Capturing beauty

 

Towards the end of somewhat tricky 2023, I turned my back on a lifelong love of learning. I am an inveterate seeker out of information, of courses and education. I get a dopamine hit from sensation of neurons firing in a new way that had become toxically addictive.

 

Of course, as with so many things, the problem was not with the learning, but with my diet. I’d fallen into the rabbit hole of learning about productivity. I had been seduced into the endless vortex of people who wanted to teach me how to engage an Instagram and grow.

 

It turns out, I didn’t really want to be more productive, I wanted to be happier.

 

It turned out I didn’t want to be on Instagram and grow, I want to be on Instagram and not have it destroy my mental health.

 

After a year (if I’m honest, probably longer) of spending all my spare time, desperately trying to scrabble knowledge from others, knowledge that never really came, and I probably didn’t want anyway, I have gone cold turkey.

 

Not cold turkey on the learning itself, I could no sooner do that then switch off my desire to breathe, what I have given up for 2024 is panicky knowledge-seeking, joylessness and ‘gurus’.

 

Giving something up always creates a little bit of a vacuum in life, and if one does not fill the vacuum, it is so easy for old habits to creep back in, or for something even more unhelpful to take its place. So in those pockets of time I used to spend watching endlessly looping reels about hooks, stories and calls to action (my soul dies a little at the thought even now). I’m going to spend on my favourite creative pastime.

 

PhotograpHY

 

I’ve had the privilege of working with some wonderful photographers in my time. One of the most helpful things that any of them ever said to me is that nobody has any idea about image storage. To this day I don’t know where Lightroom keeps my photos, I have no idea how many of them, if indeed any of them, are duplicated in a cloud somewhere, on Dropbox, or whether they have disappeared into that mysterious hole labelled ‘Google Drive’.

 

This means that I tend to use Lightroom as a photo album. I can scroll back (and I frequently do) to 2017, when I started using a proper big camera for the first time.  Most months I will look at the photographs I took on the same date in previous years, checking on how early the snowdrops were, when I went to a certain garden, the timing of the first rose. This is a much more intentional version of Facebook memories, which has the unfortunate tendency to only ever show me dead dogs.

 

Recently, what I have been noticing in these retrospectives is not only the shift in the seasons (this winter has been so disturbingly warm), but that I used to take much better pictures.

 

I have never been one for letting perfect getting the way of done, but I think when I was newer to my camera and newer to the art of capturing light, I took more time. I fiddled with knobs and experimented with settings, I even occasionally consulted the manual.

 

Then I got comfortable. I left my camera on aperture priority, turned the exposure compensation down as low as I could, and then I just snapped and shared.

 

This is a very pragmatic way of creating images, but they have the sense of meaninglessness about them. Sometimes I scroll through the snaps on my phone and add the sum of them to those stored on my computer. Then I close my eyes and I imagine how many iPhones there are in the world, how many Lightroom catalogues, how many Google photos there are. The sheer number of captured images that now exist blows my mind.

 

Although it was a genuinely moving experience to scroll through my camera roll for 2023 and remember some of the places I’ve been, some of the special moments I shared (although it cannot just be me that notices that the more special the moment, the fewer pictures there are of it), I would like to set an intention this New Year. By the end of 2024, I want to scroll through all my pictures and have the same joy in remembering experiences, I want to have the same sense of having made the most of trips and adventures, friendships and sharing, but I just want the pictures to be a lot lot better.

 

I did a coaching session with someone yesterday where I talked myself out of the job. I told the person who had sought me out for help and guidance that she needed to stop going on courses, stop paying her money to other people in the hope that they might have the answer, because she already knew the answer. She was looking for something that couldn’t be got through going on a course, or gaining a qualification, or casting around to find out how everyone else was doing it.  I could see this in her because I see it in myself.

 

Of course, my first response when I thought about my photographic resolution to see whether or not I should sign up to Jason Ingram’s garden photography course on Create Academy. Yes, that addiction to learning is strong and to educate myself will always going to be my default response to any of life’s challenges. However, I have (so far) managed to resist this here. This resolution is going to need to come from within.

 

This year, I will take the time.

 

I will take the care to notice, to frame, to adjust, to be patient, to be responsive and capture. The time, I hope, to create something that I consider truly beautiful, and then to share it with you.

 

BiodynamicS

 One Create Academy course I have done, and indeed adored, was Jane Scotter’s Biodynamics course.

 

Biodynamics, like so many spiritual practices, feels like something of an indulgence when times are hard, when time is short, when the pragmatics of every day life seem to be making endless demands of resources. Or if the world is simultaneously on fire and at war.

 

I would say that in 2022 I flirted with biodynamics. My approach was playful, curious and characterised by the zinginess of novelty, but not entirely committed.

 

Last year it felt like an unwelcome guest. Always there at the edge of my consciousness, an embodied reminder that I wasn’t quite doing justice to my field, or even doing anything “right”. I became entangled in the calendar; it tripped me up at every turn.

 

In biodynamic agriculture, each farm or garden is viewed as an integrated whole, as a living organism in its own right. Like a human being, a farm is made up of many different organs and systems. When these are managed and brought together in a dynamic way, they interact positively with one another to support the health and well-being of the whole. And like a human being, each farm is unique, with its own personality and identity. The holistic expression of a farm’s unique potential is referred to as the “farm individuality.”

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The increase in the area of my ground that came with buying the cottage next door, rather than feeling like Malus Farm became an ‘integrated whole’ all at once, just increased the sense of fragmentation. Hedges that had once marked a boundary now cleft my land in two.

So this year, 2024, me and biodynamics are going to start again in earnest. I turned my back on its principles for too long and I thought that life would be easier and freer, but actually it just felt a bit emptier. The grass never is greener on the other side.

 

I will, of course, be writing and talking more and more about this as the year goes on, but I am starting as I mean to go on with the Three Kings preparation. An exercise in gratitude, but also marking the edges of the Malus Farm, drawing a boundary that marks the enclosure of this very special place. This happens on the 6th January so I can’t share it just yet (I am writing this on the 4th) but I will share a film and images on Saturday.

 

While a biodynamic farm strives to be self-sustaining and in some ways self-contained, it is not closed to the world. Tremendous energy streams into the farm daily from the sun and stars, and rain and wind bring water and minerals. A similar generosity and abundance is expressed from the farm individuality toward the wider world when the farm is healthy. Embedded in the farm individuality is life-giving potential, not merely to avoid exploitation, but to offer rejuvenation.

If you want to get a very brief introduction to biodynamics, you can watch my interview with Robin of Limeburn Vineyard here.

Sweets for my sweet peas

And indeed, the extra space is going to be put to great use this year. I may have made 2023 sounds slightly grim, but there were great pleasures, particularly in its autumn. Bee harvest was as abundant as I have ever known. New varieties, and old favourites, thrive, and I tried with them. So this year I’m not only giving myself the goal of becoming entirely self-sufficient for sweet pea seed in the shop, but also to be the first small scale, by dynamic sweet pea seed, producer in the UK.

 

Now, the fun bit before I start selling is that I get to buy. Although there are root trainers in the courtyard full of slightly too ahead of themselves seedlings (they are in dire need of a cold snap) and a fridge stuffed to the gills with jam jars ready to go, I want more. More varieties, more blush and apricot tones, more exciting new discoveries. I often say that Piggy Sue has paid my mortgage for the last four years, and she even got a mention on Gardeners’ World, and I am casting around for the next big thing. Here’s my secret, I think it’s Bix.

 

I can’t put Bix in the Gather shop yet, because I don’t have enough (the only seed I let go was to Mel Calver, but I got a cheese box in return, so it was absolutely a fair trade) but as soon as I have grown enough vines to harvest a few jars full of seed, then I am spreading the word.

 

I had an absolutely lovely time ordering dahlias over new year, but they do get expensive fast. The oh so addictive rush of seed is that you can get a lot for pennies. Or cents if you are in the States. I am about to dive once more into my favourite websites and stock up on the most interesting and unusual sweet pea varieties I can find, and then I am going to grow them all.

 

I don’t have a slug problem…

 

I will also be shopping Chilterns and the like for a duplicate seed order to the one I did in August last year, which I then sowed very carefully in trays in my greenhouse, and which then fed the resident mice for a few days. It was mostly perennials, mostly intended to populate my Arne Maynard Spring garden, and mostly quite precious.

 

The sensation of mice being against me was at least a refreshing change from that of weeping over slugs. The warm and the wet, the hedges and the edges, have all conspired to make 2023 an absolute vintage year for slugs. We have been short of kales and chards all winter because the seedlings never really got out of the ground. I tried to grow them bigger to give them more of a chance, but the slugs just tracked them down to their module trays and ate them there instead.

 

Towards the end of last summer, I read something on a permaculture forum. ‘You don’t have a slug problem; you have a duck deficit.’

 

Ah yes I thought. What I need is ducks.

 

I went backwards and forwards with this. I already feel unable to go anywhere for more than eight hours because I have dogs to walk and to feed. My husband often works away and is also partial to a wild adventure, cycling in the Himalayas for a month say (this was his 2023 holiday) and I feel slightly tied to the homestead as a result. There has been much weighing up of pros and cons, but my desire to grow things without crying real salty tears over their almost instant demise has won out.

 

Ducks are coming in 2024.

 

In preparation, I have spent hours on a) the Flyte So Fancy website trying to find the perfect house, and b) Preloved. Because who knew, but the place where ducks are bought and sold, is Preloved.

 

In anticipation of this great event, I have invited Claire Bowen of Honeysuckle and Hilda to join the Gather expert team, and we are recording a podcast all about ducks for late spring.

 

Let’s just hope they arrive in time for the March sowing rush. I need squash plants to be growing on by the end of the month.

 

If you’d like to share your intentions, hopes, dreams and desire for 2024, or any experience you have with duck-keeping, comments are open below, or dm me on the Gather private instagram.

Happy New Year,

G x