Jorum Studio’s Carduus feels like drinking chamomile tea in a low-ceilinged kitchen, under a forest of twine-wrapped bundles of dried herbs, papery flowers, and tangled roots suspended from wooden beams. These are herbs for an apothecary, not an omelette. They are medicines and poisons, and I’d not blink in surprise if you told me they had to to be harvested only with silver knives under a waning moon. It should be scratchy and disconcerting, ominous even, but there’s warmth and safety here. And intrigue and stories.

Longing to leave London, we had been driving around Suffolk almost at random and stopped to walk outside a village. Drifting along a lane, we saw a sun-faded for sale sign, and behind sleeping-beauty-high hedges, alone in a circle of trees, was a fat cottage. Over the faded pink plaster and bleached wood, heavy thatch hung as wide and low as a highland cow’s fringe. In the tangled kitchen garden there was an apple tree so bowed and laden with fruit it would have been one of three acts of kindness to shake its branches light. Peering in through the spider-meshed windows, we got tantalising glimpses: the gleam of the polished red stone pammets, the criss-cross skeleton of beams, the slopes and sways of a house that has relaxed over its centuries of life. And in the wood-stacked porch outside the kitchen, tendrils of this scent.

I knew I wanted to live there, but the scrap of paper with the agent’s phone number was lost, and for all the hours we spent poring over maps, we never could work out which village it was near.

Carduus is another winner from the newly-launched Progressive Botany series from Jorum and another superb surprise. I’m not sure how Euan McCall manages to make something that is so inventive and unusual, but so immensely wearable.

(Doing something a little unusual and including a couple of my old ambrotype photographs, from an accidental series called Flora of the Underworld. They seemed like a good fit.)

Flora of the underworld

The orrery, 2008

originally posted 1 June 2019, my ambrotype photos made in 2008-2010