THE GARDEN MUSEUM from the U.K.

Literary Festival 2023 | Line-up and extra tickets released! We are delighted to share the first confirmed speakers for this year’s Garden Museum Literary Festival, and to celebrate we’ve released a limited amount of extra tickets! Some of the UK’s most influential and award-winning garden designers and writers will be joining us at Parham Housein Sussex over two summer days, to celebrate the best in garden writing and to share what inspires us in gardens, including Alan Titchmarsh, Advolly Richmond, Isabel Bannerman, Olivia Harrison and Tom Stuart-Smith. This year we are pleased to also offer an additional six weekend tickets free of charge to students of horticulture and garden design. To apply, please submit around 100 words on why you would benefit from attending to info@gardenmuseum.org.uk, by Monday 22 May. Our 2023 Literary Festival will take place at Parham House, one of the country’s finest Elizabethan houses set at the foot of the South Downs in West Sussex, hosted by Lady Emma Barnard and her husband, James. Fri 23 – Sat 24 June Limited extra tickets available now! See the Lit Fest line-up Last chance to see! Cecilia Charlton: Memory Garden Inspired by memories of garden flowers and the slowing of time needed to create both gardens and textiles, four large-scale site-specific weavings by artist Cecilia Charlton are on display this weekend in our historic nave for London Craft Week. Free entry Until Sunday 14 May Find out more Book Extract | Andrew Timothy O’Brien: To Stand and Stare Ahead of his book launch at the Museum on Tuesday 30 May, we share an exclusive extract from podcaster, writer, and online garden coach Andrew Timothy O’Brien’s new book ‘To Stand and Stare: How to garden while doing next to nothing’: “Let’s get one thing straight. Your garden will get along quite well without you. It just won’t be your garden. It will be that piece of land where once a garden was, and there is no tragedy in that. Every square inch of our planet’s surface is trying to get back to a state where it feels at ease with itself, a way of being from which forestry and agriculture, road building, town planning and, yes, even gardening continually strive to hold it back. This is not whimsy. This is science. I can see it happening in my lawn, in my flowerbeds and borders and, particularly, in the more forgotten corners of the garden where plants I don’t remember inviting in make themselves at home, sinking roots deep down into soil while reaching ever skyward to gather in the sun’s largesse…” Keep reading Talk this week | Greening the Desert While working in the Middle East in the 1980s, landscape architect Diana Armstrong Bell discovered a new approach to her field: greening the desert. In this talk, she will share the stories and inspiration that she drew from her experiences in the Middle East, from water capture to resilient planting, and how she applied these ideas at the Arabian Gulf University, Bahrain – even setting up a plant nursery on site. Diana will be joined in conversation by landscape architect, historian and horticulturist Karen Fitzsimon. Tues 15 May, 7pm £10 Standard, £5 Friend/Student/Young Frond £5 Livestream Book tickets Cooking Masterclass | Herbs with Rachel Davies In this three house cooking masterclass, herbs are the star of the show! Herbs can be delicate or hardy, exotic or growing in our public spaces and gardens, they have the potential to add flavour and interest to dishes and yet they are so often overlooked. Join chef and cookery teacher Rachel Davies as we explore how to use herbs of all kinds, some familiar and some less so, to make delicious food. The class includes a sit down lunch and a recipe pack to take away. Sample Menu Persian Kuku Sabzi (a baked omelette filled with chopped herbs) with a yoghurt, cucumber and fresh mint sauce Herb oil drizzled honey roasted pumpkin with puy lentils and marinated feta Tabbouleh Chocolate bark with dried edible flowers and herbs Poached plums with tarragon Sun 21 May, 10.45am-2pm £90, includes all ingredients Book tickets Branch Out: Design your own seed packet At this week’s free Branch Out session we will be exploring our archival seed packets for inspiration. Then participants can design and create your own packet using collage and mono-printing, filling them with seeds to take home. Thurs 18 May Drop-in 11am-1pm, 2pm-4pm Free entry Branch Out has been made possible thanks to funding from Arts Council England.  See all Branch Out events Object of the Week: The Artist’s House at 19 Queensland Avenue, London, by Harry Bush Bush and the artist Noel Laura Nisbet (1887–1956), whom he married in 1910, lived in the same semi-detached house in Queensland Avenue, Merton Park, SW19, (a gift from Noel’s father) from 1914 until their deaths. Over the years Bush regularly depicted the suburban back gardens seen from his studio, many of which were exhibited at The Royal Academy, as was the case with this work in 1940. Bush saw the ancestry of his art in the quiet dignity of Dutch and Flemish domestic scenes, and, as his younger daughter recalled, mixed pigments and oils, ‘so that his work should mellow, glow and last, and if possible, improve’. This painting is on display in our current exhibition Private & Public: Finding the Modern British Garden until 4 June. Presented in partnership with Liss Llewellyn, works are available to purchase in aid of our education and exhibitions programmes. Explore the online exhibition

Images: Parham House (c) Jonathan Wilkinson; Cecilia Charlton: Memory Garden installation view (c) Ben Deakin; Andrew Timothy O’Brien (c) Sundari Ferris; Greening the Desert illustration (c) Diana Armstrong Bell; Herbs (c) Rachel Davies; The Artist’s House by Harry Bush (1883-1957), image courtesy of Liss Llewellyn

ETSY SALE – Katherine Hepburn Admirer

SOLD TODAY – SUNDAY – 4/16

Book, The Private World of Katherine Hepburn Shop: ContessasHome Transaction ID: 3520507897 Quantity: 1 Price: $45.00

…..to our ETSY customer in Brooklyn, NY

Congrats!

“CONTESSA” says….. it all good!

Book/Children’s/ Ounce Dice Trice – ETSY

Book, New York Review Children’s Collection, OUNCE DICE TRICE by Alastar Reid, Drawings by Ben Shahn. Copyright 1958. This book is a collection of odd words and names to amuse and amaze. In this book you will find old words, new words and family words. This book may inspire you to start collecting or writing 

— Read on www.etsy.com/listing/264696295/book-childrens-ounce-dice-trice

SOLD……$20.90

2/17/23

A local Alexandria, VA resident

Thx much

“Contessa”

Exploring My Task List From Yesterday

Today I completed a few exercises to cover some suggestions from yesterday with regard to my pursuing a new career in writing.

One of the suggestions was to read your own writings from some time ago. I surmise this gives you a perspective into your writing skills at that time and perhaps may even reassure you that your writing is actually pretty good. Affirmation perhaps.

………………………

So… I followed the first instruction on my list of ways to avoid putting off beginning to write again, and stop procrastinating. Something has created a road block. Getting past that road block could be just a matter of taking a walk or a run. It’s one of the suggestions on my task list from yesterday. I myself chose an early morning walk at 29 degrees. It does get you going and well worth the chill you feel. An awakening for sure.

But I also decided to go back in time to my blog, and visited my very first post on June 30th of the year 2010. I’ve included the txt of my first post below.  It was interesting…..because I had, by that time, owned my new shop, Contessa’s Garden and Gift for a couple years. I had only just acquired a new digital camera and was still using a “flip phone” and I was teaching myself how to master WordPress, an online yearly subscription tool, that I’ve now subscribed to for over 13 years. I was using a laptop at the time. WordPress opened up a whole new world for me in communicating my gardening and store ownership knowledge, to my customers using the internet. Within a couple years I was into the purchase of an Apple iPhone and so I ditched the digital camera for a camera right on my iPhone. It was a fantastic transition. And it changed my business from known,  to very well known. And my writing skills from good to pretty darn good.

So it’s now almost 2023  and I’m going to take a whole day to read back to where my blog began. Check out my writing style and see where I can improve and learn some things about how my blog has evolved. In terms of “my writings.” I think it might prove to be an eventful exercise🦋.

One of the other tasks on the list from yesterday, was to read a book. I am reading a book right now and this is giving me an insight into the writing style of another author.  It gives me a focus on what this writer is trying to communicate, and in the case of this particular book, it has exercises in teaching you new skills. To see how the author writes and what he is trying to convey is interesting. This reading will broaden my vocabulary, perhaps improve my  spelling and grammar skills, perhaps teach me how to incorporate some humor into my writing and open my eyes to content that I have never read before. Of particular interest to me in the book is a technique in a chapter called Progressive Relaxation. The suggestion that if you are not truly in a relaxed mode your creative energy may not flow. For example, you sit down to write or create and you are just not able to spit it out or get the words on paper. It happens. Burn out, can sometimes paralyze creativity. So doing the exercises mentioned in this book might help, and focusing on some mind exercises to “relax” you, could very well be a great answer to turning your writing creativity around. Some deep breathing combined with some muscle tension exercises might create relaxation and bring a calmness into your heart and it might even lower your blood pressure, creating a sense of better, and a more whole relaxation. All good points and ways to combat, what I myself might call brain fatigue or brain fog.  

So today to recap, I explored two items on the task list which could help me to get past my current roadblock that’s keeping me from  creating new “writing,” and new ideas for content.

More exploration tomorrow. Tonight I am reading “past” blog postings and my book called; Fighting The Inside Dragons.  New steps to explore in broadening my new writing career.

We will return tomorrow to reference my task list again. I look forward to sharing once again with you.

“Contessa”

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Our First Blog Post from 2010

Gardening Tips for July

30WednesdayJun 2010

NOW  is a great time to clean up your garden beds and your pot containers.   Remove dead leaves and blossoms.  Cut back your stems by half.  Yes it will temporarily make you plants look bare, but nature is divine and she will  replenish your blossoms and beautiful leaves within about two to three weeks time.  Add fresh Miracle Grow Potting Soil by about one inch to your pot containers.  Push garden dirt towards the roots of your garden flowers.  They will love the attention and the protection they get from fresh, moist dirt around their stems.

Our intense heat in Virginia has been relentless and some flowers are looking a bit weary.  Mid summer is a great time to plant a few new flowers with color.  Try some marigolds, nasturtiums, morning-glory and sunflowers.  The birds will love these new additions and in the fall you will love the fact that these lovely colorful blossoms are still “Hanging In.”

Another great addition for July is to add some Sweet Potato Vine and Coleus.  They provide endless color and if you take clippings once your plants are established, you will be able to bring some in  and place them  in a vase with water.  They will root in a matter of days and you can then create new plants to enjoy and even share with friends.

Lastly, water only in the early morning, or late evening, but do water daily.

Contessa Explores A Writing Career

Hello ContessasHome Friends….

After blogging for fourteen years, and writing about gardening, yoga, my store in Delray, daily reflections and my spiritual prayer times, I am led to pursue my newest “calling.” I want to write a book. I have gazillions of thoughts and ideas in my head about things to write about. I have decided to pursue a writing career. My blog is and will remain a continued communication tool, in order to be able to keep in touch with all of you…..my gardening friends. 

I have been thinking about writing professionally for about two years. Today I visited the library to find a few books about how to start a career in writing. I will be doing some studying and some writing. I’m not sure where I’m going exactly…but it is all about getting started. Will it be a novel, or a series of short stories, a devotional, poetry or a collection of daily spiritual reflections. I do not know that yet. But “beginning” is where I will start. Creating characters possibly, making characters come to life, inventing a story and a writers style all come in to play. Being a writer will require some solitude, research, writing and rewriting and using the inner resources of my mind to gather all the material I’ve stored in my brain for these last fourteen years while I was blogging. My inner urge to write comes from my creator. I am no accident and neither is my inner urge to write. It’s all part of His plan for me. My best self so to speak. Diving deep into my mind to explore so many things I have learned about my life, my previous careers and just simply about learning. Life long learners are interesting folk. We have lived and grown and shared. This new adventure is a place I’ve not been before. But it’s been planted as a seed in my heart and so I will begin…..and I bring with me, for support and encouragement, my best friend, and the love of my earthly life and my soul mate. [JB/MP]

Tonight I’ve brought four books home with me from the Duncan Library in Delray. All very different. Each focusing on writing……and so now, for a week or so…. I will become a student of others research about writing. I will share with you as I go along in this new and scary, but exciting writing journey.

“Contessa”

Advent and Christmas…a study

Advent 2022

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November 2022 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Advent for the year 2022 is celebrated/observed on Sunday, November 27th

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We have prepared for this season by finding a publication with daily scripture and prayer for the time of Advent and Christmas.

There are 28 readings in this devotional study for Advent (Part 1), and then in (Part 2) 12 readings that begin on Christmas Day. We have used a devotional of Henri Nouwen for Lenten Devotions and our response from other students of his writings was very encouraging. So we shall continue with this publication as our guide for this upcoming Advent and Christmas seasons. We trust you will follow with us through this 40-day study.

Our first reading will be posted this Sunday, Nov 27th.

• Wisdom from Henri Nouwen •
Words of Wisdom for Daily Living

The Garden Museum, UK

Film: Lucian Freud’s Chatsworth Cyclamen Mural Did you know Lucian Freud painted a cyclamen mural in a private bathroom at Chatsworth House? In our new exhibition Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits we have recreated the space to give visitors a rare opportunity to see this little-known masterpiece. To find out more about the real thing, we visited Chatsworth to make a short film with Senior Curator of Programme Dr Alex Hodby, to share the story of this powerful plant portrait. Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is open until 5 March 2023 Digital partner Patch Plants Watch the film New Talk! Freud and Flowers at Chatsworth The Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth holds a rich variety of works by Lucian Freud, including paintings, prints, objects and even a cyclamen mural in a bathroom. This talk by Dr Alex Hodby, Senior Curator of Programme at Chatsworth (as seen in our film above!), will explore these works in the context of the collection and house. Focusing on depictions of flowers and plants, Alex will expand on how Freud’s work is understood within the context of the historic collection, and in relation to the Cavendish family. Centring on works in the collection in comparison with other closely related painting, prints and drawings, Alex will explore the artworks and how she has come to understand their place in the dynamic home at Chatsworth. Alex was one of the curators of the acclaimed exhibition this summer of the exhibition of the family’s commissions by contemporary artists The exhibition Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits will be open from 6.30pm – 7pmbefore the talk (entry included). Tues 29 November, 7pm £20 Standard, £15 Friends £10 Students / Young Fronds Book tickets Talk this week! Charlotte Molesworth in conversation with Non Morris Artist and gardener Charlotte Molesworth has been making a gentle haven of a garden – an enclosed world of light-catching peacocks, plump tiers of variegated box – for forty years. The garden at Balmoral Cottage in Kent was originally the kitchen garden of Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram’s Benenden Estate, and has been featured in Vogue, Gardens Illustrated, Gardeners’ World, The Telegraph and many more! Charlotte and her garden are a great inspiration to some of our favourite gardeners – including Rachel de Thame who commented: “I’ll never forget meeting Charlotte, ambling round that magical garden talking topiary. It was one of the few times I’ve truly resented having a film crew trailing around with us. I wanted to have her to myself … and possibly spend a month sipping tea in her kitchen. A truly remarkable person.” Non and Charlotte will be chatting about the delights of topiary – the way giant fennel and towering sunflowers dazzle against the formal structure, and why Buxus sempervirens ‘Elegantissima’ is the ‘Queen of box’. Tues 8 November, 7pm £25 Standard, £20 Friends / Young Fronds, £15 Students £10 Livestream Book tickets Book Extract | Leif Bersweden: Where the Wildflowers Grow Ahead of his Plant Science Lecture at the Garden Museum on Friday 25 November, adventuring botanist Leif Bersweden shares an extract from his new book Where the Wildflowers Grow:“Parliament Square wasn’t exactly the epitome of biodiversity. It largely consisted of Perennial Rye-grass, a species with shiny, dark-green leaves that’s often sown to create parks and recreation grounds. But as I wandered, I noticed little plants popping up here and there. There were Shepherd’s-purse and Common Chickweed, but neither was in flower. A couple strolled past, arm in arm, eyeing me with a mixture of curiosity and misgiving. I grinned sheepishly at them. Bright-red London buses slid by, heading south over Westminster Bridge. I glanced over my shoulder at the Houses of Parliament and eyed the police guards cradling their enormous guns. I felt like I was trespassing in one of the most famous places in the world. ‘Sorry, officer, don’t mind me, I’m just looking for midwinter wildflowers’ is the kind of excuse that would probably only increase their suspicion if I was questioned about my activities. My concerns were interrupted, however, when I saw the Daisy: tall, bright and open- flowered. I got down on the ground to have a closer look…” Keep reading Christmas Wreath-making Workshop ‘Tis almost the season for wreath-making! Create a beautiful bespoke traditional Christmas wreath from scratch using fresh materials and dried fruit and berries. Florist and floristry lecturer Elaine Fisher will teach you the techniques and guide you to make your own wreath to hang on your front door or even use as a table centrepiece. At the end of the workshop, you can take your festive creation home to decorate your home with. Tues 29 November, 7pm £60, includes all materials Book tickets Object of the Week: The Topiary Lawn at Great Dixter (c.1960) In honour of Charlotte Molesworth’s enchanting topiary garden, this week we looked for exemplary examples of topiary in our collection of historic garden photos and came across this photo of Great Dixter’s topiary lawn from c.1960. Complete with requisite dog sprawled on the lawn! Christopher Lloyd (1921-2006) is quoted on Great Dixter’s website:“A closely planted strip of ash trees on the garden’s west boundary, provide wonderful silhouettes of airy foliage against the sunset sky, in summer, but they do shed much seed into the garden, borne on the prevailing south-west winds. The yew topiary lends a particular atmosphere to several parts of the garden. There was more of it in my father’s time. It has a presence, especially when shadows are long and it appears to inhabit, rather than grow. It needs clipping only once a year. If done in August, it will retain its sharp outlines right through to the end of the following May. However, although we mechanised the operation soon after the last war, we seldom achieve this objective and are pleased if this prolonged task is completed by November. Yew grows much faster than people imagine, if the ground is well prepared and the plants are fed.” Explore our collection online Images: Chatsworth House photo courtesy of Chatsworth; Charlotte Molesworth (c) Leigh Clapp; Westminster Daisy (c) Leif Bersweden; Great Dixter Topiary Lawn c.1960, Garden Museum Collection Garden Museum 5 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB gardenmuseum.org.uk

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A Different Path Today

2030……recommended by my gardening client “the General,” and my pick, Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keeler. My new reads from now through August 1st

I’m needing a change of pace in my free time…. away from the topic of gardening.  Very different titles, but both recommended. Looking forward to time with “my nose in a book.”

Sunday afternoon…….

”Contessa”

A New Read…..

Lifetime female friendship is the essence of this read. Elena and Lila rely on each other and survive a poor upbringing in Naples  Italy. The author Elena Ferrante gives you a story of a neighborhood, a city, a country and a nation, during immense change, and how it affected their lives and their deep friendship. If you have had the experience of a lifetime female friendship and you have lost contact with them, you will remember your friend with great admiration and how you relied on each other, as you navigated the good and the tough times. Sometimes these kinds of friendships only happen once. A great read.

SOLD Today on ETSY……Volume

Picturing Nantucket reveals a complete spectrum of the islands artistic heritage. Complete with 125 color and 180 black and white reproduction photographs from the Nantucket Historical Associations extensive collection. If you treasure Nantucket Art, this book is an essential reference for your personal collection.

Pristine copy. Measures 10.5” x 12.5” x 1”
A beautiful coffee table book. 253 pages.

A true Art History of the Island.

THIS  Sale just came through via our ETSY SITE. Our buyer lives in Chandler, TX.  Selling Total is $46.

“CONTESSA” says……”it’s all good.”