Delightful Things 1

A Regular Compendium Of Delightful Things

Hello everyone!

I’m so pleased to be writing a new, free-to-read letter for my followers here on The Garden Collective, in addition to my monthly piece for subscribers. It's going to be a scrapbook really, with delightful things I've found, or done, or read, or thought or bought or eaten or made, all with a garden theme.

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One Good Thing I did

I picked some of the nicotiana flowers and crammed them into a flower press so that I can make them into presents, or use them to decorate with. This nicotiana is from my fellow Garden Collective writer Sarah Raven's shop and is called 'Whisper Mixed'. I ordered quite a number of plugs and lost about half of them to slugs the first day I put them in the ground. But the ones I crammed into pots with the Gladiolus callianthus have blown my socks off, still going strong now in mid November, and after a frost. I absolutely adore the unashamed pinkness of them; they’ve cheered me up no end as the nights have drawn in. For some reason I only seem to be able to find a picture from July, but anyway - I commend these to you very highly as long as you plant them in containers and keep an eye out for slugs and snails which adore them:

I've put a few of the remaining blooms into my large press (linked here). I’ll come back to this once they’re fully pressed and show you how I’m planning to mount them.

A Recipe

Not sure I’ve ever jumped to make anything as fast as I did this genius drink from Mark Diacono’s post on drinks to make as Christmas presents. Immediate trip to buy a bottle of vodka and a quick snip of the bay tree outside. This was made in thirty seconds flat and now all I need do is wait for it to percolate.

My brain immediately wants to find pretty bottles for gifting this, and I’ve ordered these nice glass bottles. I will of course put a bow around the neck of each one. Thank you Mark!

Something pretty that I want.

These lovely kings have been burning a hole in my brain for some time now. Look how wonderful their faces are. I love the idea of having three of them as part of a nativity. In fact I love the idea of creating a nativity from lots of different things that don’t match, but that work together because they tell the story. I am already searching through all the Schleich animals we have around this house for some oxen and a donkey.

An Image of joy

I’ll leave you with this exquisite wallpaper, designed for de Gournay by Beata Heuman. How HEAVENLY. I’m particularly in love with the bright red chairs in this photograph, and it makes me so pleased that I have two bright red chairs in my garden.

There was a big interiors trend that swept social media about making sure you had something bright red in any room and unlike most ‘trends’, I am fully behind this one; a bit of bright red is essential to ground a space in reality I think…it removes the heavy seriousness that intense beauty can sometimes carry with it…you sort of need something a bit clunky and bright red, and I also think that proper bright red is unfairly maligned in the garden when it comes to flowers.

Anyway, I love it, and hope it inspires you.

Do please 'like' and share this letter if it's something you enjoy, and that you feel others might find fun.

Thank you for reading

x Laetitia