Japan

A whole palette of inspiration… top to bottom, left to right; cherry, bamboo, Ginkaku-ji, family, Tokufu-ji, Shoren-in, moss, volcano (Mt. Fuji), Arashiyama, gravel, steps, blossom, Tenryu-ji

Plant Pot

My first venture into product design is complete. Yesterday I planted up nine of my Series 1 Plant Pots. Designed and made in collaboration with the very talented sculptor and prop maker William Overstall, they feature as table planters on the terrace and in the bar at One Leicester Street. They are cast in a material (I won’t bore you with the technical stuff) which has the appearance of polished concrete and they perfectly fit a 12cm plastic pot inside, making it really easy to swop plants around. They have also been designed so as they can be used for cut flowers – of course. I’m hoping that I’ll get to cast some larger versions for a job I’m working on, but in the meantime I’ll just have to satisfy myself by playing around with the content of these gorgeous little mini numbers. Oh and they are available to order (contact me for details), and wouldn’t they make a rather lovely Christmas present filled with a little winter flowering bulb or something… I’ll leave you to ponder on that.

Forage New Forest

I’ve always been partial to a mushroom and I love a bit of foraging for plant material to use in my floristry work or wild herbs to use in cooking, and yet I had never (that is until last Sunday) foraged for mushrooms. What a joy. I can honestly say, it ranks among the best things I have ever done and thanks to the brilliant  John at Forage London, I am now armed with some very basic but essential knowledge that means I can identify some delicious edibles such as Hedgehogs, Yellow legs, Bay Boletes and Honey Fungus – as well as few demon varieties that should be given a very wide berth. And my favourite? A beautiful slimy little parasitical number called the Porcelain Mushroom. So beautiful. Shame there weren’t enough for us to have a nibble. Next time.

Fruit Part 2

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.

Fruit

Married to a chef, I’ve always half a mind on stuff that can be eaten in the garden. Our garden isn’t huge, so I can’t get a lot in without compromising the way it looks and feels. Edible gardens are all very well, but once you’ve eaten it all, what are you left with? A blank patch of earth to look out onto. Not very good. Evergreen herbs (such as Thyme) are always a winner in the battle for space, whereas favourites like Lovage I tend to hide round the corner out of sight so that when they start looking ropey and die back, they don’t interfere too much with the view. However, with two small children, the plant I make room for every year is the Alpine Strawberry. There is nothing more delightful than those tiny red dots of sweetness to go hunting for – however small the patch of them might be. Hunting for fruit at the bottom of the garden was certainly one of my earliest childhood memories and inspired by this, although I am not able to do much in my own garden, I have slowly been infiltrating the garden of the Harris grandparents. And it’s working. This morning the whole family was out picking Blackcurrants and Raspberries, which Tom then stuffed with wild fennel pollen. Delicious. Next up, the Oregon Thornless Blackberry outside their kitchen is about to give a plentiful supply of fruit that should sort us for Blackberry Crumble ’til Christmas. That is if the small folk don’t eat them all before we’ve had time to pick them.

I reckon their house was always meant to have a garden of fruit, as this morning I also came across this tile sitting on the side, that I hadn’t really noticed before.

Flowers, 2013

A collaboration between myself and photographer Ali Mobasser (www.alimobasser.com)