I’m so enjoying reading the comments you’re posting for the giveaway about what you’re loving this time of year. Don’t forget you can enter the giveaway right up until Tuesday morning (NZ time), so keep sharing your seasonal loves and go into win!
Here’s one of my biggest Spring loves: magnolia blossoms.
Sunrise-shaded bud bejewelled with morning dew drops….
Layers of origami petals unfolding…
…palest pinky-white to deepest fuchsia with a russet crown at its centre.
So beautiful!
I’ve been quietly celebrating a few things this week: Monday, of course, was the Winter solstice; on Tuesday my man returned home to me after several weeks away visiting his family on the other side of the world; and on Wednesday my lovely friend Amy had her birthday… So this mandarin lantern is a warm, glowing, citrus-scented kiss sent out to cosy winter nights in front of the fire, to loving and being loved, and to dear women friends.
Here’s what you need for making a mandarin lantern:
Start by cutting the mandarin horizontally around the middle about a third to a half of the way down. Try not to cut into the fruit too much, although if you do, it’s not the end of the world (just a little bit messier later on!).
Gently ease your fingers under the rim of the top part of the skin and remove it, being careful not to split the edges (this took me two attempts).
You now want to lift all the segments out from the bottom half of the fruit. I found the knack to doing this is to hold onto the inner corner of each segment and pull outwards. Again, be careful not to tear the peel (and again this took me two attempts!). Note: The internal pithy “stalk” will become your lamp’s wick, so try to leave at least a little stub inside the base of the lamp.
This last step is where your husky-dog-with-a-penchant-for-fruit comes in handy. Our magical, David Bowie-eyed husky-cross dog, Silver loves most fruit and was a devoted helper during this part of the project.
Cut a chimney hole in the top of the lantern as shown. Your lantern is now finished and ready to be filled with oil and lit!
Trim and pinch the central pith bit in the bottom of the lantern so that it resembles a candle wick. Pour a little vegetable oil in and light the wick. It may take a few moments for the oil to be absorbed into the wick so don’t worry if it doesn’t light immediately.
Put the lid on the lantern, place on a plate (I used a vintage Art Deco plate with Chinese lantern fruit on it), and enjoy! As the lantern heats up it releases a delicious, citrus aroma – perfect for dark, wintery nights. I love how each individual skin cell glows. Isn’t it beautiful?
Did you celebrate Midwinter in a special way? Or Midsummer of course, if you’re reading this from the Northern Hemisphere! If you posted about it on your blog, please do put a link in the comments. I loved reading Maya Donenfeld’s Summer solstice post on her blog maya*made.
My head’s been so full this week, I’ve simply not managed to find the mental space to sort out what I wanted to post, let alone actually sit in front of the computer and put a post together. But I’ve missed it. Blogging has become such a joy and inspiration in my life, I definitely feel an emptiness when I don’t connect with it (and you!) for a few days.
This evening I’ve had the house to myself and it’s been wonderful just to collect my thoughts, take a deep breath…and suddenly find what I wanted to post about.
Winter has definitely arrived and this past couple of weeks have been extremely stormy and changeable. I’ve been admiring all the different graphic shapes and silhouettes of bare northern hemisphere trees…
…and this evening they made me think of a box of leaf skeletons that had belonged to my great-grandfather that I recently rediscovered.
My great-grandfather Heinz spent a lot of time in India in the ’60s, I think, and he must have got these leaves there. The large, heart-shaped leaves are from the same kind of sacred fig tree that Buddha attained enlightenment beneath. They’re so perfectly, delecately gauzy and papery.
Two of the leaves have illustrations on them. Painstaking work! They both look like they’ve been drawn in pen first, and then the woman’s been coloured in. I love them. Like paintings on a butterfly’s wing or drawings on a cloud!
And while we’re looking at leaf and tree skeletons, here are some photos I took of the most recent full moon silhouetting trees like shadow puppet scenery.
I seem to have a bit of a treasure theme going on at the moment…and in particular, ways of storing treasures. First there was the pirate’s treasure bag, and now it’s a beautiful way of displaying flotsam and jetsam and other bounty we find at beaches, on our travels or scavenging at flea markets.
I don’t know about you, but I’m always bringing home shells and pebbles and bits of polished glass or broken pottery, beads and vintage buttons, a patterned feather… and then I never quite know what to do with them.
Well, my lovely friend Amy has come up with a great solution.
On the windowsill of her bathroom she has a collection of large, vintage jars filled with found treasures. Once the jars are full, the lids are screwed back on, the jars turned upside down, and voila! simple, beautiful glass display cases.
There are shells and bits of coral, a smooth pebble, mint coloured kina shell (sea urchin), and the wings of a monarch butterfly.
Don’t you love how the lettering on the jar looks against the shells inside? She’s also used a jar to create a terrarium with a succulent plant inside.
Simple, beautiful ideas using recycled jars to preserve found objects. Perfect!
The other day I drove home a different route from usual and suddenly pulled the car over to the curb because I’d caught sight of some beautiful, red-and-white spotted toadstools out the corner of my eye and I had to photograph them. Yay! for having my camera with me that day!
I love these fly agaric toadstools, they make me think of magical fairy stories. And I love the word ‘toadstool’! I always imagine fat toads sitting on them with their legs daintily crossed. That little toadstool in the middle is so perfect and spotty, isn’t it?
And look at how huge this one is! I had to take a picture of it with my feet for size comparison so you could fully appreciate how large it is. More like a toad armchair, or even a sofa…
Here are some photos from our garden this week, focussing on some of the kinds of little magical details that are always there waiting for us to find if we look carefully enough.
Autumn leaves fall round Buddha’s head.
The spiral of newly opening banana leaves.
A paua shell catches canna lily petals like a pair of cast-off butterfly wings.
Early morning sun highlighting the strands of a spider’s web.
Flowers laid by the grave of a special little rooster that died this week. His name was Cross Beak because he developed a deformed beak as he matured. He was small and runty and life wasn’t always easy for him, but he had a huge, plucky, engaging personality and never gave up on life. We did the best we could for him, spending extra time with him hand-feeding him, giving him Reiki, and making up extra food for him when he needed it. He lived for a year and a half, but was finding it harder as the Winter approached, and one night just didn’t make it through till morning. He was bold and chatty right to the end, and always a joy to be around. We miss his lively company.
Sunday we spent the day doing a big Autumn clear-up in the garden. Lots of mowing, weeding, pruning and mulching, clearing out the car port, tidying up chicken houses and making Alice the Pig’s Winter straw bed. By the end of the day my body was feeling nice and tired, and I was craving some kind of deep relaxation. The best thing round here for that is a bush bath!
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bush bath is a bath outside in nature, usually heated in some way by a fire. Ours is an old cast iron bath held in place by a few wooden stakes. You fill it up with the garden hose (and a few buckets of warm water from the house if you’re in a hurry), light the fire underneath, put a sheet of corrugated iron on top to keep the heat in, and wait for the water to get nice and toasty!
I always fill the bath with bunches of herbs from the garden to make it even more delicious and relaxing: lavender, geranium, rosemary, manuka and eucalyptus pods. I put the herbs in right at the beginning and leave them to steep. By the time you come to get in, the water smells amazing. I don’t even bother taking the herbs out when I get in, they just add to the experience.
I got the bush bath going at about 5pm, but didn’t actually get in until about 11pm! It was a cold, crisp night and the water was steaming hot. I lit candles around the bath and eased in. Ahhhhhhh!
The smell of wood smoke and herbs, the stars overhead, no sound apart from the wind whispering the leaves nearby, and the chirrup of a solitary cricket. And then, as if it wasn’t perfect enough, a shooting star streaking a bright line down the sky. Bliss.
On Saturday morning the phone rang before I’d even got out of bed. It was my friend Amy (in bed with a cup of tea, toast and a good book!), wondering if I was up for an outdoor adventure. She’d spent the week in front of the computer and needed some nature and exercise to clear out the cobwebs. Having spent most of the week in front of the computer myself, I immediately jumped at the idea.
We decided to go to Anawhata, which is actually the next beach down the coast from where I live, but to get there it’s an hour’s drive (with the last part being down a long, winding, unsealed road), and then a half hour’s walk though the bush from where you park the car. I’ve actually never been to Anawhata before (shame on me!) which made it even more of an adventure.
The walk down through the bush was beautiful. Twisting Manuka branches silhouetted against the sky, a great fallen Rata tree that you had to duck underneath, and an unexpected carved face nestled in the tussock.
Just before the beach we came across a hand painted sign. Half hidden in the bushes, with lichen growing amongst the letters, it said: Keep our world clean and green it’s the only one we have. Every beach should have one of these signs!
Anawhata is a typical West Coast beach (rugged, wind-swept, black sand, rocky islands and outcrops, surrounded by bush, river running down through it), but with its own unique personality. It’s much more enclosed than the other beaches I know, with lots of nooks and crannies to explore.
The first thing we did was sit down and have a picnic. We’d come prepared. Actually, we’d come over prepared! Amy had brought toasted pitta breads with three different filling options: cheese, green pepper and herbs; cheese, olives and herbs; and fried egg and herbs. Yum! She’d also brought dried apricots and almonds. I brought carrot and courgette sticks with homemade basil pesto, apple slices, and bottles of our home rainwater with mint leaves.
Replenished, we started exploring.
We kept finding spirals of seaweed, and there were great tangled masses of bull kelp.
We’re both avid beachcombers, and made collections of flotsam and jetsam: coloured plastic and seeds, a crab shell and a Pohutukawa leaf, white spirals from inside of deep sea squids, a segment of a sand dollar, and a line of driftwood crowned with Neptune’s necklace seaweed.
We discovered that most of the human-created flotsam we found was all in one colour palette: industrial orange, vivid blue, jade green and red. Bottle caps, various bits of string, a faded orange rubber glove that looked like a lobster’s back… and my trainers!
We drew in the sand…
And on the way back we made a bridge out of driftwood across the little river.
We climbed back up the hill to the car physically tired, but really happy. It had been exactly what we both needed. A perfect Autumn adventure at the beach.
Yesterday evening, as the sun set, I was out on our deck taking the photographs for my ‘Coral, shell and bone’ post. The sky was going through its own coral colour palette and I got to thinking about when I was living in London for seven years and missed the sky so much.
Now, of course you do see the sky in London, that goes without saying, but it always seems to be limited by something. London’s a pretty flat place with lots of buildings obscuring the skyline, and you can go for months, years without ever seeing the horizon or the sun setting. When night falls there’s so much light pollution the stars are rarely visible.
I think the sky does something to the human spirit. I think it can literally “expand our horizons” and transport us out of our limited me-ness. It can lift the heart and fill us with joy and wonder. I think if we aren’t lucky enough to have good sky-access where we’re living, we need to go out and find it sometimes. Go and get a regular sky fix!
For those of you who are feeling a little sky deprived at the moment, I want to offer you some of the sky magic that we’re blessed with from our home.
We look due West across a valley to these hills, with little glimpses of the Tasman Sea here and there. The sky is vast and ever changing. You can watch rain rolling in off the sea, mist fingering its way over the hills, and rainbows on our neighbours’ roofs.
And on crisp Autumn mornings, the bottom of the valley is often hidden by a quilt of white fog.
I hope you’re enjoying the sky wherever in the world you are today. Take time to watch the sun set, the changing shape of the clouds, and constellations of the stars. Even just for a moment. It’s always worth it.
