Thomas Marks.
When we meet, Country Mouse is all talk of Appleby Fair, of the mutter of horse-dealers and the leathery smell of the animals. It’s his enthusiasm, paired with a visit to The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot at the British Museum (until 30 September) that has me watching for horses and their ghosts in London this month. Sitting in the quiet July dusk of Canonbury Square, it’s not long before I imagine the clean clip of hooves in the distance…
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We went to curate the spa at the Wilderness Festival. There are many more photos to see on our Facebook page, here.
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First we travelled to the high plains and hill towns of Abruzzo and then to the Tusheti mountains of Georgia.
This small film – which features pieces from the Toast autumn/winter 2012 womenswear collection – was filmed there by Nick Seaton
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Jon Day
Appleby, a small market town in Westmoreland, sits snugly in its loop of the river Eden. For the last five hundred years or so Gypsies and Travellers from across the land have gathered in the town in June for an annual horse fair; an opportunity to trade animals, to trade gossip. Many make the journey over several weeks in trailers and caravans, stopping along the way. I take the train from Leeds, travelling along what must be one of the most beautiful railways in Britain, the Settle-Carlisle line. I leave London behind. England slides past in a flicker of green and grey. Knock, Dufton and Murton pikes look on, impassive, wreathed in cloud…
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From a kind customer, Isobel Adams, who also sent us these photographs…
in sleep; organic reverie
to drift and succumb complete to thee
envelopes, enshrouds hopelessly
in wake; earth’s hot heaving soul
on which to run, averting fall
agitates, amuses, absolute all
in breath; country, ground and soil
dusty, sparse, on which man toils
captures, caresses, to persistently coil
in speech; rhetoric flows free
against rule and all decree
ebb, emanation, effusion flee
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Thomas Marks.
An arancino is about the size of a shot put. The principal ingredient is sticky, thick-grained rice, starchy and buttery, which cocoons one or other type of filling: for me, that’s ragu e piselli, a daub of mince, peas and gravy that mightn’t be out of place in a cottage pie. The barista hands it over in grease-paper, which is soon glossy with frying oil. The ball has a weight that makes you wonder how it’s been put together, and as soon as you bite through its golden crust of breadcrumbs, it starts to lose its structure: food that wants to fall apart.
I’m in Palermo, the regional capital of Sicily, sneaking from a long-grey London to seek out the kind heat of May. There are wonders of colour and high exuberance here – the gleaming twelfth-century mosaics, the plump, purple aubergines that spill from market stalls, the grinning playgrounds of baroque putti that decorate buildings meant for prayer. It’s the vividness I see first, before my eye starts to attune to the Sicilian shadows. But before long, my overriding feeling is of a city that has settled on the brink of collapse – which is why no street food could be more fitting here than the arancino…
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Jake Hobson
1. Look at the shrub and asses its branch pattern, peering inside it and pulling branches apart if necessary. Think about the overall shape you would like the plant to have, as well as how far apart you want the branches to be—this will obviously effect how many you will remove later.
2. Begin carving into the plant, using shears and secateurs to rough out the beginnings of a hidden shape. For a fully dense shape, you might not remove any branches at all, but treat the whole plant as one continuous surface. For a more open look, think out any branches that are too close together. Later that year, or after the next growing season, go back over your plant with a pair of shears or topiary clippers to consolidate the new growth.
3. A final, finished tamazukuri.
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Jake Hobson
1. Choose a young shrub. As its trunk will be young and malleable, you may wish to either train the leader using a cane, or gradually introduce bends or kinks into the trunk using stakes. if desired.
2. Remove any unwanted branches and train down the remaining ones with twine if necessary.
3. Continue to train new branches down and begin to consolidate the lower ones through pruning. Clipping with hand-held topiary clippers will soon thicken up the foliage on the branches, and decisions about branch shape can then be made. Forming the head, the final tier of the tree, involves cutting the leader and training down its side branches the whole way around the stem, creating a parachute effect. This is then treated like any other side branch and gradually clipped into shape.
4. A finished example of the tamazukuri form.
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Jake Hobson
A popular technique in Japan is clipped trees, or tamazukuri. Zukuri translates as style, and tama as round, so it loosely covers a wide range of trees and shapes, from the small Ilex crenata cloud trees that are exported to Europe from Japan (but are noticeably absent from many gardens in Japan) right up to the enormous clipped junipers and podocarps. These kinds of trees are quicker to produce, easier to maintain and cheaper than pines, so they tend to be used more in private gardens, often as screens in front of the house.
The terms tamazukuri does not describe in enough detail all the possible varieties of shapes and sizes one sees in Japan. Trunks can be straight or curved, branches trained or untrained, trees clipped into balls, blobs, flat tops and flat bottoms. Branches can be long or short, and tightly spaced so the tree is almost solid, or well spaced so that the outline of each branch is clear. Evergreens and conifers are both commonly used here, deciduous ones only rarely…
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