The final of four short Christmas stories written and read by author and poet Michael Smith, filmed by Nick Seaton. Watch the stories – as they are released – here or download them as podcasts from iTunes or read them below
The third of four short Christmas stories written and read by author and poet Michael Smith, filmed by Nick Seaton. Watch the stories – as they are released – here or download them as podcasts from iTunes or read them below
She’d suckered me into a trip to the Christmas holiday hell of Ikea, packed to the rafters with off-duty office fodder and their screaming kids, all of them completely driven to distraction by the dangling carrot of affordable kitchenwares and couches…
Me, her and her mam were lying low in the café, steeling ourselves for the ensuing scrum with plates of meatballs and chips… I looked out from the big window across a dual carriageway and a grotty Mock-Tudor suburban vista, when I was surprised to see the flags and towers of an enormous Hindu temple peeking dreamily through the rows of pebbledashed houses across the carpark… the Ikea experience was really doing in me already, and I decided to abandon my girlfriend and her mam to their nest-building instincts and go and check it out…
The second of four short Christmas stories written and read by author and poet Michael Smith, filmed by Nick Seaton. Watch the stories – as they are released – here or download them as podcasts from iTunes or read them below
The bitter cold had started digging its heels in, and London seemed lonelier, harsher this winter… I remember one night me and D walking for miles around Mayfair and St James’, hands clasped tight into our pockets, pockets of coats too thin for the cold spell that had come, frozen to the marrow, looking into the windows of oyster bars and shops that sold thousand pound grouse hunting jackets and silver shoehorns, trying to guess which tramps would freeze to death on the sparkling frosty pavement before the dawn was up…
The first of four short Christmas stories written and read by author and poet Michael Smith, filmed by Nick Seaton. Watch the stories – as they are released – here or download them as podcasts from iTunes or read them below.
It was during a washed-out trip to France… Sunday was wet and stormy, and as a last resort we drove off to Lourdes, first glimpsed from a distance as a big dramatic biblical mountain half shrouded in mist, the kind a little child might think God lived on, and Moses might come down from all fiery-eyed with a contract on two tablets…
The outskirts of Lourdes were as sad and tacky as you might expect, all cheap hotels and fake Irish pubs, wall-to-wall holy pizza and souvenir shops full of Marys with neon halos, a kind of Blackpool or Las Vegas of Catholicism that was utterly phoney and intriguing… I liked it, but for all the wrong reasons…
A short film featuring Toast’s autumn/winter 2012 menswear. We were in St Ives, Cornwall – down on the misty coast and then in the light-filled Porthmeor Studios – where Francis Bacon, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, among many others, once worked.
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
Jessica Seaton, Founder and Managing Director of Toast, on what prompted her interest in organic topiary.
I first encountered cloud pruning during a trip to Japan with Jamie (my husband and co-founder of Toast) at the beginning of last year. I had come across topiary before of course, but the more traditional sort (of rigid chess-men shapes or bird and animal characters) had not caught my imagination as this did.
In Japan it felt different, minimal and calm in its presentation. Each pruned tree had been thought through not just in terms of its own shape, but with regard to how it worked within the surrounding landscape too. These shrubs and trees (Niwaki, as they call them) did not overwhelm the gardens they grew in, they did not fight for attention with each other or the planting around them, rather they quietly emphasised all that was good about the landscape as a whole…
Situated on the very edge of the Lake District National Park, just south of Kendal, Levens Hall is surrounded not by towering craggy mountains, but by rounded hills that swell and roll away to the horizon. The Hall itself is old, built on the site of a medieval pele tower in the late 16th century. The gardens followed some 100 years later, flourishing under the care of the then owner Colonel James Grahme and his gardener Guillaume Beaumont.
Remarkably, the garden design you see at Levens Hall today remains just the same as it was 220 years ago. The topiary is some of the oldest in the world, with trees holding the same shapes as they were first trained to take by Beaumont himself.
It is this that we went to see. The day was one of bright, hot sunshine; we travelled on the early train from London, arriving into those glorious hills, happily taking in the view. At the Hall we were met by the current Head Gardener, Chris Crowder, and the rich, slightly bitter smell of box and yew. Our landscape contracted – from the wide skies and countryside of Cumbria to the formal design of the garden, and then, as we set to work taking these photographs, to the intricate topography of the trees themselves. They stretched high in triangular points, smoothed their edges in perfect circles, cast great shadows over us with their curves, caught the light with stark angles, and they mimicked the hills around us, undulating, rolling, swelling deep green toward the sky.
Jake Hobson, Cloud Pruner/Organic Topiarist, explains…
Just what is Cloud Pruning? The term is thrown around fairly indiscriminately these days, but there are basically two camps. The genuine, hardcore Japanese stuff – individually pruned trees, trained and shaped to represent stylised caricatures of themselves, sitting within the landscape of the Japanese garden. And the western version – the big blobby hedges that I refer to as Organic Topiary. Once proud, formal things, they’ve been allowed to slip, deliberately or otherwise, and now occupy a fascinating place somewhere between man and nature…
