Confessions of a water baby

I love January. I stock up on notepads, plan holidays, cook. It’s a low key, simple month - perfect for pensive, time consuming Nigel Slater recipes - broths, bread - and quiet mornings. I light a candle every meal and the children try and blow it out. I stew, stretch, walk.

…And try not to get caught up in the excitement of planning the gardening year (impossible!)

This year I also started a new annual resolution: to hit pause and begin every year quietly. And so when the children went back to nursery I kept my dairy empty, and worked. But also relaxed - not something that comes naturally to me - without distraction.

The last few weeks I have even made time to swim again. My favourite past time. I love the peace and quiet. It gives me mental clarity like nothing else. Warm or cold dips, I am a water baby. Which brings me to the other reason I love January; I’m an aquarian, and shall be celebrating my birthday this weekend!

So, this month’s newsletter is dedicated to water - and particularly water in landscape paintings - because when its grey and cold outside, art is surely the answer?

Plus I share some of the winter plants I’m appreciating in our own, currently rather waterlogged garden, here in the south west of England.

Thank you for reading - and see you in February, when we will be celebrating another important birthday…Them Outdoors is turning one!

Tabi x

Water in the Landscape

Our gardens are all physically connected by the water they receive, digest, hold and filter.

Right now, there are lots of lovely water-based projects on my own drawing board - natural swimming ponds, bespoke fountains and antique troughs. So I have been reflecting - pun intended etc etc - on how we can work both implicitly and explicitly with this essential and life-giving element.

Here are some recent works of art that have inspired and expanded this thinking, and helped me on my way…

View from Bardrochat, watercolour, Rory McEwen.

Last week, a last minute change of plans meant I had time for a delicious solo lunch at the Garden Museum. And so I also finally saw the Rory McEwen exhibition. It was incredible. His flower portraits are so perfect I can’t do them justice with words. I was especially entranced by his depictions of decaying leaves, painted after he’d received a cancer diagnosis.

Some of his landscape works included the abstract watercolour above. A view from Bardrochat House in South Ayrshire, which he bought with his wife in 1976. McEwen said:

‘I want to make a landscape that will have the appearance of giant palettes. Huge daubs and blobs of infinitely subtle colours bumping each other out of the way like the clouds blowing across the sky.’

As I spend so much time obsessing over small details in landscape designs, to zoom out and appreciate the huge ‘daubs and blobs of infinitely subtle colours’ is a reminder to enjoy the magnificent romance of gardens and landscapes, large and small.

Jock McFadyen, Somewhere in the Hebrides, 2017, oil on canvas

Nearly eight ago at the RA Summer Exhibition I fell in love with this Jock McFadyen painting. I was lucky enough to nab a print - a very spoiling birthday present from my mother on my 30th birthday.

The red-lidded bothy looks so peaceful, so remote. Maybe next January I’ll go one further on my week of quiet and escape to somewhere like this, sans famille…

The print sits above the fireplace, next to our television so when I get bored of whatever is on the box I can simply slide my eyes left and plot solo escapes.

The Beach at Gravelines, 1890, by Georges Seurat. Photograph: Courtauld

I couldn’t leave you with two past exhibitions; so here’s a future one for your diary.

Next month ‘Seurat and the Sea’ will open at the Courtauld Gallery, bringing together 27 paintings, oil sketches and drawings made by Seurat during the five summers he spent on the northern coast of France (somewhere on my aforementioned holiday planning list).

The sea was a regular motif in Seurat’s work; between 1885 and 1890 he travelled around port towns documenting life at the intersection of land and sea . Seurat says he wanted ‘to wash his eyes of the days spent in the studio [in Paris] and to translate in the most faithful manner the bright clarity, in all its nuances’.

Winter involves a lot of screen time for me and time away from my desk is limited. So I’m looking forward to visiting this when it opens next month and washing my own eyes.

Courtauld Gallery, London, 13 February to 17 May

IN MY OWN GARDEN…

YUCCA

MY NEW FRIEND

One of the fun things about moving house is the new plants you get to know. One at our cottage that I wasn’t familiar with and had never used in a scheme, is Yucca gloriosa. At over 1m tall and 1.5m wide it is a real trooper of a plant at the back of the garden, and catches the light beautifully at this time of year. The slugs do tend to annihilate it in the spring but it always bounces back.

ERYNGIUM

FROST YOURSELF

Other winter garden favourites are eryngium; pictured here in the first frost of January. Electric blue, spikey and upright, they are keeping the trial borders looking lively when everything else has nearly gone to mush. I planted lots of these as 9cm plants which will hopefully start to establish and fill out this summer, mingling with Briza media, nepeta, sanguisorba - and a lot of native wildflowers, of course.

PAPAVER

BEAUTY IN DECAY

Us garden designers love to bang on about the aesthetics of a winter garden. When the ground is frozen or waterlogged as it has been much of the last month, there isn’t much to do except look out for new shapes and silhouettes. I want many more of these poppies in the garden, their skeletal, empty seed-heads are for me what ‘year round interest’ is all about.

ENDING ON… SOME RECENT PRESS

Earlier this month, writer Grace McCloud wrote a piece about the Milking Parlour for Country Life. It is a real moment as the project was one of the first ones I did when I set up my own garden design practice, and it is really fun to read about it through someone else’s eyes.

You can read the article here.

PLEASE DO SHARE THIS NEWSLETTER WITH ANYONE WHO YOU THINK MIGHT ENJOY IT

TABI JACKSON GEE