Embroidered fanciful letter N (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)
Lime trees are still smelling wonderful and as they won’t for much longer, I keep taking walks up and down the Promenade in Cheltenham where the trees are particularly glorious.
Detail of fanciful letter N (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)
At tea a few weeks ago I heard a lovely Vita Sackville-West anecdote from a retired gardener who more than 60 years ago used to go and stay with Vita and her husband Harold Nicolson at Sissinghurst Castle. Vita would bounce down stairs in the morning and enthusiastically announce, “breakfast” at which point the phone would ring, the post would arrive or someone would call for her from the garden … and breakfast would be forgotten. Something similar happened at lunch time in the garden, when once again the suggestion of a meal lost out to things like tying up a recalcitrant rose, grieving over box blight or laying out planting for a new garden room with bad weather on the horizon. Fortunately dinner was taken very seriously and delicious food appeared. Pictures of Vita always show her looking very long and lean and now we know why – if gardening kept her fit, forgetting about food because her mind was full of plants kept her thin.
Embroidered fanciful letter N (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)
My letter N is based on an ornamented typographic N produced by the Briar Press with a few small changes.
6 Comments
Goodness, she must have been hard to keep up with!
I like your “N” – a good balance of ornament and simplicity.
Yes, I should think so. I’m sure the gift of having lots of energy (whether well fuelled or not) is a very enviable gift to have. For me, it’s spurts of energetic activity interspersed by prolonged periods of reading or sewing.
As ever your work is simply beautiful.
Thank you for saying so, Robina – much appreciated.
Thank you for sharing that story! She seems so human in it. Of course to forget about food is impossible for me, but I love her passion!
In many ways Vita seems to represent an age long gone which is why I loved this connection from someone very much still alive.
Sewing and knitting must be more conducive to thoughts of food than gardening!