Transient Moments

How to store and display your memories without turning your home into a dusty, eclectic museum of curiosities is a question I grapple with on a daily basis. I live with an engineer who sees objects for their form function and practical uses. Ask him to make me a shelf or put back together the jigsaw puzzle of an old reclaimed greenhouse that just comprises of various lengths of aluminum struts and a bag of bolts and he’s as happy as a person could be.

Ask him to comment on a paper Mache bowl of dried flowers and he’s speechless, lost for words. It doesn’t spark any form of awe or wonderment in him at all. Just a mental reminder that the Hoover might be needed at some point when it finally expires. So he has his office in an old bedroom with books of engineering terms and equations lining his walls and an unfathomable array of half-built wooden pond yachts filling his shelves and I have shelves where I can display my treasures and an old bookcase where I can shut the door on a display of changing fascination that keeps the dust and cat at bay.

A small extract, taken from my new book. ‘The Flower Hunter, creating a floral love story inspired by the landscape’. Here you’ll find a recipe for re-creating these small transient memories from your garden.