The Gardens at Yewbarrow House in May

1/6/2013

The consensus of opinion among those I spoke to who saw Christopher Bradley-Hole’s Telegraph garden at Chelsea was that it was “awful”. It was drab, dire, derivative and, most significantly for a garden at a spring show, entirely mono-chromatic. What Brits long for after a long hard winter is a bit of joie de vivre. Spring was so slow in arriving this year that we had the delayed gratification of seeing it all together in the month of May; daffodils with azaleas, tulips with paeonies.

It was a relief to step back into my garden after Chelsea and see the colours of spring as they ought to be. And to know that there’s plenty more to come. Could there be anything more depressing than to open the bedroom curtains every morning, to be faced with a colourless “zen” creation in the Christopher Bradley-Hole mode?

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About Slow Life

The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.