Jostian Jungle 2: Terraria

Jostification – the process and the blog – has been on hold for a while for health reasons.  I had hoped that recovery would be a time of creativity, reflection and productivity, but frustratingly this has not been the case.  Aside from a little care given to the Hanging Gardens of Clapton – which are looking stunning this early spring -

(greenfly patrol and potting up some thyme), and directing from the sofa some loved ones in various DIY activities, I have done little more Jostifying than vaguely ponder on colour schemes for my two remaining undecorated rooms.  Watching The Umbrellas of Cherborg, I find, both helps and hinders in this regard.

However, I’m relieved to be able to report that I did eventually find inspiration in an unexpected place, and a manageable Jostification activity.  I have created some terraria and think I may have started off a new obsession.

I have been working my way through a large stack of old Guardian Weekend magazines, and amongst all the terrible fashion features and interviews with people I don’t care about, I found a few gems, including a feature on how to make gardens in receptacles, including glass jars.  I already had the three glass jars above, so only needed to get some gravel and small ferns.  I followed the layer of gravel with a layer of soil.

I combined a visit to the hospital with a trip to a posh garden centre and found some (hopefully) appropriate plants.

The advice in the article was to grow small, slow-growing plants, with a combination of heights. You just plant them, give them a little water and then put the lid on and let them get on with it.  They should not need watering, but if they get too damp, you can leave the lid off for a while.

I obviously enjoyed the opportunity to add some Iona pebbles and a broken cherub statuette. I liked combining growing plants with objects to make three unique new creations.

Unfortunately they don’t photograph very well.  Sorry about that.

This one above has a peplomia – as recommended in the Guardian feature.  I stuck a purple wandering Jew in there too – which may wander too much, we’ll have to see.

Once complete, I used these new additions to my collections as an opportunity to redisplay some other stuff. Gifts of cacti and a beautiful orchid-type plant, various stands, goblets and receptacles, along with the miniature desk and church collection box just somehow sit together perfectly with the terraria.

I’ve had the bird skull for about half my life.  Found on a beach in Scotland, it has been on display in all my homes, in various ways.  I think this is its best yet; the whole scene a kind of memento mori, a reminder of life and death and passing time.

I usually struggle with cacti – I like them but they don’t seem to like me.  I am hoping these will put up with me as they are so gorgeous in this setting.

The display is yet another secular shrine.  I had thought I’d run out of shrine-worthy surfaces, but it’s amazing how easy it is to create a new shrine if the urge is strong enough. It would also not look out of place in Paxton Gate , a marvellously silly shop I went to in San Francisco last year. Although it would need some impaled insects and odd taxidermy examples to really work there – and you’d never see these round this vegan’s flat.

The newly hung velvet curtains add a theatrical element.  Looking at this picture, I realise that although a green-fingered lady, I am entering new growing etrrain here – I don’t yet know how I’ll get on with gardens in bottles, orchids and cacti.  I was about to order some air plants – which I can see working very well here – but think I’d better take it one step at a time… I will report back.

Christmas Decorations are for Life, Not Just for Christmas

I don’t decotrate my home for Christmas.  It can’t take much more decorating, being fully Jostified already, and I’m pretty bah humbug about the whole season anyway.  However, I do love Christmas decorations, and regard it as one of the real pleasures of being a grownup, that I can keep decorations up all year round (it epitomises being able to do what I like).

I don’t really class this is a Jostian collection, because the various Christmas decorations around my home are completely integrated into the decor.  When taking pictures for this post, I had to look really hard to spot them all.

The black and red hearts are maent to hang on spruce branches, but look much better as part of my kitchen colour scheme.  There are a few decorations in my kitchen, including this magnificent bauble:

And these birds, perching on a branch across the girder (?), which sadly don’t photograph as well, perhaps because their backdrop insn’t “sunlight” streaming through trees:

I attached the branches (of dried twisted willow) with a few cable tacks – works really well, and the birds are clip-on, so this was a satisfyingly easy bit of curation.

The other kitchen – based Christmas decorations are in Shrine Corner – shrines I find make very natural homes for festive decorations.

I love the variety: birds, hearts, chandeliers – and they are all on a completely Jostian theme.

Every year my sister gives me a Christmas decoration for my birthday.  These two, a tassel to end all tassels, and a glass chandelier, featured in The Bathroom, are both from her:

Most years I buy some for myself too.  The pink deer was last year’s:

This year, it had to be these fat pink birds.  I was very pleased to find their perfect perch, and had been wondering what to do with the hooks on this fabulous mirrorfor ages.  Killed two birds with one stone.

And any excuse, really to keep showing off the enchanted forest wallpaper.

This fella, however, only had temporary residence in my home.  He was bought for a friend of mine (a loady of exquisite taste – and a mild obsession with tiny dogs) and I had to say goodbye last weekend.  For me, this dog wasn’t for life, despite him looking bloody great in this teacup.

Jostian Collections 4: The Glory of the (Vintage) Rose

I love actual roses for their scent, their luxurious layered petals, their unbelievable variety and for their thorns.  I love wild roses, but equally the gorgeous, ridiculous cultivated varieties, one of the most extreme displays of human intervention in nature for purely aesthetic purposes, I can understand why horticulturalists become obsessed.  People have been playing god with this flower for milennia.

Roses are both a Jostian collection and an inspiration, and have been for some years, since I got very carried away with some research into the origins of the fairytale, Sleeping Beauty.  At first glance, the very idea of collecting rose-adorned items may seem tacky, old ladyish, obvious or weird. But that’s never stopped me before.

Collecting rose-patterned ceramics, textiles and other household objects is very easy: it is one of the most commonly-used motifs in art and design; the most often-depicted flower of all – in the west at least (in the east it is apparently surpassed by the lotus and chrysanthemum).  The trick, of course, with collecting the rose-patterned is to be very discerning.  I only collect vintage examples (and by vintage I do not mean Kath Kidston, you understand).

As well as being the most frequently-depicted, no other flower has had so many poems, song lyrics or idioms created around it. Likewise, no other flower has come to represent such an astonishing array of cultural significances.  They hold unrivalled symbolic appeal and cross-cultural significance from political to romantic, sexual to religious, alchemical to memorial.

This post focuses on the flower’s visual representations, however, and will take you on a tour of some of my favourite examples from the collection, and include a revisit to a few previous posts.  Roses bring together several of my collections and interior design achievements.

My favourite vintage roses are Victorian, like this design from the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine of about 1860, for a needlepoint handbag.

Or this, a design for a needlepoint footstool.  I have been having a go at this project for about three years now.  It will look amazing one day. This is as far as I’ve got:

But sadly not much original Victorian material survives for the humble charity-shopper, so most of my collection is of mid-century gems such as this:

My sister found it for me years ago, and it features in Printed Metal.

More recentluy I found this:

I sprinted across the charity shop when I spotted it – and the pleasure of buying it was enhanced by the green-with-envy compliment on my find from the hipster standing next to me at the counter.  Ha!  A week later, this bin came into my life at St John at Hackney’s  church fete:

It seemed like a rose-tinted miracle, items like these don’t come along very often, apart from in overpriced hipster-run second hand shops in deprived places like Margate.

Along with these metal goods, I have a comprehensive array of rose patterned crocks, all in a special display above the kitchen sink.

My favourite of which is this simple beauty:

And while we’re in the kitchen, there is of course the wallpaper I made by collaging and photocopying a scarf and the scraps of a cutain:

For more on the wallpaper, have a look at The Kitchen.

The scarf in question, my favourite vintage scarf of all time, is on the left:

Much more on all 76 scarves is here.

My dressing table is also adorned with vintage rose items.

A quilted box. Perfect to keep a lady’s cotton wool pads in.

And this is a cardboard (presumably) ex-chocolate box, with drawers, is ideal as a makeup overflow container.

A ceramic brooch and petit-point embroidered scarf clip.

And of course, no lady’s dressing table would be complete without two gorgeous enamelled compacts.

I’ve had this amazing bedspread for years – it came from a jumble sale in Walthamstow and cost £1.  It’s faded a bit, but still going strong.  It enables me to pretend my life is a bed of roses.

The over-use of the rose as a design motif, and its over-loaded symbolic status are things that have appealed to me as an artist for many years.  This embroidery (the finest I’ve ever made) is done in couching stitch, and depicts a decaying, dead rose.  It is one of many pieces I’ve attepted on this theme.

I also have on (permanent – thanks, Adam) loan this amazing, giant book:

Full of huge colour plates of various rose varieties, and although clearly botanical illustrations, they are styled in such a way as to give away the mid-century era in which they were created. I love these pictures.

So much so that I had this one, perfecta, permanently etched into my skin a couple of years ago.  I’d like to collect a whole garden of them eventually.  On my arms, perhaps, and

outside, if I ever am lucky enough to have a real rose garden.

Jostian Inspiration 3: Caledonian Carvings (Churchyard Appreciation)

I recently visited Scotland for a week of fantastic views like this:

Even in the torrential rain, Skye is beautiful, and was a welcome shock to my London system.  A week of gazing at the sea, sky and heather, while sawing down or uprooting non-native trees was the perfect holiday for this overworked arts and heritage professional.

Gorgeous, yes, but in no way creatively inspiring for me.  It was in fact a welcome break from inspiration, but by the time I got to Edinburgh, I was almost desperate for some culture.  Edinburgh has plenty of this, but I knew what I wanted first: a churchyard.  A friend (who provided me with a personalised Edinburgh guide for my 24 hours there) had recommended Greyfriars Kirkyard, but I had no idea what kind of churchyard it was.

What I found was the finest collection of Memento Mori funerary architecture I have ever seen.  When you first enter, you are greeted by skulls and skeletons, exquisitely carved, and amazingly well preserved, leering from every tomb and plaque.

Dating from the 16th Century, the kirkyard is the final resting place for many of Edinburgh’s great and good; traders, ministers, educationalists; powerful people with sufficient wealth to commission these stunning carvings.

The17th Century baroque style is in strong evidence, with a sometimes bizarre mish mash of neo-classical, renaissance, medieval and oriental design.  Gargoyles share plinths with cherubs; skulls become part of curlicue scrollwork.  The effect, walking round this kirkyard, is somewhat overwhelming at times.

I have always enjoyed churchyards and cemetaries.  As a teenage drinker and wannbe goth, they were the perfect place to smoke Marlboros and drink snakebite.  Although I took little notice of the styles and designs of tombstones then, I always appreciated the peace and tranquility of these places.  I now have a professional interest in funerary architecture, and tend to seek out burial places whenever I go somewhere new.

This is a churchyard in my native East Anglia.  I enjoy the variation in local styles of carving and types of stone.

Outdoor memorials only came into use in the mid 17th Century: before then, the wealthy would always buy a plot within their parish church, the poor were buried outside in unmarked graves.  As church crypts became full, the rich had to be buried outside with the poor, and this is when gravestones and tombs began to appear in our churchyards, and to service this need, stone masonry as a trade developed.

Large or small, tombstones are always a signifier of wealth and status, and the fashions when this practice was new were for images and designs, inspired by renaissance art, which remind the living of their mortality.  Hence all the skulls, skeletons and Grim Reaper figures at Greyfriars.

This is possibly the most bizarre memorial: a standing effigy of the deceased, flanked by two skeletons, inside its own little house.  It certainly hammers home the twin messages of material wealth and the fragility of life.  With the emergence of the middle classes after the Industrial Revolution, there was demand for memorials to suit every pocket.

Until I began working at a churchyard, I had always thought of the Victorian cemetery as the epitome of the art of tombstone design.  Go to Highgate, Abney Park, Arnos Vale or any Victorian churchyard and you will see angels, obelisks and neo gothic-arched headstones emblazoned with flowers, holding hands or crosses.

But like architecture, painting and apparel, the designs are subject to changing fashions and, of course, theological ideas. Post-reformation, crosses were never shown on tombstones, as they were seen as far too papist.  After the vogue for memento mori designs, and before the Victorian angels set in, there was a whole era of palladian and neo-classical – inspired memorial, such as these at Hackney:

But Hackney churchyard has earlier memorials too.

This is the finest example of a memento mori tomb design at my churchyard (it would have been part of a chest tomb) and shows skulls for death, hour glasses for the passing of time, trumpets for resurrection and bats’ wings for darkness and night.

Most of the early outdoor tombs here are badly weathered, and were stacked to create an urban park in the 1890s.  Some skulls are still visible, however, along with other symbols such as curtains, sunbursts and cherub heads.  However, these  stone carvers’ art pales in comparison with their Caledonian counterparts, whose skills (and harder wearing stone) still strongly convey their message: life is fragile, remember you will die, fear hell.

The wealthy commissioners of these spectacular memorials have enabled the skill of these artists to live on; paradoxically they celebrate life, and the message I choose to leave Greyfriars with is this: make the most of this brief opportunity, use your creativity while you can, it might just enrich the lives of others.

Jostian Collections 4: Grandma’s Carousel Teaset

I had a blank wall in The Kitchen, which has been waiting for a whole year for its decor to finally be installed and today was its lucky day.  It’s a bank holiday, so would have been a bit weird not to have done some DIY – so I got the drill out and put up these shelves.

So that I could finally display my Grandma’s Fairground teaset.  I have known this design all my life, and was promised it on my getting my own home.  She probably wasn’t expecting that to take quite as long as it has, and it’s been packed away in a box at my mum’s for many years.  And under my kitchen table for six months.

But now it’s finally up.  It’s an Alfred Meakin design, bought by my grandparents in the mid 1950s.  Deciding on a new crockery set was a serious business; it was an expensive purchase, that the family would have to live with for many years. My aunt recalls hating it. I always felt impressed that my Grandma chose soemthing so modern, so cool.  At the time of purchase, there were many new, exciting designs for homewares to choose from, now that post-war austerity was over and women had more time to make their homes look fashionable, thanks to new labour-saving devices.  British design,  from architecture to fashion to teacups, influenced by the Modernist movement in art, conveyed ideas of optimism, the future and youth.  Summed up perfectly by this Carousel design.  It even depicts a Hot Dogs stand – terribly American.

When I was a child it was still going strong, and I adored it – I grew up in a house of brown Hornsea Pottery and Victorian hotelware, so this mid-century throwback was exotic, fun and had actual pictures on it.  Fun pictures of a fair.  It seemed quite unbelievable, almost shocking.  It maybe was at the time -young people having fun, being frivolous, being teenagers.

At Grandma’s house, we would drink tea from these cups and saucers, eat trifle from the bowls and toast from the plates.  I would imagine who these exotic fair-goers were, the ladies in petticoated dresses, the men standing around coolly.  I also found it amazing that you could have designs inside the cups and bowls. When I got older I began to appreciate their vintage quality – at 15 I was wearing 1950s dresses (you could still buy them from charity shops then) and began collecting all sorts of vintage tat.  This was when I asked my Grandma if one day I could have the tea set.

And now I have it – on display and in use. Every time I have a nice cup of tea from this cup, I’ll think of my Grandma, sitting in ger dressing gown against the paisley wallpaper, making toast for breakfast.

The Hanging Gardens of Clapton

Inspired by a combination of the vertical gardening of California, and a stern letter about health and safety from the housing association which owns my block, I have given my Jostian balcony a bit of a makeover.  This will be the last post on a gardening theme for a while, I promise.

This is what it looked like a year ago when I started this blog:

And a few weeks ago it looked like this:

I had been collecting bits of old furniture and piling plants onto all available surfaces, a bit like I do indoors with shrines and displays of collections.

It looked gorgeous but the truth I was having to fight my way through roses, herbs, tomatoes and geraniums  to get to my front door.

So the deal with the Irish stout makers was that hanging baskets and a few pots along the wall were allowed.  Which is technically what I’ve done:

With hanging buckets of roses and fushias.  A shelf for tomatoes and beans. And these amazing pouches:

Which I’ve filled with nasturtiums, mint, oregano and geraniums.  And some are hanging over the balcony wall, with pelargoniums in the outside pockets, and shade-tolerant impatiens on the inside:

I’ll be able to replant them with winter flowering pansies, cyclamen and bulbs in the autumn.  I prefer these to these other flower bags:

Although I love this view when I open my door:

And the view as I reach my block:

Next year I think there will be a row of those pouches, full of trailing plants and lettuces and more herbs.

This is what other peoples’ outside spaces look like:

I don’t understand why they don’t want an ivy-draped Sophia:

Amazing purple beans:

Or glorious nasturtiums:

And this view to enjoy every day over breakfast:

Jostian Inspiration 2: California Gardening

I recently had the pleasure of visiting some friends, Professor P and Mr T, in San Francisco.  Following on from my last post about my own interior jungle, I was struck by their interior design triumphs, especially the plants, and also by the Californian plant fashions in general.

Most people in the part of town where they are seem to live in dolls’ houses like these:

But my mates live in an open plan apartment, very boring from the outside, but they have done wonders with the inside.

I took lots of pictures.

Professor P makes most of the furniture, to Mr T’s exacting specifications and together they artfully arrange books, plants and colour the walls.  Compared to the Jostian interior ethos of clutter and collections, their approach is minimal, but  so artful with just enough intriguing curating going on that I felt rather inspired.

The use of plants as important features is a design approach close to my heart.

The main difference being that theirs are almost all cacti and succulents: species which inexplicably hate me.  I like them, but won’t try any more becauuse I get upset when plants die. I can keep jade trees alive, but that’s about it.

The amazing apartment comprises at least two live/work spaces.  This live space turned out to be especially suited for drunken expressive dance-offs, but I won’t be including those photos.

This is where Mr T does his writing.

Obviously I should have stolen these for my hand collection.

Professor P’s laboratory.  I have no idea what any of this equipment is for.

The deer’s head was apparently stolen from a bar.

And this mirror from a skip outside St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch.  Last time I saw it was in New York.  It works beautifully here among the clean lines, modern colours and foliage.

While there, my travelleing companion and I were tasked with helping the Professor plant up the balcony.  This meant a really exciting trip to a garden centre – which was full of exotic succulents, palms and grasses.  And some amazing dsiplays like this:

And this:

Not exactly Homebase.  And I was introduced to the concept of vertical gardening (not to be confused with uphill gardening) – which I will need to be putting into practice soon.

This is a wall-mounted succulents “collage” – all the rage on the West Coast apparently.

As is this “plant wall”, complete with built in water pump.

But we went for grasses and succulents able to withstand the harsh winds, fogs and sun of Potrero Hill.

It looked bloody good by the time we’d finished, complementing the Prof’s beautiful upcycled bespoke balcony furniture.  It’s annoying that I didn’t think to take some before photos.

It was like being inside an updated 1970s Hockney painting.  I came home inspired not only with ideas for my balcony (see future post) but also with the urge to spring clean my entire flat.  Professor P pays as much attention to cleanliness as to aesthetic detail.  I won’t be painting any walls primary colours any time soon, but did start questioning the need for so many walls and such low ceilings, and doors everywhere…