Nest & Nurtured
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Read more: From Palace Walls to Paper: A Material History of Covering Surfaces
From Palace Walls to Paper: A Material History of Covering Surfaces
The blade slides beneath aged paper, separating decades from plaster. She works slowly, careful not to tear what she's uncovering: beneath magnolia woodchip lies mustard velvet flock, beneath that a William Morris acanthus in faded green, deeper still a hand-blocked geometric from perhaps the 1920s, and finally, against the original plaster, fragments of something older, a pattern so worn the design barely registers. Five layers. Five families. Five distinct moments when someone stood in this room and decided: this pattern, this colour, this is what we want surrounding us.
The smell is particular: wheat paste gone sour, pigment oxidised, paper fibres returning to pulp. Her hands work the scraper whilst her mind works the archaeology. Each layer a choice about beauty, about fashion, about what walls should say when they stop being merely structural and become expressive.
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Read more: Autumn & Winter Botanicals: Native British Plants for Colder Months
Autumn & Winter Botanicals: Native British Plants for Colder Months
October morning in a Somerset garden. The mist has not lifted yet but she is already outside, secateurs in hand, breath visible in cold air. The roses are finished, their hips swelling where blooms once were. The dahlias blackened by first frost lie collapsed against their stakes. Everything exuberant has retreated. This is when the garden shows what it truly is, stripped of summer's abundance, revealing the bones beneath. The yew hedge stands dark and solid.
The holly glitters with berries no bird has touched yet. Teasel seed heads catch drops of condensation, geometric and perfect in their decay. These are not reluctant survivors but plants evolved for precisely this: short days, long nights, frost settling in hollows, Atlantic gales. They do not merely endure winter. They inhabit it. She has been learning this slowly, through three autumns spent observing rather than intervening, through winters watching which plants hold their form whilst others collapse into mulch. The garden's true character emerges now. Not in May's explosion but in November's patient architecture. This is when you discover whether you have built sanctuary or merely arranged decoration.
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