autumn news

This week has been a blur of activity once more.  Autumn has come and work is not letting up, something which I am of course grateful for. I am getting very excited about my new online shop, details which will be revealed as soon as the website is up and running. I am going to be selling lovely vintage garden things, and I've had a lot of fun searching for them.  I will also be stocking my absolute favourite garden related items and beautiful cards from certain well known card designers!

My new article for the Bath Life magazine has gone off to print so I can't wait to see how that looks. I've got a fortnightly double page spread, which means I have to take lots of photos!  I am so lucky that they are letting me write about my garden passions and using all my photography too. Better get on with it then!

We are still busy building gardens, and just completed a contemporary one with a large curved blue wall in it!  Not a style we often get to do in Georgian Bath.  We spent yesterday planting tree ferns and huge trees and shrubs. The weather was fantastic, I do adore this time of year. Woken up to grey skies and rain today.  It could not last forever, but it puts me in the mood to do some cooking and rustle something up from my new Nigel Slater cookbook, Tender.  Highly recommended read and I think I'll be giving it to various people for Christmas this year.

Pretty in pink

This September has seen a lot of dry and warm weather. So much so that much strangeness is afoot in the garden, including bulbs coming up, bees still very active and a lot of spring-like activity! 

I love this rose!  I can't remember where I got it from but it is a long flowering type and such a great colour.  These shots were all taken on my film camera, Pentax K1000. It seems to create an almost dreamy lomo-like effect, and I use it all the time these days!

More pink, this time snapdragons.

Not really pink, but my beloved Verbena bonariensis.  Still going strong!  Has anyone else experienced any out-of-season activity?  I would love to hear from you!  I am really making the most of this weather and spending as much time as possible outside, it seems to good to be true!

Busy with Polaroid

I was really pleased to see that I have had my portrait of Grace chosen as Click Of The Day on the Shutter Sisters Blog.  I discovered this last night as someone had left a comment on my Flickr page!  I have long admired the work of the Shutter Sisters, so am thrilled that I was chosen!  Grace was sitting at our kitchen table doing her homework and wearing my sweater and her weird funny glasses she loves, and I suddenly thought how incredibly old fashioned the scene was, especially with my vintage typewriter in the background, recently found for £1 at a car boot sale!  Grace looks like she is preparing to write her screenplay!

This Polaroid was taken in my garden as although we are headed towards Autumn everything still feels quite summery, despite the amazing spider's webs garlanding everything!  When I go out in the morning to let Ned out I find myself walking through them and having to pick spiders out of my hair!  I think Verbena bonariensis has to be one of my top five favourite plants for it's ability to flower for so long and to give the garden a certain delicate glamour.  I like to plant it in all the wrong places where it blocks paths and gets in the way!  Both of these photos were taken on my Polaroid Land Camera, SX-70 using 600 film and a neutral density filter.  My supply of film is dwindling and I hope the new production of it happens soon!

Gone AWOL

I have been up to my eyes in it recently and not had time to update my beloved blog and have rather neglected it and my readers!  Anyway, things have been extremely busy down at the Orchard Studio where I have found myself working on several projects all at the same time and meeting myself coming back the other way too!

We are about to start planting a very large cottage garden style border and I've been lucky to have very nice clients who are happy for me to plant my own choice of plants, which is fantastic and I can't wait to get started on it!  We will be planting a lot of alliums!

These images are taken from the lovely website of Hannah Nunn who is a very talented designer and both produces and showcases these wonderful lights.  We met recently via Twitter and I was really impressed by the unusual and quirky designs.  I especially love these and am saving up for the fox lampshade! 

Talking of Twitter, I have resisted getting involved in it for some time and have been encouraged by my friend Louise who is a keen devotee.  I am starting to get the point of it and so have become enmeshed in the addictive world of tweeting and am not sure where it will all end.  Michele from Cowboys and Custard has also taken to it like a duck to water and is tweeting her head off day and night. Please do follow me if you get a chance and wish to hear news from the horses mouth!

More Moss Magic

Continuing with my ongoing obsession with moss and moss art, I wanted to show these images from the Brooklyn based artist Edina Todoki.  Her work can be seen at Mossitka and includes Banksy style graffiti crafted from living moss.

I would love to see this around Bath perhaps on some of the less than lovely buildings springing up here and there!  This could be a great guerrilla gardening exercise, and if anyone would like to join me please email me or leave a comment!

 

This is just brilliant.  And I imagine quite strokeable!

 

The moss making recipe can be found on this blog and involves mixing moss with water and sugar and blitzing in a blender to make moss milkshake, which can be painted on to any surface, using a template or in a freehand type of way.

 

For the more sedate among you, it can also be used to age up terracotta pots or anything in the garden which you want mossy. 

A blast from the past

Sometimes I wonder why I love gardening, gardens and plants so much.  And why I love my tiny dachshund too...

Here I am at William Robinson's house, Gravetye Manor in Sussex, in the late 1960's, checking out the borders and accompanied by both dachshund and enormous poodle. Not sure where he came from...

William Robinson is known for introducing the idea of the English wild flower garden to a fairly staid Victorian way of gardening.  His planting styles are much copied and used today.

Clearly this is where it all began for me.  And I'm wearing Start-rite shoes.