Step outside with me to nurture midsummer creativity.

taking creative cues from a garden in June.

Jun 18, 2024

A warm hello to anyone new here, I’m Lyndsay, mother, creative and storyteller with a background in interiors PR. Story & Thread. is a weekly letter exploring the intersection of creativity, mothering and the living world, with a home and a garden at the heart. I am so glad you have found your way here…

“Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself”.

—Virginia Woolf.

Hello my dears

I hope your week has started well…?

It feels like summer is arriving at long last here in London (maybe). Though I have come to realise that rather than grasping for good weather, this season is in fact, all about the light. There is a luminescence suffused in summer days that finds us, even among heavy rainclouds.

I can’t wait to see some of you via the (virtual) rose garden for the

Holding Stories

creative summer gathering that I am co-hosting with
Lauren Barber
— there are still some spaces if you would like to join us…

We will gather 11am-12.30pm BST on Saturday 22nd June to honour the lightest, brightest, most expansive point in the year at both the summer solstice and the full rose moon. We will weave together some gentle movement with a meditation infused in the wisdom, myth and folklore of the rose; reflections on our creativity so far this year; seasonal contemplations and a vision-holding circle for the weeks and months ahead. More details here…

Book your space

After a trip to the Garden Museum last week, I have been inspired by the idea of our outside space as a ‘room’ — a place to feel both grounded and inspired, to nurture beauty and creativity…

Summer takes me outside.

I have spoken before about how winter draws me deep into the bones of my home. In contrast, summer takes me by the hand, outdoors — to explore, and to notice the light as it brings both shimmer and shade, enshrining everything it touches.

Summer is a time of inescapable, untamed beauty (yes, even when everything is rain-drenched). Of course, there is beauty woven deeply into every season, but summer embodies an unapologetic resplendence and easeful wildness, that is both earthly and transcendent.

I have been out immersing myself in the wild summer beauty as much as possible — in the tangles of twining bindweed and the scattering of wild poppies among long grasses in the city’s green corridors: in one of London’s botanic gardens that is both a carefully cultivated haven and a corner of wild magic; in the wisdom of ancient woodlands that we are lucky to have on our doorstep…

…but most of all, as I sit in my garden.

I visited the Garden Museum last week, to catch

Alice Vincent

’s brilliant ‘Why Women Grow’ exhibition (on until the end of the month), and to immerse myself in ‘Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors’, an exhibition about how green spaces influenced the interwoven lives of four Bloomsbury women — Ottoline Morell, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Each of their gardens embodied the qualities of a room (or a series of rooms) — both a healing sanctuary in difficult personal and global conditions, as well as an inspiring place to gather, to entertain, and to create.

The garden as a room.

I love the image used on the exhibition catalogue, of ‘A View into a Garden’ by Vanessa Bell, a painting of her studio at Charleston, her home in East Sussex, celebrated as a gathering place and creative hub for the Bloomsbury Group. The studio opens directly into the garden, with flowers inside and out, and two chairs facing each other, suggesting the continuity between interior and exterior.

The exhibition catalogue, featuring ‘A View into a Garden’ by Vanessa Bell.

Look outdoors to create a canvas of space & ease.

Fluidity between inside and outside creates a sense of space and ease, as well as the benefits of lungfuls of fresh air and a shower of daylight into our bodies and minds. Looking outwards takes the eye further, beyond our usual living space and the often messy day-to-day, to the furthest edges and the overlooked corners of our worlds.

Whenever I step out into the garden, I feel renewed — a sense of space and ease descends. Whether it is to glimpse the light and feel the early morning air on my skin before breakfast; or a chance to linger and observe what has been happening in the garden overnight; or even a singular moment to take a breath and be still when it feels chaotic inside — the garden feels like an extra room to be in and something shifts within me.

This time last year I wrote,

The garden is like another room; not just for growing things but a place to sit alone and simply observe. Although it is far from perfect and certainly requires my attention; urgency and overwhelm dissipate there.

When I can’t get outside, looking through our back windows creates a connection with the outdoors, the effect is an ever-changing moving image as the garden shapeshifts through the seasons.

Soften & merge into the senses.

“The air of June is velvet with her scent”.

—Vita Sackville-West, The Garden.

Like a room, an outdoor plot is best experienced through the senses. Connecting to the senses allows us to immerse ourselves fully in the moment and feel our edges soften as we become present to, and merge with the space around us.

Vita Sackville-West pronounced June, “that month of sounds, that month of scents / that sensuous month when every sense / ripens, and yet is young”, and I am inclined to agree…

The scent of sweet nostalgic roses in the June air often laden with moisture and feeling.

The sight of verdancy and a wash of watercolour florals painted on a canvas of London brick and weathered fences.

A sense of hush although it is anything but… the birds sing joyfully, the bees buzz industriously and planes reverberate overhead.

Cool air breezily brushes across my skin whilst clouds cover the sky, and I sense the golden solar glow when the sun finds its way to me.

The taste of strong coffee lingers…

Star-like Astrantia and raindrops on rose leaves.

Observe and anchor with the seasons.

“The garden… is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples”.
—Vanessa Bell about the garden at Charleston.

Noticing what is unfolding in my garden anchors me to the season, it allows me to both lean into nurture but also to surrender to the wildness of a piece of land that I look after, but do not control. So often I look to the garden to give me seasonal clues and cues about my own internal landscape, rhythms and cycles.

No matter the time of day, a midsummer garden feels dream-like with hints of mysticism — lush and abundant but wild and free.

In my garden, a shady corner has filled itself with foxgloves and wildflowers; climbing roses make their way up the fences and trellises, tree ferns unfurl revealing their wingspan; geraniums spill towards the grass; hibiscus and hydrangeas are beginning to bud and jasmine is coming into fragrant flower.

Lulling lavender, bright pelargoniums, rosemary and the grey-green of olive trees all conjure memories of time spent in France with my family. Flowers and seedlings sit in pots on the garden table; sweet peas are staked in the ground and are beginning to find their way, to twist, twine and tumble.

Harness creativity in the beauty of a midsummer garden.

“It was always an artist’s garden”.

—Angelica Garnett, Vanessa Bell’s daughter about the garden at Charleston.

A garden ‘room’ can also be the extension of creative workspace, an outdoor atelier and source of inspiration. Whilst it is rare that I work on my laptop outside, I often take my notebook to the bench, and thoughts find me there.

All of the Bloomsbury women found a connection between their gardens and their work. They were ‘artist gardens’ where the intention and meaning went far beyond the immediate aesthetics. It is as though the women’s love of art, literature and travel poured into their gardens, and in turn their gardens shaped them and their work.

For Virginia Woolf, her garden provided both a healing refuge and a source of inspiration. In her garden writing lodge, she authored some of the most renowned books, including A Room of One’s Own in 1929. Vita Sackville-West worked from a fairytale writing tower in her garden at Sissinghurst and went on to write 20 books there. In her Charleston garden-side studio, Vanessa Bell often painted natural motifs, as well as bringing floral designs on large-scale murals into her home, undoubtedly inspired by her garden and blurring the boundary further. Ottoline Morrell hosted writers’ salons at her home at Garsington with many of the creative gatherings with renowned writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence taking place outside.

And so the gardens themselves were not only a place of creativity, but the art and writing was influenced by the gardens too.

So often I find that my inspiration comes from spending time in the garden — as well as the sense of everyday awe at the “beguiling beauty of a single flower”1, seasonal cues act as prompts for my own creative unfolding. The garden helps me to foster trust in a deeper knowing of growth below the surface. Sowing, growing and allowing things to fall away is a moving meditation, connecting my body and mind. The garden tells me that the essential acts of noticing, caring and cultivating are deeply needed but so is the space left for the unfolding of wild and natural beauty. It encourages me to take up space as I grow and evolve at my own pace. The garden in summer reminds me of beauty as a guiding force, and of the hopeful inner call to turn towards the light.

Do you find inspiration and creativity outside in the summer?

Thank you so much for reading — I hope we can chat more in the comments, or of course feel free to send me an email with your thoughts, I always love to hear from you.