Outside In | Sean A. Pritchard
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book, posted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Sean Pritchard: I'm Sean Pritchard and my book is Outside In: A Year of Growing and Displaying.
Suzy Chase: Your book on gardening and floral design stands out for its exquisite beauty, thanks to the infusion of emotion and vulnerability throughout its pages. Despite residing in New York City where personal outdoor space is scarce, I found myself captivated by your eloquent prose. First off, please explain what it means to be a garden designer and how you came to be a garden designer.
Sean Pritchard: My career in garden design started a little later in my life, I suppose. I originally left university and went into business. I was working in media and publishing, so that was a great grounding in business acumen, if you like. But I'd come to that from having done a degree, an art degree, and so there was always a sort of sense somewhere inside of me that I wasn't doing what I loved, that really lit a fire inside of me. There was always that thing that I wasn't being as creative and as messy, I suppose, with what I was doing every day.
And I suppose alongside that, I had always had a fascination with plants and flowers and gardens. And in my spare time I'd always be visiting some garden or other and growing plants and flowers in my own little garden that I had at the time, cutting flowers, bringing them inside. It really felt quite natural to me to do something that really lent into gardens and flowers. So I enrolled on a course in Bristol, England, a garden design course that I did, and in doing that, really sort of found, I think, what I should have always been doing.
Suzy Chase: I want to go back to when you were on the cusp of 30 and you found yourself on a narrow country lane, waiting for a real estate agent, surrounded by hedgerows as tall as you'd ever seen. And then you laid eyes on what would be your cottage. I love this quote: "The cottage, being old and piecemeal, as it is, somehow lends itself to a quiet anarchism from which I derive a lot of pleasure." Please chat about your darling cottage and the gardens for a little bit.
Sean Pritchard: This cottage, I think it's about 350 years old. It's sat in the landscape here in Somerset for an awful long time and seen a lot of change and things come and go. But really, I suppose, what I'm most fascinated by is the longevity of this house, its resilience, its ability to have stood here for such a long time and have weathered everything that's happened since then. And inside the cottage, everything's sort of a bit wonky and everything is sort of a bit lopsided and nothing's in a straight line, and it's very sort of informal. And to me there's a real sense of comfort in that. It sits on a tiny little country lane that winds its way up through the Mendip Hills here. And yeah, it's just a very peaceful, very informal place.
Suzy Chase: Your writing is just so poetic and sublime. I love this line: "The rooms of the cottage are a kind of stage, a platform for evolving melodramatic performances brought in from the garden." You say it's not just about the immediate ornamental appeal they bring to the room. I would love for you to chat about that.
Sean Pritchard: I suppose, obviously, plants and flowers, when they're brought inside, look pretty. They're decorative and they elevate a room with their color and their shape and their textures and their forms. So there's always that aspect of bringing the garden inside. But I suppose for me it goes a bit deeper than that in that I sort of always need to feel as though I am living with the garden, living amongst the garden, living with nature and the landscape. And so really bringing elements of the garden inside helps me feel, as I go about my daily business here in the cottage, it makes me feel closer to the landscape, to the garden and to nature.
I can't imagine shutting the door on the garden and the landscape and just leaving it all outside. It's, for me, really important that I feel as though the outside and the inside are sort of one, they flow into each other. There's no sort of boundary between what's happening inside and outside. And I don't tend to think about the rooms in the cottage as being separate, really, to what I do and what happens outside.
Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, "I'm on an eternal mission to dismantle any notion of having left the magic of the garden behind when you walk through the door and into the cottage." I mean, I could quote your book all day long. I love it.
Sean Pritchard: Thank you. It was a joy to write, actually, because it gave me an opportunity to really think about things that had been going on in my mind, ideas and inspirations and things like that that I'd been doing and thinking about for years. And it gave me a real opportunity to actually sit with those thoughts and try and understand them and to try and process them in a way that I might communicate them to somebody else.
Suzy Chase: Talk a little bit about how the British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist, the amazing Gertrude Jekyll, influenced your style and your decision to do away with your lawn.
Sean Pritchard: She is an absolute forever inspiration to me, sort of an enduring icon of gardens, garden design, decoration, plants, flowers. I have copies of all her books and regularly reread them or dip into them, and I just find with her writing, there's such an honesty and sharpness of observation in what she talks about. She will talk about what she sees in the garden or what she's observed that day, and it will be things that other people might have completely overlooked.
Little details of things that you think, "Wow, that is somebody who is really invested in the landscape and the garden and is seeing things that are so inspiring but would be so easy to overlook." And I suppose what I've always tried to do is do that as well. This idea of looking really closely, observing, just being with a garden or a landscape for a few moments and really just looking and seeing what is happening, the little dramas that are being played out with wildlife and the way plants are interacting with each other. She was so amazing at noting all those things.
Suzy Chase: The planning you do for the garden revolves around the central idea of an indoor display. Talk a little bit about that and how you storyboard as part of the creative process.
Sean Pritchard: The idea of indoor display to me always revolves around an idea of celebration. So what's going on out in the garden, the planting, the color, the shapes, the textures, to me always seems like a celebration. It always seems like a celebration of nature, renewal, and I suppose I'm always interested in trying to replicate that inside. When people come to visit the cottage, or even when it's just me here, I want to feel as though I'm celebrating nature and the garden and the landscape inside.
So I'm always using displays to do that, to showcase what's going on outside and showcase the power of nature and the garden. And I suppose with these displays, there's also a sense of comfort in them as well. Yes, they change as we travel through the season, so things that I might display today obviously will change tomorrow and next week and months to come. But they always come back, they always return. So if today I'm displaying daffodils and tulips and spring flowers, they'll change, but this time next year they'll be back. And there's a real grounding in that to me. It's sort of a reassuring sense that everything is traveling and journeying as it should. So that's why they're so important to me.
Suzy Chase: I love the idea of celebration, and that's the thread that ties every chapter together in this book. But you also create little pockets of fragrances inside the cottage that catch you as you pass by. How do you do that?
Sean Pritchard: Scent and fragrance is one of the things I'm always most excited to bring into the cottage. Right now, actually, I'm sat at my kitchen table and I've got a jug of daffodils next to me that are flowering in the garden, and the scent from them is just amazing. I suppose so many memories of gardens for me revolve around scent. I imagine they do for many people as well. But when I think about some of my earliest garden memories, I think about my grandfather and his sweet peas. He used to be a sort of amateur enthusiast of sweet peas and would grow countless varieties in his garden when I was younger. And that's really my earliest memory of horticulture, of plants and flowers, is being in his garden as a young child and being completely intoxicated by the smell of sweet peas, by that real sweet perfume that they produce in summer.
And so I suppose ever since then, smells and scents and fragrances of the garden have always been really evocative to me, and they, again, root me in specific moments and times of the year. If I think about summer, I think about the smell of tomato, the tomato plants, or I think of the smell of sweet peas or of lilies and roses. And so therefore, bringing them inside just feels really natural to me. What I like to do is to put little displays of scented flowers in those places inside where you'll just catch it as you travel through a room, or in the hallway where you might be arriving back home and it might just catch you as you walk in. Or you might be going from one room to another, and on the side there might be a little pot of roses that just hit you as you pass by and just remind you of what's going on outside.
Suzy Chase: There's something I love about floating flowers. How can we achieve this look in our home and what sorts of flowers are the best?
Sean Pritchard: I love them too. Obviously, the main consideration is the vessel, the plate or the bowl. What I like to use, shallow old platter, and I tend to use old blue-and-white ones I fill with a little bit of water and then pop the flowers on top of that. In terms of the best sort of flowers for that, flowers that are quite flat might sound obvious, but those that have a flat profile often work best. So things like hellebores and daffodils work particularly well. Also, what I love to float are roses and some of the blousier and more complex the better. So cottage garden shrub roses, I think look fantastic when they're floated. And there's something about flowers that are difficult to appreciate when they're stood up, so again, like hellebores that tend to droop when you put them in a vase, their little heads bob downwards, and it's hard to appreciate the flower that way.
So floating it allows you to see the flower from that top-down perspective, which really gives you a sense of how beautiful it is. Whilst I'll always float specific things all the time, like hellebores and violets and daffodils and things like that, I'll always try new things as well. Often that comes from a point of necessity because when I'm working around the garden, there'll always be those flowers that... Casualties have been knocked off whilst I brush past it, or I cut the wrong thing or knock something off. And you knock a flower off and you've hardly got any stem with it, so you'll float it and you'll think, "Oh, actually, that looks really beautiful." So my advice would be if you see something and you think, "Oh, that would look great floated in a bowl or in a vase," then give it a go.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Home, where I ask you to describe one memory of your childhood home. And please start by telling us where it was.
Sean Pritchard: I suppose a memory of my childhood home would have to be the garden that I think is the earliest memory I can think of of home. I've spoken about my grandfather's garden and his sweet peas, but my own family garden as a child is somewhere that I think of first when I think of that time, think of the hours that I spent down at the bottom of the garden that turned into quite a woodland area. And I can just remember the hours as a little boy, sat making dens and nests and things and learning about the different wildflowers that were growing there.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Sean Pritchard: I'm on Instagram, Sean_Anthony_Pritchard. My website is seanapritchard.com.
Suzy Chase: Okay, I have to quote something out of the book one more time. You wrote, "There's always, deep down, part of me that's looking for an escape, somewhere else my mind can retreat to when I feel overwhelmed by everyday life." I love that you've assigned emotions to flowers, plants in your garden, and not just beauty. This book is a beautiful love letter to your garden. Thanks so much for coming on Decorating by the Book podcast.
Sean Pritchard: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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