The expectation when you walk into a delicatessen is of unique products, hand-made artisan products, products that have a ethical message behind them. So often though the products on offer are not upon close inspection anything but. It is a shame to often see branded products on both the deli shelves and on the supermarket […]… Continue reading Not all syrups are made equally — Ion Syrup Blog
After two months in Romania working on our conifer syrup project, we arrived back in France to Eden. Our garden represented what Nature provides when man makes no intervention. The wild flowers fight for their positions amongst the rampaging brambles. The wild grasses grow tall towards the sun to hold their little seed children in… Continue reading Garden Of Eden before the fall
A couple of years ago I married a Transylvanian. He doesn’t bite but he is romantic, loves life, the mountains, good home cooked food and French Pugs. He is also a workaholic like me. So I get to travel to Romania a lot. A beautiful country, heaped in traditions and rural living just outside the… Continue reading Romanian Romantic
Two years ago we formed a perfume oil business. I never liked spray perfumes, made me sneeze, the large atomising bottles, refilling the small ones….just too much hassle and digging a big branded perfume bottle out of my tiny handbag just didnt cut the mustard at a meeting or at the luncheon. For the intimate… Continue reading O-Dose – Finding a brand
Sometimes you take a photo and years later upon seeing it again, memories flood back, you delve back into the box of old pictures and huddle on the bed amongst a disorderly history of your life. The lid goes back on the box, the box goes back on the shelf and you will probably find… Continue reading Its a London thing
Last year my wild flowers, encouraged from existing wild species, from clearing evasive monster weeds, and removal of strangling meadow grasses, was in just five minutes destroyed by the hedge trimmer. Good intentions to keep the meadows tidy, but hang on a minute – outside my patch! My overgrown meadow, yet to become a garden… Continue reading The wild in wildflowers
The rain hasn’t stopped over the last few weeks. Intermittent bursts of sunshine have pushed their way in between the clouds, but not enough to avoid carrying a jacket, hat and umbrella and often hiding in doorways whilst the heavens thunder and crash. My big plan had been to have a long day up in… Continue reading Dogs in a storm
I find entering photographic competitions a double-edged sword. My partner says that if I do not win I will be sad and think I have failed – not so. I do believe there is a place for competitions. For one the winners photographs are hugely inspiring and wild flowers always feature as a category in… Continue reading IGPOTY – Why I was not International Garden Photographer Of The Year
A day off being lazy last week. I didn’t have my camera only my phone. I wanted to capture the hazy light of a day after rain and the carafe of red wine and the roses with their pretty blotched shades of yellow and pink. I added some graininess to keep the photo looking soft… Continue reading Wine and Roses
This is Sousa. She is an oriental dog and like all small dogs, noisy and very possessive of her bones. She lives at our home in Romania and spends the day chasing cats, bees and looking for mice in the huge woodpile we have. The bees in Romania make superb honey and this sign I… Continue reading Dogs and Bees and Weeds
I love floral photography but my other huge enjoyment is sketching, painting and writing children’s stories. At the moment I have four on the go, very different subjects and very different types of illustration. Two will be traditional watercolour, one collage and another more graphic, maybe via printing and stencil – not yet sure. In… Continue reading Doodle and sketches
I have been away from France for almost a year now. Pressing work in London meant abandoning the barn, photography and the sunshine for wet and windy England. Another few months in Romania making our pine syrups and now it is June and I am finally heading back to the meadows and cows and six… Continue reading A bike and a camera
During may and June of each year the Carpathian mountains in Romania blossom with wild flowers, pine and fir buds. This new growth is packed full of oil and when simmered slowly for a few hours with added sugar, fresh herbs and citrus fruits, creates a deliciously rich syrup, dark and tangy, aniseed and licorice,… Continue reading Ion Pine Cone Bud Syrups – syrup from the mountains
I photographed this fluffy fronded Dandelion last summer, growing on the verge of a narrow lane in Kent. It was the only one, and I loved its almost graphic quality in the lens, strong lines and whiteness against the green foliage behind. I have no idea what type it is and I have never seen… Continue reading Lions Teeth clock flowers
The journey to our home in France takes about nine hours from Calais and we make regular stops for mini picnics – crusty bread, chunks of brie, boiled eggs and coleslaw. French motor ways have lovely parking areas, where you can picnic and stop for a nap if you want before pushing on. This one… Continue reading French picnics
Blackheath near Greenwich, in London, is a broad expanse of common land where the locals walk, fly kites, and take their dogs for exercise. Running all along the edge of the road that cuts through, leading to Shooters Hill are wildflowers, a crazy mixture of bright pinks, purples and lemon yellows. Every couple of years they mow them… Continue reading Blackheath wildflowers
Sometimes hidden in the grasses in the meadows near where I live, you suddenly see a little bright splash of colour in the sunlight and with a little perseverance with the telephoto and depth of field you get these lovely little portraits of our many varied wild flowers. I have yet to name this one. … Continue reading Hidden in the fields
In Valcea, Romania there is a small park by the river and last winter when the snow had almost obliterated every pathway I took a detour across town to try and capture the last few leaves hanging on before the final weight of snow shook them down. I love the greyness here and sense of cold. The… Continue reading Last winter leaves
I used to live in London, right in the centre, ten minutes along the River Thames to Westminster, then later nearer the City, where the big banks hang out and the money is made. For a floral photographer not an ideal place, apart from a few parks full of planted beds, but I still wanted… Continue reading Flowers on the streets
In the late afternoon, as the suns heat rises and the light creates lovely silhouettes and bright colours, the meadows in Valcea, Romania, are great to photograph. We have a house there and the town is surrounded by mountains. With forests, wild flower meadows and up in the Transylvanian Alps a more dramatic landscape to… Continue reading Carpathian meadows
Sometimes you go through an afternoons photo shoot and you see an image that you know will work for an interior. I love graphic art and with a small tweak an image can take on a whole new look, perfect for adding colour to a room or where you might want a picture for a bare wall,… Continue reading Flowers for interiors
What could be better than fulfilling a wish you have had for as long as you can remember – to buy a barn in France, with a garden, surrounded by fields with cows grazing and town nearby to get your daily fix of French stick loafs. We chose a very rural part of France, the… Continue reading The Barn and The Boys
Poisonous hemlock. I didn’t realise we had so much of this wild flower in our lanes near our French barn. Must remember to not lick my fingers after positioning the stems to photograph! Read more about this tricky flower at The Poison Garden site.
Daisies. Found across all the meadows near where we live. Common but I love their sunny little faces.
This little guy , a Common Carder Bee, was so engrossed in collecting nectar, he was oblivious to my zoom lens. It’s hard to get bees facing you for photos. They spot you and always seem to turn their bottoms to you. Hard to focus on them too, but fun trying. I used to be… Continue reading Bee Happy
You read about perfumes and fragrance oils in Vogue, Cosmo, and Porter and pass through the heady aromas of jasmine, tuber rose, vetiver and sandalwood in the large Oxford Street London stores and with little tabs of slim paper test, spray and dab a cacophony of scents on your wrists and wonder which suits you best,… Continue reading O-Dose fragrance oils
Once upon a time there was a little bear who lived in London. He sat in the shop front of a delicatessen selling tea, honey pickles and cold hams. In 1967 he came home in a brown paper bag on the back of a bicycle to be given to a little girl who kept him… Continue reading A little bear with a big nose -Premo from London
The Carpathians in Transylvania not only provide glorious views across meadows full of wild flowers and mountain vistas, but wild forests full of wild boar, brown bears and places to forage for mushrooms and other wild berries to turn into fruit syrups and cordials. But the pines and firs in the forests also provide in May and… Continue reading Ion Pine Cone and Fir Tip Syrup
As part of my day to day work I am developing food products through a couple of ,y other companies – Ion Syrup and Premo From London. This involves another photographic area that I never really thought about till last year when I needed to work on social media, Twitter and a blog. Photographing food… Continue reading Food photography is not so simple
The road from our hamlet to the local town of Gouzon is lovely. It rolls and dips between the fields, still straight as the Romans built, and is a great place to grab a quick photo of the roadside flowers that spring up. All through the year the cycle of seeds and weather create swaths… Continue reading On the road
Thistles and nettles may not be everyone’s favourite, unless you make the nettles into some lovely home made wine, but as they they wilted under the heat of the late summer I caught them on camera to catch their stubbornness. Where some die in the heat, others continue to grow and find cool places in… Continue reading Wild Weeds
Our barn is right in the middle of meadows where cows graze with their young calves and young bullocks frolic and show off. The hedgerows are full of wild flowers, grasses and insects and on late autumn evenings as the light falls, the colours of the fruit laden brambles, hawthorns and other thorny hedge plants… Continue reading Late evening hedgerow grasses
A French Creative Life 