Today Jessica Townsend tells us a little about ‘her’ countryside.

Callum: Where in the world is ‘your’ countryside?

Jessica: The heart of the Lincolnshire Wolds, a small village surrounded by fields and sky. It’s where I grew up and I was instantly drawn back here when I left the big city life for a slower pace. This landscape is home - from the muddy paths leading to my front door, to the bird who every day calls me to the second tree on the left in Farmer Terry’s field – I know it all so well.

Callum: Earliest countryside memory?

 Jessica: The land where our house now sits was once part of the fields that surround it. I remember when my parents first bought the land, seeing nothing but long grasses and running through them getting stung by nettles. When I do the same now it always brings me back to that moment, when we first came to this place and called it home.

Callum: Why do you love the countryside?

 Jessica: I love the quiet and the noises that disturb it - the chatter of birds, the rustling leaves, the whispers of the wind. I love the absolute solitude that can be found just moments from my door, and the inspiration that can be found in it. But most of all I love the amount of sky. The Lincolnshire Wolds are relatively flat and at times it can feel like the whole world is nothing but wide, open skies. It makes me feel free.

Callum: You have 24 hours, anywhere: describe your ideal day in the countryside.

 Jessica: I would start the day with crisp, autumn sunshine overhead and a steaming coffee outdoors, followed by a walk with the dog through paths of red and gold. Rosy cheeks are a must, and a stroll through the woods wouldn’t go amiss. The day would end with a lakeside pub and a warming cider as we wait for the stars to appear.

Callum: Favourite season and why?

 Jessica: Spring first comes to mind, as I love the sense of new beginnings and nature coming to life. However, after becoming part of the Creative Countryside Community I’ve been shown such beauty in the autumn months that I may be a convert, especially after the never-ending summer we just had. Autumn is also a time I can wear socks, boots and jumpers everyday and that definitely has my vote!

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Check out Jessica’s slow fashion at House of Flint.

Last week, a question in the Creative Countryside Community piqued my interest, not solely as a stimulating inquiry in its own right, but because it was a question my brother had posed in our siblings’ WhatsApp group only hours before:

‘Do you acknowledge the start of autumn on September 1st (meteorological) or the autumn equinox (astronomical date (21st / 22nd))?’

As I started to think through my own answer and reasons, the thought process inevitably turned to a love letter to September, and everything contained within this beautiful month of exhale, transition and metamorphosis.

It’s hard to pin any of the seasons down to a single day, to herald a definitive ‘arrival’, but for me, autumn is especially hard to do so.  I’ve experienced August days full to the brim with lashing rain, thick jumpers and cosy comfort food indoors.  Conversely, I’ve viewed the embers of September days attired in shorts and t-shirt, from the tops of Derbyshire moorland or Sussex Downland, with a day’s worth of hot sun glowing in the pinkness of sunburned skin.

For me, autumn is a season that ebbs slowly in from the very edges of nature itself: it bleeds; it seeps slowly.  September is simultaneously late summer and early autumn.  These seasons rub shoulders confidently together – a natural friction, yet an unspoken harmony.  It’s a month of ratios, rather than a definitive start and ending.  And it’s that unpredictable and heady mix of magic that makes September so entrancing.

September is a month in which we’re suddenly jolted back into a state of alertness.  For too long, we’ve been drunk upon the overflowing cup of summer: the long hot days, warm nights, and seemingly ever-present light.  Now it’s the quickening dusk, almost tidal in its encroachment; the fleeting beauty of dying leaves that pulse all manner of yellows: just some of the markers that sharpen the senses.  

The wilful abandon of taking summer for granted is ended with an enforced observance of sobriety: our eyes do the harvesting, as we eagerly stockpile the mental stores to satiate our wistful longings in the barren depths of winter.  Moments are magnified, appreciated; tended.

Harvesting is not limited to the eyes: the garden continues to take away with one hand and give with the other.  I spend a weekend dead-heading, de-potting and re-arranging, packing away a summer’s worth of organic detritus, whilst runner beans send forth new produce, pumpkins continue to swell, and tomatoes redden upon the vine.

I don’t care what your argument: no-one can convince me that late summer’s transition into autumn isn’t one of this country’s most magnificent times of year.  But September is the magical moment in our natural calendar: a month of harmonious tension.

And where our seasons rub up against each other in a beautiful friction, the resultant sparks ignite a vision of truth that’s often hard to comprehend.

Viva September.

Curiosity is the cornerstone of any creative mind.

An inquisitive nature that refuses to take things at face value.  A soul that looks deeper into the world around them and spends time reflecting, thinking, processing.  Curiosity is a blessing (and can also be a curse) but is also a trait that garners immense riches when applied to life outdoors.

It is curiosity that forced me outside into my garden on chill winter mornings in November, as I chronicled the tiny changes in the garden at a time of year I used to consider ‘dead’.  It is curiosity that has seen me poring over the tiniest of flowers and plants in the garden, as I become romantically entwined with a specific plant, rather than worrying about the state of the lawn.

But it is also this inquiring soul that has seen me start to amass a rather wonderful collection of curiosities, as I build a nature table made up of objects that are natural, beautiful and full of intrigue.

‘Cabinets of curiosities’ date back to c. 1600, and were collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined in Renaissance Europe.

As we move into more modern times, these became collections of many different forms, from archaeological and religious relics, to works of art, antiquities and of course, objects of natural history.  And for the curious mind, the outdoors offers a rich bounty of different curios to feed the soul and fire the creative within all of us.

Interestingly enough, these were rarely actual cabinets, with the term more loosely referring to an area of a room.  Alas; the curious mind digresses…

In a world where real meaning is often being eroded through apathy, technology (or both), there’s something wonderfully human about collecting different objects from the outdoors.  They require slow, considered saunters to discover them; a natural curiosity applied to a walk or time outdoors, free from the frenetic demands of modern life.

They are tangible, unfiltered and real, and I urge every one of you to start building your own nature table, or natural ‘cabinet of curiosities’ to stimulate the mind and nourish the soul.

On one level, they are aesthetically pleasing.  From the delicate veined patterns of last year’s hydrangea leaves, to the vivid hues of green and yellow lichen, there is a natural nourishment that comes from having a collection of natural ‘objects d’art’ to look at.  They may be ‘everyday’, but every day they also give forth new views, perspectives and thoughts.The delicate strength and sheer variety of materials in a bird’s nest, or the smooth lines of unidentified vertebrae: these objects bridge the curious mind to an uncensored and raw reminder of the real, natural world around us.  To hold these objects is to connect with nature in a way that is getting lost through smartphone sanitisation.

And lastly, they each represent something of true meaning.  I still remember the sheer excitement on my daughter’s face when we found an abandoned ram’s horn when pottering about near a stream.  The empty crab shell, colours jaded now, that represents a time of sheer joy and connection on a beach on Anglesey.  These things are far more than a collection of interesting objects: they are markers of meaning.

We live in a consumer society where we’re constantly told to amass, multiply, and collect.  That human desire to collect is not to be denied.  I just urge you to indulge that motivation in a way that (for me at least) feels infinitely more rewarding, stimulating, and indulging of our natural curiosities.

A nature table is a thing to be embraced.  And even if you live in the heart of a city, there are a thousand different objects just waitingto be found if you’re curious enough to seek them out.

Fancy sharing your collected finds? Use the hashtag #countrysidecuriosities on Instagram and we'll share our favourites!

Bladder campion (Silene vulgaris), one of several new plants I’m experimenting with this year.  Their rounded shape and vivid whiteness offsets strikingly against the different greens of leaves and ferns in the background.

A thousand visual soliloquies that combine to weave a powerful narrative: gardening is a silent act of creativity.  And it’s also a pastime that is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance. And this resurgence is truly multi-faceted.  From the hashtags and hipsters of Instagram that are fuelling a thriving trade in exotic houseplants, to the swathes of gentle souls recognising that gardening offers true freedom from frenetic living, gardening is very much in vogue.

A real success story from my local market last summer.  Its common name of Lamb’s tail (Chiastophyllum oppositifolium) needs no explanation.  Its hanging fronds form clumps of fascination: the red and silver of the huechera (silver scrolls) in the background give it an even crisper vividness.

Cultivating curiosity in the garden (or a balcony, where my early exploits took place) is increasingly offering people a raft of reasons to re-connect with nature.  And for me, that can only be a good thing.  Slower living, reconnection with food, the need for patience in a throwaway world: gardening is a teacher we would all do well to heed.

But this article seeks to celebrate the creativity that gardening can offer: a call to arms to embrace the aesthetically pleasing and commit to a life of creative experimentation.  I guarantee that your soul – and your soil – will be all the richer for it.

Huechera (siver scrolls).  Purchased last summer for its evergreen nature, although that label is somewhat of a misnomer.  Silver, green and a warm maroon underneath, this plant surprised me this year when it issued forth great stems of budding flowers.  A shared favourite of both myself, and the many bees that visit it contentedly throughout these warm days.

Finding your own eye is key.  After a decade of gardening (from crops in pots, an allotment, to my humble garden), I’m only just starting to scrape the surface in terms of what I truly like.  And what you like will be different.  So much of garden ‘design’ and ‘landscape gardening’ can feel elitist and isolating; dictatorial: I urge you to pursue what you like with joyful abandon; creativity, not conformity.

Secondly, anyone who knows me will know that I like to wax lyrical about the joy of pots.  Tiny canvases, they offer a mobility that affords a freedom and playfulness to proceedings.  As seasons progress, plants bloom at different times (bolt at different times), flower at different times: pots offer the ability to re-create displays and move things to create new micro landscapes.

Embrace beautiful failure.  I’m in my eighth summer in the Peak District and I’m still watching glorious disasters unfurl and unfold in the garden!  Experimentation is part – perhaps the – joy of creativity in any discipline.  So many of the plants, structures and arrangements that I’ve developed lifelong love for, have been serendipitous, accidental, stumbled upon by chance.  Sticking to ‘guaranteed results’ results in precisely that: a formulaic act with all mystery surgically removed.

Get started.  I germinated my passion for horticulture on a balcony in Hackney, growing vegetables and flowers in a space that was smaller than a standard-sized double bed.  It can be oh-so-easy to feel that you don’t have a big enough space, so if further validation is needed, seek out the small gardens feature on this series of Gardeners’ World.

And lastly, I’d urge everyone to focus on the details, rather than the overall picture.  Embrace the small details.  One of the many pleasures I derive from my own tiny garden, is the micro, rather than the macro.  Of course, my aim is to nurture a vista of totality, but my joy is in the tiny details.  The bladder wort that is finally in bloom; the lamb’s tail that attracts an endless cycle of tireless bees; the meadow buttercups that bask in the stored heat of the drystone wall: a microcosm of magnificence.

Plants offer a canvas of creativity that is fluid, continual and indulgent: if you possess a creative bent, and even the smallest inkling of love for nature, I urge you to experiment with the colours, shapes, textures and structures that gardening affords.  Your outlook will be both physically and mentally all the better for it.

Ancient landscape:
your stoic features
whisper renewed wisdom
with every tidal
turn.
 
Your craggy coastline
Immovable stone
and dancing flower
a living monument
to contradiction.
 
Expansive, far-reaching
and without
perceptible limit;
you simultaneously manage
to serve
as the very symbol
of boundary:
 
An end,
a finish,
a full stop:
a literal
punctuation mark
on a pock-marked
landscape.
 
Perhaps
(perhaps)
It is because
of this
 
strange
 
binary
 
magnetism
 
that we
are so drawn
to the ends of the earth
to feel so small
in your presence.
 
There are many types of landscape
In which to lose oneself
but it is coastal terrain
that delivers
the most evocative
of escapism.
 
You guide me;
yellow gorse flower
on either side
of a stony track
guides my soul
as I approach
your extremities;
my feet feel as if
they have walked this path
in different times,
through different bodies.
 
I stand before you
suddenly very human
 
frail
 
insignificant
 
and feeling
that contradiction
deep inside of me
as saltwater dances on the breeze
with an alchemy
conjured up
by eternity Herself.
 
I am free.

It’s strange, but the notion of truly ‘being present’, has almost become a counterculture behaviour.  A valid description, its status as such heralds a stark warning on how intrinsically linked we are becoming to digital, viewing moments as future memories waiting to be captured, rather than experiences to be felt in the moment.

But this is not a post about the benefits of digital detox, but more a weekly ritual I want to share, that has helped me not only to focus on ‘being present’, but one that has truly deepened my connection with my garden and its abundance of life in the winter.

Long hours commuting, the demands of a busy job, and the even tougher task of keeping a 3-year-old entertained leaves little time for oneself, or to focus fully on observing and listening to the world around you.  But the other weekend, a chance opportunity to spend just 20 minutes in the garden alone, triggered a routine that I now hold sacred for so many reasons.

I awoke early on a Saturday morning, and my wife and daughter were both still asleep.  I made myself a cup of coffee, reached for a jacket and took myself to the end of the garden to enjoy a few moments of solitude before the household woke up in earnest.

Standing there, time almost seemed to slow down.  Each draught on my hot cup of coffee was followed by a lungful of cold winter air, and then accompanied a bird flitting in the bush beside me; a leaf being carried along in the stream; a heron swooping awkwardly above me.  The less I thought about life, the more I noticed it.

Winter forces me to live a life in boxes even more than the summer: trains carriages, stations, trams, offices, houses.  The opportunity to start the weekend standing in the garden seems to open the pores of the soul and reset one’s internal balance.

But aside from the mental benefits this brings, it’s also started to fuel a deeper connection to life in the winter.  I’ve always loved winter for the same numerous reasons that it’s loved by so many others.  But the garden has always felt like a dead zone to me; closed down and locked off for the winter.

My weekly excursions into it, however, prove how wrong this presumption was.  Even just 15 minutes a week has allowed me to be silent, still and listen to the world around me.  And the abundance of intrigue, interest and activity, has been a revelation to me.  From the intimate lives of birds, made more visible now the branches are bare, or the perseverance and life of different plants, the weekly ritual of observation and quiet listening, has connected me to winter in a way I’ve never felt before.

Discovering this – or should it be, rediscovering? – has been nothing short of a joy.

In addition to the richness this has brought to my love of nature, these wintertime reveries have also helped my creative process.  Any writer will have empathy for the lack of discipline, writer’s block, or general procrastination that seems to come so easily.

But these weekend musings have taken on a metamorphosis of their own, much like the season.  Solitude turned to observation; observation turned to listening.  Listening fuelled note-taking; and notes inspired prose. 

The ‘field notes from the garden’ now form a weekly feature on my blog, a column I derive much pleasure from writing.  But as I’ve started to collate these, even in their infancy, they are starting to form a record of natural history in the smallest of gardens. 

A recent trend for micro, rather than macro, natural history is rather prevalent: writers penning books on edge-land, woodland or even fields.  Could the humblest of small gardens in the Peak District take that premise even further still?

Time will tell.  But I urge all of you, writers or not, to actively carve out a few moments of winter solitude in your gardens, outside spaces, or even gazing out of a window.  When you actively listen, engage and connect, it’s incredible what stories start to reveal themselves to you.

(This also presents an opportunity to apologise to my neighbours for the early morning sight of myself in pyjamas and thick jackets in the garden.  If any of you are reading this, then hopefully this piece changes your perception of me from ‘bizarre-winter-garden-pyjama-man’!)

You can access my weekly observations in the ‘field notes’ category on my website: https://aseasonedsoul.blog/category/field-notes/ or follow me on Twitter @aseasonedsoul

Drop some oil into a large pool of surface water.  Watch as it slowly bleeds and swirls, dispersing, yet unable to be truly absorbed, accommodated.  It moves slowly, yet purposefully; expansively: and that is the very same image I can see before me, as I gaze up at a gloom September sky, that moves like an unearthly liquid.

I can’t ascertain whether it is cloud, rain or merely haze, but the sky pulses today, as it licks over the embers of slowly dying moorland.  And despite this movement, the air feels listless and lifeless; barren, devoid, empty.  And it is the loss of the swallows, that provides the punctuation on this thought.

Only a few weeks prior, the sky overhead was a chalky blue, washed with soft white clouds that drifted aimlessly and happily through cool evening air.  Against this sheet music, the graceful arcs and sweeps of swallows played out a natural music for the eyes; an orchestra of flight, grace and silent triumph.

But today, an emptiness.  An absence that is felt, in ways weightier than the lightness of their presence.  I wonder where they are; what they are doing?  Whether they ever think of these fields, and the hours they spent sweeping over them?  I think of them, here, and now.  I gaze across fields that transition into moorland, and lament their loss.

My legs take on their own rhythm, and I slip into a gait that is comfortable and effortless.  Today, it is my eyes that are doing all of the work, drinking in every last vestige of what once was verdant.  Summer is over, and autumn is here.  Yet I always feel that autumn never truly ‘arrives’; this beautiful season is far too transitional to remain still, or stable, to definitively arrive.

The grasses that sprang forth from lichen-covered walls with such verdant energy, are now yellow, white and brown.  Leggy, tired, defeated: I can relate.

How strange, as they hunch and bend over themselves.  Such weightless things, yet the stalks of spent energy now appear to carry an invisible force of great magnitude.  Their swansong is as stark as the clouds that gather above my head.

I see a piece of wood that is too large to be labelled a twig, or indeed, a stick, and yet too small to be described as a log.  It is covered in the most wonderful greenish and blueish lichen – veritably covered – and has the appearance of scales; a snake of the most exquisite delicate patterns and textures.  I run my hand across it and marvel at the beauty of its cool sensation.

I continue on my way, and take heart from the various ferns that protrude from dry-stone walls.  Autumn is a time of visual and visceral decay, yet a thousand observations combine to form a unique beauty that is there for those that seek it with open eye and honest soul.

Up high on the vast, open swathes of moorland, the landscape is limited only by the framing of our human vision. A concerted effort to strain your eyes wider, beyond their natural aperture, reveals yet more aching openness, the horizon wide and expansive; open, wild, raw.

Yet within these great vistas of peat, grit, limestone and heather, brought to life in sudden bursts by the guttural shrieking of flushed grouse, lays one of the countryside’s great dichotomies: the wider the expanse and greater the openness, the deeper the introspection that is attained and attuned.

I gaze outwards, to gaze inwards. Scanning the jagged landscape allows me to explore the contours of my own mind and soul, in ways that are seemingly constricted by the confines of urban environments.

And for me, weather – especially in the Peak District – is a natural phenomenon that only exacerbates this feeling. Out here, weather clings to the landscape with resolute stoicism: clouds latch onto moorland hilltops and sit there, passive and yet active, shrouding the slopes with mystery and promising a deeper escapism than fair weather permits.

For me, walking in bad weather in the Peak District has become something of a pilgrimage. When mist envelops the landscape in secrecy, or engorged clouds sit heavy and swollen on peat moorland, it draws with almost magnetic power: escape, escape, escape.

Bad weather only exacerbates the feeling of intimacy and introspection when walking in this raw, elemental environment. The expanse of the outdoors rewards me with the physical and mental escape from urban living, but the weather adds an even greater level of intimacy to the experience. I am lost in an expanse of moorland, yet this vast panorama is made intimate and framed by the immediacy of the weather affecting it.

It is a feeling of enclosure within expansiveness.

And this is what I tried to capture with a camera, on a cold, windswept rainstorm in February.

The pure physicality of cold, biting air upon the skin; the crisp lines and textures of bare branches and skeletal leaves folded in upon themselves; the build up of condensation upon the moustache hairs of one’s beard; the quiet, haunting beauty of a natural world, dormant, and yet silently alive underground and behind the scenes... 

There’s no doubting that winter is a season of breathtaking beauty; one that offers solace, silence and respite to those who venture out of doors to brave something raw and truly elemental; to those who seek its truth and conversation.  But for the commuting classes of countryside aficionados, winter can also be a season that curtails, that cages.

Winter is the harbinger of darkness - of short days and long nights - a time in which I feel removed from the natural world; a time in which I struggle to fulfil my deeply-engrained passion for it. 

A time of pure longing for the light that lengthens the days and frees me to embrace the outdoors and experience it in its fullness once more.

A period of dark mornings walking to the station, where waiting trains ferry a silent mass of humans, invisible in the stillness of the dark, to sprawling concrete jungles, only to participate in the noise and cacophony of human endeavour, before returning silently back to waiting houses that shroud, hide and envelop.

For the commuter, winter is a cruel cage.

And this also, is why February is seized upon with such open-hearted embrace.  The slow, ebbing of darkness is pounced upon; the darkness becomes slowly less black, before a further transition of velvety hues takes place.  And slowly, stoically, the mornings suddenly embrace a small crack of light breaking over the tops of the hills, stood silent and proud in the distance.  Shapes take on new, refreshed meaning and purpose; vigour and vitality enter not only the landscape, but the eyes of the morning commuter, to whom the natural world is suddenly opening up once again, like petals unfurling upon a new flower.

And, all of a sudden, the morning walk of the commuter becomes alive once again.  I embrace the visual feast before me; the very simplicity of seeing the birds in the branches once again; connecting the incessant cheeps of the proud blackbird to the singer performing it.

And all of a sudden, just like that, I pass a clump of snowdrops next to an old tree stump.

The thin, delicate stems are painted from the most vivid hues of green, delicately poised with hanging opal drops of purest white, their beauty exacerbated by the clinging droplets of morning dew, offset with the crisp, silent flakes of frost upon the surrounding blades of grass.

I stand for a few seconds and drink the scene in, my hungry, commuter-starved eyes consuming the sight vociferously and with real relish.  Here, right outside my house, is a sight that signals not only the onset of spring, but a symbol of vision and connection with the natural world once again.  While my weekdays may still be spent commuting and working in a city, the mornings and evenings are slowly presenting themselves to me once again, and the humble snowdrops herald the arrival of lighter days and seasons that can be embraced out of hours.

The pale white snowdrops are the key that unlock the cage of winter.