the earlier bit of the middle of February

My Gather writing rolls in a loose circle and I was mindful that it had been many months since I had photographed a what’s out now. And I thought that maybe I wouldn’t bother. February is a bleak month until the narcissi are out.

Predictably, this was short sighted. The things that are out now are not flashy or brassy or bold. When I looked through the hedge to the branches poking through into the other field, the quince was flowering on the far side. I adore quince but it flowers on the old wood, often in funny places and nearer the base than the tip. Looks wonderful in a hedge but tricky to cut and bring in. But limitations ignite creativity and having just a few odd twigs in bloom led to a simple arrangement in a Kenzan in a Japanese tea bowl.

The fabrics underneath are some of my recent dye projects. The colours are subtle and intricately mottled. I keep over-dyeing the same pieces to intensify the colour (using tannin rich dyes is a way of avoiding the mordanting step, but I may have to return to putting in the alum pot to get really strong colours). However, I might leave this one as it is. I just love it.

As well as the blossoms that are hiding on the wrong side of the hedge, there is the blossom that is hiding in plain sight. The autumn-flowering cherry blossom has been utterly wonderful since November and it has just had one last flush. It always beats the spring blossom by a clear month, and the recent sunshine has covered the whole tree is covered in pristine, sugar-pink flowers.

And of course there are hellebores. Of course there are. I grow mine at the end of the kitchen garden, down by the studio, because the soil is moist and shady. The thing about hellebores, unless you grow them in pots, is that you have to lie on the ground to appreciate how utterly wonderful they are. And I do adore a hellebore, so cutting them and bringing them indoors is the best thing to do.

Philip Craddock, florist to the stars, swears blind that you can cut hellebores with the stamens intact if you make a slit all the way up the stem a millimetre deep and then plunge them into cool water for 24 hours. I am trying it now. I’ll let you know if they hold.

Talking of the kitchen garden, I am plundering the last of the winter veg. The last of the leeks have been absolutely wonderful. There is always a moment in harvesting vegetables where I suddenly remember why people use supermarkets; soil in the sink and over the chopping board. However, since my breakup with my phone (see this instagram post for details, but also this brilliant article about how we have started to have our most intimate relationships with our phones) I have spent the bookends of my day with a book. My most recent is James Rebanks’ English Pastoral. I will not only read it once. I am reading it now because I am devouring it. I will read it a second time to fully absorb the political messages about change and the law of unintended consequences. And then I will read it a third time to try and work out how he constructs sentences that are so effortlessly beautiful that his writing just flows and ripples.

But I digress. Being in the middle of his book and seeing my soil with new eyes, it is a privilege, not a chore, to be able to wash my own leeks. Each one I lifted left a hole, and in each hole I saw earthworms. The leeks, like so much in my winter garden, were put in late and so are fat and stout, rather than pale and elegantly lengthened as supermarket leeks are. I don’t care though. I will soften them in butter and add cabbage and sausage meatballs and butterbeans and they will make the best soup in the world.

In keeping with the theme of February’s flowers are there if you look, after I had finished writing this, I saw that the pot next to my studio door is full of Muscari neglectum. Muscari armenaicum, the paler blue variety, run wild in my front garden (very few things grow there, which is why I never mention it) but I prefer the more dramatic, fade to black, colour scheme of the M. neglectum.

& whilst I was picking them to photograph for you, I remembered that the winter clematis were all out (I have Freckles and Wisley Cream) so you get a picture of those too…