Dear readers,
I have decided to change the name of this publication as it has been pointed out to me that students in the “tidewanderings” course who had also kindly subscribed here, were getting a bit confused when emails from Substack floated in, without a link to the course.
From the next instalment it will be travelling under the title “floribundineum :: makings and musings with India Flint”. You won’t find the word in the Oxford English Dictionary because I have made it up. It was one of the things I liked to do as a child, somewhat influenced by my paternal grandfather the late Prof. Emeritus Hans Schwerdtfeger, who scattered invented words made up from combined crumbs of the seven or so languages he spoke into the German we used within the family. (Consequently there were a few raised eyebrows when I visited relatives in Germany, and thought that the words I was using were conventional German, but that is another story.)
I will also be offering a paid subscription. Here’s how it will work.
The “musings” will still be free to a good home, but the “makings” (in which I will share processes, recipes and comfortable clothing patterns that I have devised) will be available only for subscribers tossing tips into my hat.
Remember when you were a child. Before your life was heaped with responsibilities. Before you were made to care about what other people thought of what you did.
Did you have a place to play outside? Might you have known a small bit of earth where you had a garden of your very own?
Did you brew potions in old cans and pots, decorate mud pies with flowers, rub fragrant greens from leaves into your clothes? Lay out lines of stones, gather petals in tiny baskets, find secret places and build hideaways in them? If the answer is yes, we share common ground.
I have loved trees and flowers and forests and woods and gardens and gardening all my life. I firmly believe that everywhere is beautiful if you take the time.
I’ll be talking about my work with flowers and leaves, cloth and paper, words and ink. Dyeing cloth, making small books, stitching garments … and in between I will continue telling stories about people I don’t want to forget and places I have left my footprints in.
photo above by Haley Renee
Recalling mountains of rose petals smelling divine and wondering how to stop the rotting smelly compost they became the squeezing of plums and beetroot to rub on faces….and later when all was but a memory reading about a certain woman in South Australia who was uncovering these mysteries- and cheekily contacting her—— and then time moves on —-
What a lovely place to be. I am a lousy gardener. I cant chop the weeds because they are housing baby birds. But hearing their little voices brings joy to my heart! As do your musings……