Everything except the glass and the ivy features in the very Talented Mr (Matt Whiley) Fox’s menu specially created for One Leicester Street’s Bar over the next coming month. I shall be there trying a few for sure. For more information on the menu and how to book a table go to the One Leicester Street facebook page or visit www.talentedmrfox.com.
Having worked for many years as a contemporary art curator before retraining as a garden and floristry designer, I’m always on the look out for stuff that bridges the gap between my past and present careers. The work of artist Wieland Payer does just that; Nature and landscape; its fragility and its malevolence, in and out of our hands, being his core subject.
I first encountered Payer’s work two years ago, when he was graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Printmaking. His work immediately stopped me in my tracks, catching my attention by being incredibly beautiful, while simultaneously tragic and dark. This was 2011 and he’d just completed a series of print works in which the remains of a man-made metropolis are being consumed by Nature. One such work Temple I, presents a possible future Angkor Wat scenario, where some sort of motorway flyover has fallen into decay and Nature takes hold among the ruins. In another work from this series titled Antenna Forest, radio masts lie felled like redundant technological trees, while another ironically titled New Life depicts a beautiful but terrifying mushroom cloud.
An obvious reference for these works is the kind of post-apocalyptic landscape described in Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1979 film Stalker.
However, it’s the connection of this work to the landscape tradition of German Romanticism that I find to be far more poignant. In particular the work of Caspar David Friedrich and the direct correlation in style and allegorical meaning between much of Payer’s work and Friedrich’s 1823-4 painting, oxymoronically titled The Wreck of Hope.
In this painting, the skeleton of a ship, identifiable as the HMS Griper, is just visible – Griper being one of two ships wrecked during William Edward Parry‘s 1920 and 1924 failed expeditions to the North Pole – hope is quite literally wrecked. Another work by Friedrich also seems particularly relevant in thinking about Payer’s work. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog painted in 1818, depicts a lone man standing on the precipice of a rock jutting out from a vast ocean. Looking out across the great expanse of water he contemplates his fragility in the face of Nature’s enormity.
While the works from 2011 have an Ozymandias-like foreboding quality to them; warning that all civilisations have the capability to fall apart, Payer’s most recent work takes a different tack. Rather than Nature running wild in amongst the debris of a fallen civilisation, these works instead seem to be suggesting a future in which the natural world is safeguarded from disaster, where it is controlled and kept in check by mankind. In one recent work from 2013 titled Wand II, an Eden project-style glass superstructure is shown as a ceiling to an apparently uninhabited vast and dense forest landscape. Whether or not this his other recent works are intended to present a more positive, optimistic view of the future does little to comfort me – beautiful as it is, this is not a future landscape I would hope for.
Little hands make light work of the fruit bounty offered up by the garden, but my plum jam subsequently caught on the bottom of the pan.
Today was a classic site visit in the pouring rain; standing surrounded by building detritus and imagining such a time as when we might all sit in the finished garden, in the sunshine, drinking cups of tea. Funny how whenever I think about one of my designs coming to life and being a real, habitable garden, it’s always on a sunny day. Something about optimism – and determinism – that all the mess will be transformed into the garden idyll promised by my design.
It’s been a long while since I first put pen to paper on this garden, but we’re on track now. Building work on the house is drawing to a close and everyone is starting to turn their heads to the garden. The best bit today? Seeing the beautiful Emery et Cie cement tiles installed as a surround to the sedum roof terrace. Such a nice detail. Can’t wait to see the rest of it come together now.
I have just finished installing a herb garden for Nuno Mendes, the Chef Patron of Viajante at Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green. It’s a bit of an unusual one, as the entire garden is planted in an eclectic array of vintage vessels on the window sills of the smaller sister restaurant Corner Room. I’m pretty confident everything will thrive, though some of the plants will quickly outgrow their pots and have to move on, so it will be an interesting, ongoing experiment.
It goes without saying that all the herbs are culinary; Thai Basil (Ocimum basilicum) and Shi-so (Perilla frutescens) feature as do some pot herb classics like Chives (Allium schoenoprasum) and Flat Leaf Parsley (Petroselinum crispin var. neapolitanum). The idea was to compile a selection of herbs, some of which could be cropped and used regularly (such as the different varieties of mint) and others that could be used for garnish or experimentation. The plants were sourced from the very lovely Anthony Lyman-Dixon at Arne Herbs and include among other varieties, a type of English Peppermint called Mitcham Black Mint that was nearly all but destroyed by the building of Gatwick Airport. Saved from extinction personally by Anthony, I have it on good authority that it makes a very good cuppa. Sadly, Arne Herbs is shutting up shop at the end of the year, so I’ll have to find someone else to supply me with unusual and rare herbs in the future, which may prove tricky as many of the trusted suppliers of rare and unusual herbs are just dealing in seeds these days, not plugs. Having just discovered him and the font of knowledge that he is in this area, I am selfishly, very upset to see him retire. The end of an era… as he told me, since the Lyman-Dixon have been growing herbs since the 1800s. I understand though, that he’s not hanging his hat up totally in retirement, but instead going to focus his attention on writing an illustrated Medieval Herbal Dictionary. I’ll look forward to having a nose through that.
It wasn’t just sourcing the plants that proved to be an interesting exercise for this miniature garden design, but sourcing the vessels too. Continuing with the theme of decoration already prevailing in the restaurant, I began a big hunt through antiques markets and online to find old tea caddies, tobacco jars, ice buckets and spice canisters. What a haul – it was like Christmas when they started arriving, box after box. My favourites are a George W. Horner floral tin tea caddy, a 19th century brass tobacco jar inscribed James Wilson and some quart and pint sized copper measuring cups which I imagine once served a purpose in a gin distilling house. Some containers when they turned up, were a little on the small size, barely accommodating the squattest of the 9cm plastic pots required to actually hold the plants – I’m hoping not too many of these end up in handbags, pretty tasty though they are.
I’m pleased to report that it didn’t rain and nor did the flowers die in the sweltering 30 degree heat was Portugal this last weekend. All went more than well, despite a few set backs; the Scabias arrived either dead or just as buds, the waxflower was pinky red, not creamy pink and a whole load of strange green lantern-like flowers arrived from the supplier as an apology. I guess it’s the thought that counts. It didn’t matter though, as by the time I came to inspect the bought stuff, I was already way too excited about the foraged stuff to care about the lack of cultivated stock I’d managed to get hold of. The important thing was that I had some beautiful roses, a car load of wild fennel and grasses that I’d cut from the coastal road verge on the way there and as far as the eye could see; amazing pine, Eucalyptus globulus and olive, all ripe for the picking. In the end the balance was right; the perfect combination of Portugal and England – just like the bride and groom.
Great news – One Leicester Street – where I do the flowers every week has been short listed for the interiors category of the Elle Decoration British Design Awards #BritishDesignAwards. Please vote! Voting closes at the end of the month….
Miria Harris Landscape, Gardens and Floristry Design 
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