Château de Miromesnil

I was commissioned to photograph a beautiful garden in Normandy, France back in 2018. After the shoot, I had some time left before catching the ferry back to England so I stopped at the Château de Miromesnil where I had a lovely walk around the gardens.

Birthplace of Maupassant, many visitors come here because of him. I didn’t know much about the place before I got there and I was so happy to discover the beautiful potager around the château. It is not your usual manicured French garden but it’s full of lovely fruit trees, colourful dahlias and zinnias, cabbages and very photogenic rows of dill. Absolutely heavenly. I would highly recommend to visit and join the guided tour as well (if you’re a French speaker) which is very informative and gives lots interesting details about the past of the château.

Gingerbread

I have been baking gingerbread cookies at Christmas for a long time now. I remember making little gingerbread houses in my grandmother’s kitchen years and years ago. I’ll try and find images of those..
I’m not a great baker and there are only a handful of things I bake and most of the time with fruits in them. But no Christmas can go by without me filling the house with the smell of gingerbread cookies. I find them very easy to make and very relaxing to bake and decorate. Perfect.

You won’t need a huge and special list of ingredients but you might want to make sure you have some cookie cutters before you start with your gingerbread. They come in all shapes and forms but I do like using Christmassy ones at Christmas time. Christmas tree, bells, moose, stars, angels..

This gingerbread is soft and keeps for weeks only that it’s so good it never really does..

You will need:

200g of honey
150g of butter
250g of icing sugar
3 eggs
1tsp sodium carbonate
750g of flour
1 pack gingerbread spice mix

or
your own mix of the following
2tsp of ground cinnamon
1tsp of ground ginger
1tsp of ground cloves
1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp of ground cardamom

And this is what you’ll need to do:

Put the butter and the honey into a bowl that will fit over a pan of simmering water. Leave it over the water, stirring occasionally. When melted, let the mix cool.

In a large bowl, mix together the rest of the ingredients and add the butter-honey mix to it. You’ll get a soft dough. I don’t mix or overwork it too much, just slightly shape it into a ball. Let the dough rest in a cool place or in the fridge for overnight or even a day or two.

When ready to bake them, preheat the oven to 170 Celsius. Roll the dough to about 3-5mm thick. Then out with all those cookie cutters!
Flour the cutter a bit so the dough doesn’t stick to it. Line your baking tray with a sheet of baking parchement and put your cut cookies onto the tray and into the preheated oven for about 5-8 minutes.

Do keep an eye on them as they bake very quick. When nice and golden, they are ready.

Place the cookies on a cooling rack. When completely cooled down, you can start preparing for the icing. If you don’t have time for it straight away, just put the cookies in a cookie jar or tin, they will last there forever and can decorate them anytime.

For the icing, you’ll need 1 egg white, 200g icing sugar and a drop of lemon.

In a bowl beat the egg white and gradually add the icing sugar. This should take about 3-4 minutes. Then add a drop of lemon that will give a nice shine to the icing.
When nice and firm, spoon the mix into a piping bag and have fun icing your own designs!

And now it’s time to use your beautifully crafted gingerbread cookies.
I like making gifts tags or place cards for Winter parties. They can also be wonderful gifts in a nice jar or just the perfect treat on a cold Winter afternoon..

Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas!

with love,
Eva

Dahlia

It has been a very good year for dahlias. It wasn’t the best though for the ones I left in the ground but those have been in there for at least 3 years so I figure I should now lift and divide them. Anyway, the ones that are good just keep on giving. I cut them every day and either give them to friends or bring them in the house.
One of the main reasons I like growing them is because they are easy to grow and won’t stop giving you flowers well into Autumn.

These above are a mix of ones growing in my garden but some I picked at Green and Gorgeous. I have too many orange-Autumn colour ones and so Sweet Nathalie (or Café au Lait) stand out a bit. I’m definitely going to mix in more colours next year. This is the best time of the year seeing all the beautiful varieties growing out there i.e. writing a dahlia shopping list.

I love displaying dahlias in a rather simple way, putting them in these vintage stoneware jars - Victorian ink bottles. You can esily find these on etsy or car boot sales.

I grow most of my dahlias at the very back of the garden. This area looked like this - below - when we moved here 7 years ago but we cleared it a lot. We’re only renting so there’s ony so much work we want or can do but I’m quite happy with the current state.

So yes. Dahlias. Such a colourful (sometimes even a bit too much for my liking) and easy to grow flower, do grow them if you can.

Great Dixter

From a flying visit early July.. Just love it there.

Crab apple

There are four crab apple trees on one of my favourite bridlepath. I love seeing these in all season but they are always my favourite when the trees lose their leaves and only the apples hang on like baubles. A few days ago, a big branch from one of these trees broke off so I saved a few bits and brought them home. I love crab apples trees a lot. I love their wildness, their imperfect shape and as they grow old, their mossy branches. They also say Autumn is not far now..

Meanwhile my crab apple:

It’s a Comtesse de Paris that I planted in February and is enjoying the company of Ammi Majus growing all around it. I chose this one for its apples that turn orange in the Autumn. Although I really liked its simple, single flowers in the Spring too.

Garden by the sea

In recent years, one of the highlights of my trips up to Scotland is meeting Rachael of Hedgerow / @hedgerow for a coffee or lunch and a walk and chat around the streets of Portobello. She shows me the most beautiful little streets , colourful old doors and gates and we admire anything green and flowery (I must do a blog post just on that). When, after a long long time, we finally travelled up to Scotland again in May, I got to see Rachael’s beautiful garden too and her stylish home (proper magazine material but I didn’t want to be too pushy on that front, maybe next time)

Rachael is a floral designer and an architect and these passions of hers can be found everywhere you look in her garden and home.

We had tea and cinnamon buns and a good, much needed chat and I spent some time out to her rainy garden with my camera. We then headed out for lunch to Rachael’s favourite place - Skylark - before walking back home through rainy Portobello and making a flat lay with flowers from her garden.

Making this flat lay with flowers from Rachael’s garden was such a treat. I never take it for granted picking flowers (or dismantling a bouquet) just for this. The backdrop we used was her kitchen table and the light in the kitchen just worked perfectly and helped us create this moody image on that rainy day.

Thank you Rachael for this very special day, I had the best time. This must have been the most relaxing day of my holiday.

I’m going to share with you more private gardens, do come along.

The first posy

There will be flowers now in the garden until the end of the year. This is the first posy from the garden and oh it feels so nice picking these colourful little Spring flowers. The garden I’m currently custodian of - since we’re only renting but we can do whatever we want to the garden, seriously, we have the best landlords - so this garden once belonged to a gardener. How I love this thought. In the Spring, it’s full of all the flowers you see here. I added lots of hellebores myself and there are no narcissi growing in the garden but I always grow them in pots. One day, in my own garden, these flowers will grow too, in the orchard where I’ll leave the grass long..

There will be flowers now in the garden until the end of the year. And around me, outside the garden too, so many beautiful ones. This year I’m photographing two books with two wonderful flower growers. I feel extremely lucky for calling this my work but also because I know I’ll learn so much from them. The only thing though I cannot seem to learn at all is making bouquets. So I’m going to stick to these little posies. I always find it easy to arrange them in a vase and then take them out from the vase and voilà, the posy is done.

There will be flowers now in the garden until the end of the year. It’s sometimes hard work but most of the time just pure happiness. Nothing relaxes me more than working in the garden (oh! or taking pictures in the/a garden) and I do love brining in flowers, branches, green leaves, anything. But I also love brining home bits from my walks. I came across this beautiful cherry plum tree yesterday..

There will be flowers now in the garden until the end of the year. I’m planning to make a posy every month and also very regurarly photograph the garden. I promise.

Forced bulbs

I came home with some beautiful flowers and a pot filled with Narcissus bulbocodium ‘Arctic Bells’ from a photo shoot last week. Part of that shoot reminded me of a garden book (and I cannot remember now which one it was) where there was an image of a room filled with pots that were filled with forced bulbs. Somehow that photo mesmerized me and that image stayed with me. During that shoot last week, I was able to take photographs carrying that very similar feeling and that made me think oh my, this is like a dream.

So today I turned our dining room into a mini studio and had a little play with these flowers. The dining room is the only place in the house where I’m happiest with the light (at the moment as I know it can change any time) and that light looks like this..

Early Spring flowers

So I had this beautiful pot filled with these pettitcoat daffodils. I only took them out of the pot for a little flat lay but now they’re all safely back in the pot. But I do love seeing bulbs in their full beauty, the roots, the bulb and the flowers. I absolutely love this connection.

Narcissus bulbocodium 'Arctic Bells‘

I rarely force bulbs myself but I do buy bulbs early January (planted by garden nurseries). As soon as I get home with them, I remove them from their plastic containers and plant them into terracotta pots. The ‘Arctic Bells’ below were gifts from two wonderful persons I had shoots with last week.

Narcissi, muscari, snowdrops

I keep them in the conservatory which is the coldest place at the moment and slowly bring them in throughout February. To brighten up the days that are already growing longer. This is the month the sun starts to shine through the neighbour’s cherry tree and into our kitchen in sunny mornings too. Very prescious moments.

Paperwhite narcissus

Snowdrops and narcissus

It’s hard to believe it’s still early February and there are already so many beautiful flowers around. All of these are also British grown, the cut narcissi all from Cornwall.