Writing from here
Autumn smudging into winter snuck passed me unnoticed this year.
Between flu in October and tonsillitis in November I had a week’s brief respite up on my feet. I mooched about in the glasshouse intending to sort the dried flowers, only to discover, dismayed, that nine days in bed had allowed the mould to bloom blue over the lot. They were spoiled but I still fussed about them seeing what I could salvage. My throat felt dry and no amount of water could quench it but I was so focused on the flowers I didn’t notice. 48 hours later I was in A&E waiting for intravenous drugs to allow me to swallow again.
So energy sapped, like a Jane Austen heroine I took to my bed out of the damp. Too lumpen headed to writ emails or look at seed catalogues or even think about plants, I watched Netflix. Having exhausted all the crime dramas quickly, I turned - randomly - to an ancient series of The Chef’s Table.
The program features one chef per episode. Someone who is doing something singular and inspiring and a bit impossible. I was struck while watching each of them how they all shared an obsession with their ingredients. Artichoke, sprat or pig’s brain was transfigured with fire, salt or brine to make the undesirable desirable. Between the four hourly rounds of antibiotics I thought about how, as a gardener or florist, a direct relationship with our ingredients is also vital.
It’s obvious, but I’d lost sight of this a bit. The lure and demands of Instagram have often outcompeted that direct relationship. I might finally get round to cutting a bucket of dahlias only to spoil the experience of using them by thinking, ‘will I post this? Will people think it’s good? Good enough to tap their thumb twice?’ I am ruining a meditation on dahlias - plants I have grown from seed, now blooming into this impossibly symmetrical cluster of petals - because of strangers’ thumbs! It’s ridiculous and sad but I know this is old news. I don’t know anyone who currently wholly enjoys hanging out on Instagram and uses it in an easeful way. I have discovered beautiful things and small-scale makers and might stumble across an image that makes me stop and reconsider an amaranthus flower - just like that pig’s brain - but I do sometimes wonder if it, Instagram, is coaxing us towards a homogenous blob of sameness. It’s not helping my brain.
I know that florists are creative people and the good ones look beyond (or really hardly at all) at the flowers made by others. They find their inspiration in architecture, paintings, dance, the sky... I know this, but up until my binge of ‘The Chef’s Table’ I think I might have forgotten. My brain seeks out dopamine in a way that is counterintuitive. I can sink deep into scrolling only to crawl out of that hole 40 minutes later feeling insecure and overwhelmed.
Post illness I am resolving to spend less time on Instagram and more time on the stuff that lights up my brain. How can I slow down creativity and remove that pressure from the online world? How do I foster connection that works for me? Instagram can stay, but I want to use it sparingly. I want to dabble again in the analogue.
As an online reader of other people’s words, I am careless. I’ll scroll rapidly through a great article because it pops up while I am cooking pasta or in traffic or waiting at the school gate and about to have a bag hurled at my midriff. I am in a rush and I am not concentrating and there is no time for attention when everything is received through a rectangular screen, So I have an experiment to propose to you for 2026.
A year of letter writing. ‘Writing from here’, in a garden in the Welsh borders.
Once a month I’ll send out a real letter in the post to anyone who signs up. There might be 3 of you. It won’t be just a ramble on what I’ve been up to and it certainly won’t be a list of jobs for the month - there’s plenty of those living online already. I don’t quite *know* what I will write about but I want to think about this garden, the things I notice, about flowers and land and how difficult the practice of slowing down can be but why it really is important. I have a hunch that taking the time to print it on a letter and address the envelopes to people scattered around will help me to savour the experience and not just create ‘content’. (Other than the use of ‘product’ in place of ‘flower’ in floristry, I think I might hate this term the most).
It won’t be on exquisite seed embedded, handmade paper and tied with a silk ribbon because that will make it too expensive to send but I will try and make it a lovely thing to receive. A nicer paper, one of the good picture stamps to send it through the mail, some considered words. Something to anticipate and open with a cup of tea when you have a moment to yourself. Perhaps you have a fire to sit next to. A moment when you might usually fire up your screen.
It will cost £5 a month and you can sign up at any point between now and December 2026. I am not promising this experiment will run for longer than a year but I am excited to try 12 letters. The first will be sent in the third week of January when we tend to all need a bit of a boost. The deadline to sign up for that one will be Friday 16 January. I should mutter something about this making a good Christmas present for the flower and garden lover in your life but you’ll probably make that connection yourself.
I don’t expect you to write back but imagine if I got a few replies? I think Jane Austen would be tickled to know that my ‘taking to my bed’ inspired a return to the old fashioned art of letter writing. Now I’m off to cut some wintersweet to pair with the dried artemisia I did manage to save from the mould.
