Aesthete Gift List

Tools for beauty in the everyday

With Christmas approaching on the rolling horizon, I am thrilled to be asked for gift requests. Who doesn’t like writing a ‘want’ list? I’m often asked about my tools and the best suppliers for materials I use on the plots.  Well, here it is. Not the boring ‘water pipe’ or ‘re-bar’ for hoops but the important essential things that we all want really.

Of course I adore William Morris’ long quoted;

‘have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’.

He was anti minimalist old Morris and I am sure we can all come up with reasons why everything we have is ‘useful’ but is it really? As I gracefully age, and after a big move this year (13 doors up the hill), I really did reduce the tool sheds (plural) and possessions right down. Moving is a great opportunity to review ‘stuff’. We’d long known we would be moving and began preparing a few years ago when we relocated the polytunnel out of the home garden, and extended it, with a greenhouse onto the plots. I love a good sort out and now I use gloves and tools that I really do love to work with.

Monty Don and Nigel Slater, two more great advocates of beautiful things, from fountain pens, notebooks and tools in the garden, kitchen and at one’s desk, their lives look elegantly curated but why should we tolerate anything less than beautiful. I’ve taken this on as a personal mantra and my everyday is far more enjoyable for it. Even if I am still quite scruffy myself!

Here is a list of tools and items I use everything together with some others that would make great stocking fillers (plus one or two that won’t fit by the tree) for the gardener or aesthete in your life. Or just for you, if you needed permission, here it is.

In no particular order, and for every budget -