Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: lily of the valley (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

A few days of comparative calm after the stress of moving my photos to an external hard drive has been creatively productive – though I never really know whether calm leads to more embroidery or whether it’s the act of embroidering that soothes the restless spirit and lowers the blood pressure. Whichever it is, the good thing is that I find I’ve finished quite a few more flowers for the altar frontal (which I shall drip feed to the blog) and I think it brings the total finished to about 20, with perhaps another 10 to go. I must take advantage of a lull in calls on my time and arrange for the sewing bees to start up again.

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: lily of the valley (hand embroidered by Mary Addison) 

Lily of the valley and Dior’s perfume Diorissimo come to my mind like tick follows tock. I only ever had just one bottle in the year before I went to university but now the very sight of the flower summons up the smell. Owning a bottle made me feel very sophisticated, not least because the black and white hound’s tooth check label and box looked very chic  – the box is no longer the same and rather like the perfume itself is now just a little bit more bland and less memorable.

Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez: Perfume: The Guide  (a great little present for anyone who loves perfumes) call Diorissimo the archtypal muguet. Informed and hyperbolic, their prose continues in a manner not unlike sticking a lollipop in sherbert dip…

Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez: Perfume: The Guide

“Bear in mind that no extract can be obtained from the natural flowers, so all muguet are reconstructions. The original 1956 Dioissimo established Edmond Roudnitska as the Mozart of postwar French perfumery. And Diorissmo was a truly Mozartian fragrance, with a catchy, jaunty presto tune like the overture to the Marriage of Figaro. How Roudnitska achieved it is the  stuff of legend. In the garden of his house in Cabris, near Grasse, he planted lily of the valley and used it for reference. The idea of Roudnitska on all fours among the little white bells, a smelling strip in hand is delightful. A fundamentally important material to the original accord was hydroxycitronellal, one of a tiny number of hydroxyaldehydes in perfumery, which has much of the soapy, floral whiteness of muguet. Hydroxy, as it is familiarly called, is now restricted in use, though still present in the “list of allergens” on the present Diorissimo packaging. Today’s Diorissimo is unquestionably different from the older version, though still a thing of great beauty. The best way to describe it, it seems to me, is as the voice if a great soprano close to retirement. The melody, the timbre are there, but some of the high notes are a little forced and have lost the effortless soaring, the liquid fluency of old. Up close, this thing shouts a little. But it has tremendous radiance and at a distance still works fine as likely the most distinctive fragrance of all time. “

And to think, some people regard perfume as just a nice smell!

This week has been technologically challenging and in a small way traumatic as I’ve had to transfer my photo albums on to an external hard drive and then free up space on my Mac Air. Finding the right person to help took some time but now I think we’ve done it with just a few photos lost from the last couple of weeks. I hope tomorrow will be unseasonably bright so that I can replace the erased photos (including one for this post).

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: fuchsia (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Some serious gardeners turn their backs on fuchsias. Katherine Swift (author of The Morville Hours and The Morville Years) states firmly that they do nothing for her and in an article in the Guardian of 2002 Monty Don struggled with the idea of actually having them in his own garden at all, although he has since taken the plunge, both in his garden and in print. (Do read the article as he gives a summary of the plant’s origin more interestingly than I could do.) Anna Pavord was obviously tempted in The Curious Gardener where she describes the fuchsias in Columbia Road Market (London E2; open only on Sundays) as representing “staggeringly good value” but that was in 2010 and it may not be true any more.

Altar frontal for Ipsden Ch. Oxon: fuchsia (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I think the fuchsia has suffered the fate of many other plants – once the varieties become overly ornate, gardeners of taste go off them. I remember seeing a big bush of the tiny pink flowers of fuchsia magellanica in the gardens of Athelhampton House in Dorset, and being won over at the artless way it arched fine stems of delicate flowers and leaves (possibly variegated) into the path. I even wrote the name down so that I could hunt one down for my own garden, which I did … but it didn’t last. I suspect that I should have hardened it off to outdoor conditions more gradually than I did.

Art Nouveau fuchsia pendant carved in horn and stained

I’ve always been very taken with the design of the above piece of Art Nouveau jewellery seen in a photo from my cuttings book and I couldn’t resist using elements of that design for my fuchsia. I chose not to go for a big ballgown of petals and went for something a bit more sleek and less shouty. I’ve planted quite a few fuchsias in the vicarage garden and they’ve been quite happy over the summer but I’ve never yet managed to get any through the winter. Once again, I think it’s the smaller, less showy varieties that do best locally. Perhaps I’ll opt for one of those and have one last try.