Essence of jasmine: fragrant memories of childhood, love, and comfort

Used in many Thai desserts, woven into leis and offered up in prayers, jasmine sambac is easily used in a heavenly sweet scented beverage

It took us two years to find our house. I wasn’t looking for a house so much as I was looking for space to liberate the roots of all the potted fruit trees, vegetables and herbs I had accumulated which moved from rental house to rental house with us. They certainly outnumbered our boxes of possessions which were mainly made up of books on plants.

We found the perfect block in the neighbourhood that I grew up in, it was only slightly sloping and had water tanks. I must be the only person naïve enough to favour and choose real estate based on the existing water tanks on a property.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/38FKyRu
via IFTTT

Kitsch confidential in New York

A Greenwich Village designer’s passion for rebooting reclaimed treasures brings her prewar duplex apartment bang up to date

Behind the classic facade of US-born designer Sasha Bikoff’s prewar Greenwich Village duplex lies a tale of 18th-century France and glam disco-era bravado. Or, to put it another way, Marie Antoinette meets Studio 54 and 1980s Palm Beach.

“I’m inspired by the eccentricity of different eras,” says Bikoff. “So when I discovered the original 80s powder room in this place, it sealed the deal. It was just so far out that I had to live here.”

Continue reading...

from Property | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tR84fl
via IFTTT

Kitsch confidential in New York

A Greenwich Village designer’s passion for rebooting reclaimed treasures brings her prewar duplex apartment bang up to date

Behind the classic facade of US-born designer Sasha Bikoff’s prewar Greenwich Village duplex lies a tale of 18th-century France and glam disco-era bravado. Or, to put it another way, Marie Antoinette meets Studio 54 and 1980s Palm Beach.

“I’m inspired by the eccentricity of different eras,” says Bikoff. “So when I discovered the original 80s powder room in this place, it sealed the deal. It was just so far out that I had to live here.”

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tR84fl
via IFTTT

Grow your likes: the unstoppable rise of the Insta plant

They’re green, photogenic and social media stars

Instagram may well have changed the way you garden, even if you don’t have an account. From the plants you buy – and where you buy them – to the gardens you visit, the platform has driven a profound change in the tastes and habits of even established gardeners, not to mention encouraging a new generation of green fingers.

Plants have been inspiring artists for hundreds of years, so they are well suited to the photo app. A younger generation (urban, cash-strapped, Insta-obsessed and renting) are driving houseplant sales, sharing pictures of their plant babies instead of the human ones they can’t afford. From the dramatic structure of mother-in-law’s tongue to blousy tea roses, you can say a lot about your taste through the species you share. Connecting with nature reduces stress, much needed in these chaotic times; even bursts of online greenery, amid Instagram’s sometimes frantic commercialism, are a tonic.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/30T8ePr
via IFTTT

Gardening tips: chit potatoes for an early summer crop

Then plant a dark-leaved elder and visit Bicton Park Botanical Gardens in Devon

Plant this Dark-leaved elder (Sambucus nigra f. porphyrophylla ‘Black Tower’) produces pink flowers in spring followed by elderberries. It has the added benefit of growing up rather than out, making it ideal for smaller gardens. Height and spread 250cm x 120cm: full sun or partial shade.

Chit this Get some potatoes sprouting now and they’ll be ready by early summer. Try ‘Kifli’, a blight-resistant, high-yielding salad potato that’s ideal for planting in sacks or pots. The first step is chitting: place tubers in an old egg box, blunt end uppermost, on a windowsill until the shoots are about 2cm long.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2uv8Dvp
via IFTTT

Flowers to sow for a summer wedding | Alys Fowler

Pot marigolds are the kindest, easiest, most trustworthy of flowers that reflect the values of the woman I shall marry

This summer I’ve a wedding to grow flowers for: my own. And for someone who has known about this for some time, I have left it all rather late, but there you go. It’s not my first time doing this, so I know full well that you have to start a lot earlier than a couple of months before the big day.

With this in mind, I recently opened the Chiltern Seed catalogue and weighed up my options. Frothy ammi and sprinkles of dusky pink wild carrots are unlikely to be ready in time. The same could be said of cosmos, nicotiana, zinnia, oryla; the list goes on. Of course, it is possible to force many of these things, but that would require a greenhouse and a schedule to be around every weekend for watering.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RtG0rL
via IFTTT

Country diary: could alder wood wasps be breathing new life into an old friend?

Abbeydale, South Yorkshire: A much-loved tree may have gone, but dozens of small holes drilled up its trunk make me think a new chapter is about to begin

When Jim died, we decided, having talked it through with the neighbours, to leave him where he was in the garden. Our friend had been good to us in life and there was no reason to assume that would change. Jim was a tree, a common alder, although given that alders are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, not the most appropriate moniker. He, or she, was named by our daughter Rosa, who often spent afternoons after school in Jim’s boughs, hugging the fissured grey trunk, as rough as an elephant. But despite being a similar age, with a similar lifespan, the alder didn’t long survive Rosa leaving home. Over several springs, its leaves became increasingly sparse and failed to unfurl properly. An orange stain appeared in cracks at the base of the trunk. Small branches began dying off, then larger ones. Last year Jim gave up the ghost altogether, a victim to alder dieback, the Phytophthora mould infection that is ravaging alders up and down the country.

Related: Country diary: a chainsaw massacre in the alder woods

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2sSnEa9
via IFTTT