{inside outside}

When I was young(er), there was a tree I used to play in for hours at a time. The root system was a burrow of small interconnecting rooms and mossy dwellings. My friend and I made little beds out of bark with quilts of flower petals for the little family of Sylvanian rabbits we had cobbled together. Painstaking miniature creations took on life outside like they never quite seemed to indoors. When called in for dinner, who knew what went on inside that green-hued den?

I love these images because they represent the adult version! Chandeliers and sofas dragged out into a field to play. When left outside for too long, the creeping, curling tendrils of nature seek to claim them back. It's a wonderfully eccentric and aristocratic notion - the notoriously complex picnics at Glyndebourne and outdoor theatres of the grand and wealthy to name a few.

{feeling leafy}

I was browsing away through the archives of the lovely Mary Ruffle, and realised that I kept saving images of clean white interiors filled with potted greenery. Not flowers, but leafy shrubs, herbs and ferns. They make houses into homes and you can never have too many. I especially love the old tea cans filled with herbs above the kitchen sink. I might just have to try something like this at home... I also adore ferns in bathrooms, but the only place I avoid placing plants is in the bedroom. But you can fill them with flowers instead!

Lovely Luberon

This house {or, Mas - a French farmhouse} is pure rural French idyllicism. It's actually for sale which is why these lovely photos are bandying about for people like me to salivate over... up high in the Luberon in the south of France, this house is ten minutes from an equally idyllic village and half an hour from Avignon - one of my {many} favorite French cities. Really, it's the lavender, the green pool, the stonework and the bridge arcing over a path, the courtyard, the uneven windows,the blue sky and the cypress trees to mention but a few things. And you're up high, nestled against a mountain. I can't think of a better retreat into beauty and nature... enjoy x

*breezy and billowing*

Just found this bed and HAD to post it! What HEAVEN! Maybe because i'm the arid desert and already camping, but this bed is seriously luxurious looking right now. I know, if i'm camping how on earth am i on the internet? But there's wifi even all the way out here!

{stanborough house}

I went home just for this weekend to find the garden bursting with colourful peonies, roses and foxgloves, a robust looking herb garden and a ripening vegetable patch waiting to laden the kitchen table with broad beans and fresh basil. Yum! All in all, Stanborough was a lovely, sunny retreat from London (much helped by mum and her cooking and motherliness of course). Mum and her boyfriend Pete have been working hard on the house and garden to bring it up to scratch before they open up the place (as a B&B, retreat, local venue for theatre, live music and courses) this autumn and it looks likes it's paying off!

I love all the potted plants on the steps and the painted benches in the backround are a new, elegant addition.

The herb garden above and mum's clever bamboo pyramid for her sweet peas.

Peonies are one of my absolute favorite flowers, and i'm loving the different shades of pink with the odd smattering of summer yellow in these beds at the front of the house. So beautiful.

*taxus baccata*

I'm rather fascinated by yew trees. There was one in our garden when I was little and we were always strictly forbidden to play near it. Them and the foxgloves of course. And any red berries. But we weren't exactly informed why and I recently found out - because they are one of the most toxic plants on earth.

Image by Andrea Dunlap

Long held sacred by the inhabitants of this fair isle, yew tree groves often marked spiritual Celtic grounds - whereby the Christian church promptly set up shop on such sites and harnessed their properties. This is also why yew trees are often to be found in grave yards. A poison of dried yew needles was a sure fire for a swift death and often the only honourable alternative to falling on ones sword. And of course we prized the wood for bow staves too, leading to the tree's near extinction and saved only by the advent of the gun. Well that's one positive thing about I guns I suppose...

I think they're quite interesting, I hope you do too.

a home under the stars*

It's summer! And for me that means a nice canvas wall-tent in the Utah desert (right next to a couple of tipees), so I like to think it might look something like this! I just wish I could somehow fanangle some crisp, Greek stripy linens and a few throw cushions... Don't you just love that sweet washing line and the tree stump seats by the fire? Heaven.

Photography by Sarah Maingot and styling by Twig Hutchinson.

casa fontanalba*

At the relatively late age of 35, Clarence Bicknell chucked in his dog-collar after over a decade of religious service and headed off to Italy. His passion for painting was soon overwhelmed by his love for botany, which led him to the aptly named Valley of Miracles high up on the Franco-Italian border. It was here that rare specimens grew with abundance due to the valley's unusual climate and not long after, Bicknell stumbled across Bronze-Age drawings and prehistoric rock carvings of great beauty. Eventually it made sense to build a small rudimentary home from where he could work in peace and host his guests. When rough weather forced him to twiddle his thumbs at home, Bicknell channelled his love for the outdoors through his other talent; painting. Pale pink, ochre and green-blues coloured his walls onto which he began to paint the local flora and ancient paintings with scientific precision. These were interspersed with the odd phrase in Esperanto, the local language, and the initials of each guest he ever received.

I feel so inspired by Bickenell's magical home and in particular his use of colour. I think I'm going to re-paint my kitchen in a pale matt peach and the adjoining living room in that violet-tinted blue, with green woodwork. From there I think I to might have a go at the odd wreath of cow-parsley and buttercups. Isn't it enchanting?

we are stardust*

Lately, I've had a bit of an interest in all things Physics. Well, sort of. If I had a list titled "Top Dumbstruck Learning Moments at School", i'd say a fair few of them occurred in my Physics class. Now I liked chemistry - that was my class' first introduction to science. I remember a series of bangs and varying degrees of blindness, before our teacher got back on his feet and handed out several mis-matched pairs of goggles and enormous white coats that swamped our eleven year old frames. Biology was quite fun - remember the onion skin test? Oh yes, we liked our microscopes. But though Physics was rather uncool, i'll never forget the day our dear teacher told us the universe was growing. That if it was growing, it surely followed that it had a boundary, an edge of sorts. That not only was it round, but that we should sit and try to imagine what the edge could possibly look like, and what was on the other side. To be honest, all I saw was whiteness - maybe a side effect from earlier experiments that day? Now that, my friends, beats even the largest of chunks of combusting magnesium. That mind-boggling speech was swiftly followed by Joni Mitchell sweetly singing out "we are stardust, billion year old carbon, we are golden!" That was our teacher's favorite song of course.

So here's to that teacher who made all that science stuff so terribly brain-engaging. He was also very good at easter-egg hunts - scientifically based ones of course... It was also he that paid for my and a friend's tickets to go and see Dr. James Lovelock's speak at the local hall, which was the first i'd really heard of the dying surface of our planet Earth. I went and bought Lovelock's first book the other day, along with Hawking's "A Briefer History of Time". All of those tantalizing questions posed to us in that class are addressed in these here fine books, let alone that whole light year thing (did you know that light particles can travel 186,000 miles in one second? One second? That just blows the whole light year concept right out of my spatial comfort zone, yet how bloody exciting!)

Anyhow, I have yet to finish it and besides, i'm quite sure Hawking is rather better than me in explaining these sort of explosive existential tit bits. So i'll leave you with some images of our universe that quite literally blow my tiny human thoughts into a million particles of possibilities. What does your edge look like?

Photos courtesy of Jason Ware.

natural fashion

I recently fell in love with the book Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa by Hans Silvester. It is an intriguing example of the kind of creativity that springs from humanity living in abundance and simbiosis with nature. The Surma and Mursi tribes of East Africa live near the busy streams and rivers that cut through the dry savannahs of the Rift, allowing for a bounty of fruit trees, grasses, flowers and papyrus to flourish. Especially before the arrival of the rain season, the hot weather encourages families down to the cooling shades of the water, where the inspiring raw materials for their creations lie. As Silvester notes;

"For Westerners, any such activity might demand great intellectual effort - which branch, what colour, how and where should they be arranged? - and the whole process could seem laborious... but here people make their choices spontaneously but firmly... They live so closely to nature that they also act naturally..."

The Rift Valley is blessed with a rich paint-box of minerals and earth pigments. Red, ochre, shades of white, yellow and light grey - with the exception of blue, the tribes have access to concentrated colour that contrast beautifully with the coppery tone of their skin. The painting also has the practical property of protecting them from sun exposure. The pigments dry within seconds, which give the artists a spontaneous incentive to act in bursts.

What I find so fascinating is Silvester's thoughts on the up until recent absence of mirrors in these tribes. Even the rivers are too silty to provide a clear reflection, leaving the response and reaction of others as a measure. Since your self-image is determined through the eyes of others, the practice of body-painting and decoration is rarely done alone, and often in teams.

Surely what we are seeing is one of the very first art forms - more than likely far far older than cave paintings and other recordable varieties. This close interaction with nature requires a knowledge of the properties of each material, leading to a tactile understanding and instinct for the environment. Perhaps this enjoyable way of learning was intrinsic to our survival - and how apt that this very human instinct to create and touch should still thrive in what is often referred to as the 'Cradle of Humanity'.

And just quickly (that was quite a big sentence I wrote up there), a slightly less spontaneous example of our rather more studied approach to 'nature' dressing up...