The Gather gift guide 2023

Give the joy of flowers with these unique, sustainable Christmas gift ideas for flower and plant lovers.

What do you give a flower and plant lover who cares about the environment and doesn’t want more stuff (we’ve all got enough stuff). There’s nothing quite like a thoughtful gift to say ‘I love you’, but finding the right thing can be hard for anyone who cares about having a positive impact on the planet. I absolutely dread anything I give being considered tat or, God forbid, landfill; I’d truly rather give nothing at all.

I am delighted to invite some of my favourite people to contribute to this year’s gift guide. Rather than just banging on about thing itself, I wanted to introduce you to the faces behind the brands. If you know anything about me, you know that I would never ever send you a link to Amazon to buy your Christmas presents, and if you are looking for exceptional small businesses owners to support, I have found you some great ones.

I invited each to come and do and interview for us (to be released over the next week) and, so as to assuage some of their nerves, I prepared some questions in advance. Out of fairness, I thought I’d better answer them too…

A plug for my thing first. Have you considered a bundle of sweet peas?

Or, and this truly is the perfect present for a very specific sort of person, a gift membership to The Jilly Cooper Fan Club…?

What makes you feel Christmassy?

Cheese and crackers, on a big wooden board. Snow. Making plans for that last day in the office. Pulling traveller’s joy out of the hedges and hanging it (or wreathing it) on every surface I can find. Sneaking out to walk the dogs late and turning left into the village (rather than right, straight out to the fields) so I can look through my neighbour’s windows and be judgemental about their interior décor/festive baubles/Christmas trees.

How are you spending Christmas this year?

Very much en famille. Almost the entire extended family are either NHS or armed forces so it is something of a Christmas miracle for everyone’s leave to coincide. This is one such year. There will be ten of us meeting for a dog walk with mince pies and hip flasks at 10am, back to Malus Farm for canapes and Bucks Fizz, and then on to my mother’s for the full Christmas dinner works. If I am not fast asleep by the end of the King’s Speech, I will consider something to have gone wrong.

I just need to work out if I can face doing all that the morning after Midnight Mass.

Dream Christmas?

This is very much a dream, because I have never tried it, but I would adore to suddenly, without having to have done any planning or thinking about it, whisked away to the Fife Arms in Aberdeenshire. If one can be whisked from Somerset to Scotland. I want to be placed in a four poster bed with a decaffeinated espresso martini, to sleep for 36 hours, and then be fed pigs in blankets dipped in bread sauce, and drink nothing but champagne from morning until night.

What was the best Christmas present you ever received?

Maud arrived in our household three days before Christmas in 2017. She was an absolute delight from the moment she arrived. When I say delight, I mean monkey.

My mother in law arrived two days before Christmas and my abiding memory of that year was her sitting in an armchair calling ‘should she be eating that?’ to me in the kitchen as I cooked a full Christmas dinner. Maud stole baubles, sausage stuffing, pine cones, kindling, and cardboard boxes. Nothing was safe. She still steals things. She’s still adorable and the light of our lives.

And the worst?

I think the worst Christmas presents are the ones which reveal that the gift-giver has no sense of who you are, or that they perceive you in a very different way to the image you were really hoping you were putting out into the world. When I was twenty-five, I was given a musical jewellery box with a twirling ballerina. I was speechless for about an hour, and then I think I cried for a while.

Oh, and my mother always gives me ‘improving’, passive-aggressive presents. The advanced driving lessons were a real low. She asked me if I had passed my advanced driving test once a week for about five years. No, I never took it.

Who would love some Grace Alexander seeds as a present and why?

I adore this question, and I adore Christmas, and I adore being given seeds as a gift. But so many seed packets were so incredibly ugly, with dreadful imagery on the front, all over-saturation and cheap gloss. I like to think that the perfect person to receive my seeds is someone with exquisite taste, but who loves getting their hands dirty and growing their flowers from the ground up, with just enough space to grow a few hazel teepees of sweet peas, and who cares enough about ceramics to have just the right container for each variety.

What are you hoping for this Christmas?

I mean, obviously any of the options below, because it’s my list. But in addition, some Malin & Goetz perfume (although I wouldn’t be disappointed with some Penhaglion’s ‘Quercus’), a Charlie Borrow canvas game bag, Rococo Chocolates, some extra tall dinner candles from Baileys Home, and a new pair of Ariat wellingtons. (Their quality is truly dreadful so I get through a pair every twelve months, but until they split, they are the most comfortable wellingtons I have ever known.)

Other things you might consider:

FFERN

A luxurious gift option for nature lovers: a bottle of Ffern’s natural perfume

Ffern is a gorgeous small batch natural perfume company based near me in Somerset, UK. Their packaging is beautifully minimalist and entirely plastic-free, and their natural fragrances are released in limited edition runs seasonally to members of their client list, known as the Ledger. 

Each bottle costs £79, and you will be billed in advance of the season’s release (you can also purchase a limited supply of existing fragrances), but you can cancel any time you like. Doing business this way helps them know how much perfume to make in each season’s batch, thereby cutting down on waste with each production run—ingenious. 

A wonderful luxury gift idea, whether you’d like to purchase a bottle of perfume as a one-off gift for a friend, or stay signed up to the Ledger so you can get every season’s release (keeping a bottle here and there for yourself, and ensuring an ongoing supply of an utterly gorgeous luxury gift for nature-loving friends and family). 

You can sign up to the waiting list for Ffern’s Ledger list any time, and they’ll let you know as soon as they have an opening for new clients. They ship within the UK and to the USA, but don’t currently ship elsewhere in the world—just something to be aware of when planning your gift-giving.

Full disclosure - I am a fully signed up Ffern customer and I love them so much, I made a film about the Spring 23 release.

Vital seeds vegetable seed collections

For the kitchen gardener, or the gourmet 

Vital seeds are simply the only people I buy vegetable seed from now. I have got to know Fred over the Seed Sovereignty year course I did (and have just passed) and he is a delight. And an absolute fount of knowledge about all things vegetable growing. I adore their seeds so much, I couldn’t even get cross when he started telling me about how they were branching out inro cornflowers.

Cornflowers are notoriously tricky because they all ripen at different times. I have my fingers and toes crossed they don’t find out how blissfully easy sweet peas are.

But I digress. Vital seeds do absolutely fabulous collections of different seeds. Winter lettuces and leafy greens for those who want easy, soul-nourishing food. Chicories for blanching for the hardcore. As well as collections, there is also a digital seed sowing course (I’ve done it, #notgifted) and gift vouchers, if you know some kitchen gardeners but you don’t know what’s on their wish list for the 2024 growing season.

PRINTS BY Emma Lewis

For those with incredible taste, and a love of trees

You may not know, but Emma Lewis did the photography for my new business venture, Grace Alexander Mentoring. I have been such a great fan for quite a while now (she took the loveliest picture of my stairs many years ago) and my interest in her work was re-sparked by listening to a lovely podcast she did with the Caro podcast.

She talked so thoughtfully about photographing trees, asking their consent, and then just sitting with them a little while. Out of this process came some utterly wonderful, dramatic, prints of leaves.

I’m saving up for a beech leaf. Or hoping I find one rolled up in my stocking.

Socks

Elevating the boring to the extraordinary

Talking of stockings, and I know I’m missing the point, but I don’t think it’s Christmas unless you have given or received some socks. My absolute find of the year was an accidental one. I treated myself to some Blundstones and I just happened to be seduced into adding a pair of socks to my basket. Once you’ve paid that much for a pair of boots (I look back fondly on the time when I worked on a ranch in Australia, and we had Blundstones and Redbacks practically on tap), a pair of socks is neither here nor there.

These socks are here though. Warm, tough, properly thick without being the slightest bit stiff. I have used them inside wellingtons and as bed socks. They are just the ultimate.

They are also out of stock for all the lovely mossy green ones, but for this sort of luxury, I’ll happily have charcoal.

 Rag of Colts

A once in a lifetime sort of Christmas present

I had to think long and hard about including Rag of Colts in this gift guide. On the downside, Caroline sells her bags so fast that there are so rarely any in stock; they literally fly off the workbench, On the upside, she now has an actual physical shop in Bruton and that means that she has joined up with some other independent makers and brands, including her mother, who makes the most incredible indigo dresses.

Her bags are such a work of art that they are seriously high end, but I am asking my husband to splash out on one of her belts for my Christmas present.

 La-Eva

A psychological treat

I have to confess that I am not unbiased when it comes to La-Eva. Its founder, Louisa, was a Clinical Psychologist (was? Is? Can one ever stop being a psychologist?) before La-Eva took off, and as a result, I sense that the ethos of her products goes beyond the usual greenwashing, wellness narrative.

Despite being lazy to the point of austere in the pampering realm, I do happen to own a bottle of their Roseum body lotion. A bottle of this would make a lovely present, but they do also happen to do beautiful gift boxes if you happen to have a loved one you love very much indeed.

Comments open if you would like to add your own fabulous ideas for this tricky gifting season. Full disclosure, I am only doing presents for my husband this year (spoiler alert, it’s an investment piece Arthur Beale jumper) but any gift ideas for men gratefully received. So tricky.