Now
It's high summer here and the growing is at its most generous — everything full, fast and slightly unruly. With unpredictable weather, I am observing daily though with the plants are very resilient. I am growing more perennials and shrubs and finding that they need little attention or water but reliably providing colour and movement.
Garden and landscape design has been full-on this season. I'm working on several projects at once — a city garden, borders being renovated for low maintenance and climate resilience, a project with a large event space, and planting beds around an outdoors bath!
Celebration flowers are in full swing too, buckets and bouquets for weddings and events, cut fresh from the plots.
Saturday classes are running monthly: the art and craft of cut flowers, a relaxed introduction to tasks for the month with cake and coffee alongside. And in the evenings, when the light's good and the flowers are at their best, people have been coming to the plots to practise arranging with me; informal, hands-in-the-buckets sessions among the rows.
I've taken up a daily sketch practice. I am a true beginner which is hard but trying to pay attention with a pencil or brush for a few minutes most days. I find it very calming. French practise is much harder!
I'm deep in research on food forests and syntropic growing, thinking hard about how these systems could work in the field here and on other projects on the horizon.
And for book club: Moby-Dick. It's dense and quite slow but enjoying it more than I expected to
Updated June 2026
