1) seeds, 2) links
giant post, make a cup of tea first
Good morning! ↑ Look at this! I am thrilled that the hugely talented Beth Spencer has agreed to illustrate some of my posts, starting with this one. I so love her work. Also her inspirational newsletter Introvert Drawing Club is like balm for the soul. It makes you love humanity (yes, even now, still) and was one of the first Substacks I ever subscribed to.
Beth is also the creator of this badge ↓, which went viral for obvious reasons and which is free for anyone to use on their posts - you can download it here.
(By the way, if you’re using the most recent version of Word, the AI one with Copilot, it scrapes everything you write and uses it to train itself. The absolute bloody cheek. As if this wasn’t bad enough - three of mine! Anyway: you can turn it off by unticking Enable Copilot in the settings).
Before I start, have you seen this post ↓ and its comments, and also this thread? Both are packed with absolutely inspired personal recommendations of all sorts of excellent places to stay, all over the world - the kind of intel you only really get word of mouth. Someone has even kindly made a Google doc of them all (find it in the thread).
Do have a read if you missed it earlier in the week because it is GOLD. I’ll be going back in to add a ton of places in the next few days.
Right, onwards.
1: the joy of seeds
Beth’s illustration above is of part of the plant collections I’ve ordered from Sarah Raven. On the left is Cath C’s Atherley Dahlia collection (Dahlia ‘Porcelain,’ Dahlia ‘Dutch Delight,’ Dahlia ‘Orange Girl’, Dahlia ‘Red Emperor’), in the middle are cosmos with cornflowers, and on the right is this Cutting Patch collection (45 seedlings. I’ve decided to accept that I hate pricking out. Life is short and time is precious).
I wish I could tell you that was all I ordered, but I become possessed on the seed/seedling/tuber front at this time of year. It’s because the idea of the garden exploding into life now finally feels vaguely imaginable, rather than like an insane fantasy.
The catalogues drop through the letterbox one by one and I force myself to not look at them, like a dog trying to ignore a sausage but with (marginally) less whimpering. Then when the pile is nice and fat, I set aside a whole morning and sit down at the kitchen table with the paper catalogues, my iPad for online-only ones, and my trusty notebook. I make tea in a teapot rather than in a mug to mark the solemnity of the occasion. Then I get down to work.
I jot down the names of everything I like and snap pictures of the things with my phone. This takes a good couple of hours, during which I am in a state of transcendent happiness. Then I look through the pictures en masse and delete any that look strange together. Then I order what’s left.
It’s an imperfect science because I just go with a vibe rather than with anything very specific in mind. But these are all annuals, apart from the dahlias, and I trust that provided you know what you like in terms of colours, shapes and the feelings they evoke, then things will probably work out. And if they don’t, sowing nasturtiums in the wrong place is hardly life and death. (Also with nasturtiums there’s no such thing as the wrong place, QED).
I share all this because I think a lot of people find gardening really intimidating. I certainly did, before moving to the country - I could pot up geraniums and herbs and that was about it. I didn't understand a single thing about timings. I thought that, excepting winter, any old plants just grew any old time, regardless of heat and light levels.
I didn’t know, or had forgotten, that a plant’s sole purpose in life is to reproduce, i.e. to make seeds/fruit, and that once it’s done this it either puts itself to bed or dies. So it had simply never occurred to me that if you keep deadheading and picking the flowers or vegetables, then you deny them their seed-making opportunity, meaning they try again (and again) and therefore produce more and more flowers and more and more veg - enough to fill your house with flowers and your fridge with courgettes for months and months on end.
I feel that this ignorance is at one level deeply idiotic - I mean, I went to school, we had Biology - and at another quite commonplace in people who live in cities and have limited outside space.
(Our Biology teacher was Australian, attractive and not shockingly ancient. When we did Human Reproduction she drew the relevant organs on the blackboard and then said, with a glint in her eye, ‘I can tell you what happens, girls, but I can never tell you what it feels like.’ Then she sort of laughed to herself. It stopped our giggling dead in its tracks).
Anyway - this post is for you if the very idea of planting anything makes you nervous. Seeds are cheap and annuals and vegetables are really, really easy to grow (especially vertical beans). You don’t need much space - Benjamin Ranyard from Higgledy Garden, one of my other most trusted source of seeds, grows his flowers in buckets on a houseboat, and they are spectacular. Here’s his excellent seed growing guide.
Needless to say if you want to learn how to actually garden, rather than vaguely scatter seeds about humming cheerily to yourself and hoping for the best, you cannot do better than Jo Thompson’s Substack, which is basically the Bible except without smiting, whether you are designing a garden from scratch or just want to know what you should be doing this month. (I’m really looking forward to her new book).
2: things I’ve enjoyed this week
I feel bad for Adrien Brody’s nose. To me a strong nose is a highly desirable thing in a face. Once when I was a teenager a boy I liked dumped me and I was moping around the kitchen sniffling. My mother stared at me incredulously and said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, India - he had a pug nose,’ which at the time made me furious but which I completely see the wisdom of today.
The V&A has an on-demand online course called How To Read a Painting which I think would make a very nice present for someone, or for oneself. It costs £45, for which you get nine expert video lectures from Dr Kathy McLauchlan, lasting just under two hours in total. If you click on that link and scroll down, you can watch the brief introduction for free.
Or, for zero pence if you’re in the UK, you could listen to the BBC’s fantastic series Moving Pictures, which works in conjunction with Google Arts & Culture (you open up the relevant painting and zoom in and out on various details as you listen - it is great).
I’m obsessed with Prue Leith’s massive Lazy Susan. She had it made especially. Look at it spin! I really want one.
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I think that Naomi Alderman’s Radio 4 series Human Intelligence will come to be viewed as one of the great radio programmes. It’s a 50-part history of significant thinkers, in digestible 15 minute chunks. It is written and presented with such fizzing cleverness, wit and originality that it feels really fresh.
One of Naomi’s many gifts (they include novels, Zombies and only this week a stellar multi-entry contribution to this post’s comments) is to make often complicated ideas feel immediately graspable. It’s like she lets air into the room. I have a theory re. intelligence: people who drone on in an opaque and show offy way are not clever - they are merely swots. Properly clever people make everything feel easy and accessible. There’s a sort of generosity in it.
To give you the gist and breadth, the first five episodes are on Socrates, George Washington, Martin Luther, Malcolm X and Mary Wollstonecraft. I really couldn’t recommend the series more.
I like this clip of Simon Amstell being wise about his terrible relationship with his dad.
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There’s a very good leopardskin bag at & Other Stories. It’s £155. I have inspected it in the flesh and it is👌🏼. It keeps going in and out of stock, so grab it if you like it. (I now have the vague feeling I’ve posted it before. Sorry if yes. My brain is over-full at the moment).
There’s a sale of some of Barry Humphries’ personal belongings at Christie’s next week (it’s on view from today until the 12th and the sale is on the 13th). The catalogue is fascinating. Catalogues often tell such an interesting story - Leanne Shapton fictionalised the concept brilliantly in this perfect book ↓, which tells the story of a relationship through the eventual sale of the couple’s possessions. It’s all told in photographs and captions.
