They were apples from their tree, sent off to be pressed. She said it tastes slightly different every year, depending on the season.

It felt like a generous thing to share, not just the juice but the year it came from.

At home I poured a glass with a couple of ice cubes, as she suggested. The smell came first: fresh apple skin, slightly sharp, then the sweetness.

It tasted like autumn. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a way that felt specific and current. The air has shifted. The fruit had ripened.

It made me think about preserving.

There was a generation for whom preserving was simply part of living. Waiting for fruit and vegetables to reach their lowest price, buying in bulk, bottling them for winter. Lining shelves with jars that would carry a household through the colder months.

That rhythm feels rarer now.

I do it in smaller ways: wild garlic pesto in the freezer, pears in syrup at Christmas, cabbages turning into sauerkraut.

Drinking the apple juice felt like an echo of that habit. A small act of holding onto a season, even as everything else moves on.

Going out didn’t feel inviting. It felt like effort.

The rain had soaked into the paths and the ground. The air was dense with damp. I noticed how much attention it took to keep walking, how being outside felt like a choice rather than something automatic.

At one point, the rain intensified and I stopped under the trees. I paid attention to what the weather was doing: to the soil and to the air.

There is a smell that comes with rain.
When water meets earth and something shifts. A quiet pleasure, dense and grounded, rising from the soil. Evidence of activity continuing beneath my feet.

It stayed with me as a reminder that even in heavy conditions, the ground is active, and things continue, often unnoticed.

This week, I visited a garden I designed a few years ago. As I walked through the gate and along the side passage, the space opened out in front of me and, without making a conscious decision, my pace changed.

It was the grasses that did it.

Even after rain, they caught the light. Buffs and bronzes, soft golds and muted browns; colours that hadn’t announced themselves, but had settled into the environment.

As I walked, my attention shifted from looking at, to touching, the landscape. My fingers moved through the grasses without much thought, testing their weight and texture, while I listened to the low rustle as they moved against one another, responding to air and what passed through them.

What I was feeling wasn’t separate from what I was seeing. Colour arrived through resistance and sound as much as through light, and was felt briefly in my hands before I moved on.

The grasses stood upright in the garden, statuesque but not fixed, adjusting subtly to their surroundings. Behind them, Fagus and Carpinus still held their autumn leaves, deepening the palette. Browns layered against browns, the garden settling into itself.

As I moved through the space, I became aware of how often it’s these colours that catch me at this point in the year, not just here, but across gardens and wider landscapes. The tones that remain in the in-between.

I stayed with it for a moment longer than I meant to, and then carried on.

My nan is living with Alzheimer’s now. It’s taking hold, and she is different to the woman I grew up with. It’s hard to witness, but as she changes, I find myself returning to the memories I carry of her — and of her mum — and noticing how present they still are in the way I move through the world.

When I think about my connection to being outdoors, I don’t think of landscapes in the abstract. I think of my great gran’s garden in Whitton, London. It was small and was the only garden she ever had, but it held so much. There was a little fence, and on the other side of it were her vegetables. She believed deeply in growing food. She kept chickens. She collected water.

She had a water butt that gathered rain from the shed roof. It was always full — dark, deep, and quietly mysterious. As a child, I used to look into it and think it might lead to another world. She was always happy for us to go into the vegetable garden to pick things and to eat whatever we could find. There was an ease to it; a generosity I didn’t realise I was absorbing at the time.

My nan (her daughter) had a courtyard garden in Crook in Durham. It was a tiny backyard that backed onto an alley. She grew things from cuttings and planted seeds from apples she liked the taste of, just to see what would happen. It was a place of constant experiment. Not precious. Not controlled. Just attentive.

Then there’s my mum. She taught me to walk slowly. To place my hand on the bark of old oak trees, to close my eyes and to listen so that I could make time for what’s already there.

What I’ve been realising recently is that these women shaped my attention long before I had language for it. They didn’t teach me to notice the world by instruction. They taught me through care, repetition and quiet permission.

And now I see my daughters doing some of the same things. Kneeling, picking things up and listening, all without being told.

It’s made me think about how ways of seeing are passed down; not perfectly, not intact, but with us nonetheless.

At Compost Club, soil felt less like a material and more like something active and ongoing, full of relationships, labour and life. Michael spent time showing me around where he works, walking through his process as he spoke. The audio I’m sharing here comes from our conversation that afternoon.

Afterwards, there was one thing in particular that stayed with me. Before I left, we placed a microphone into the ground in his garden, and listened.

What came through wasn’t a single sound, but a shifting chorus of soft crackles, faint movements, a low, constant activity. Not loud enough to demand attention, but unmistakably alive. It felt like tuning in to a world usually closed to us, one that continues beneath our feet whether we notice it or not.

In that moment, a simple piece of technology gave us a way to listen more closely, something usually unseen and unheard becoming briefly present. Not dramatic, but alive.

It felt like a reminder that attention doesn’t always arrive on its own. Sometimes it needs help; a tool, a gesture, a shared act of listening and when we offer it, the world beneath us feels wider.

I’m sharing the conversation here as part of Sense, as an invitation to pay attention in a slightly different way.

At this time of year, walking makes it easier to notice how the body responds to change before the mind recognises it.

This week, winter made itself felt. The cold arrived abruptly, tightening the air and changing how the landscape was held. I went out for a walk.

As I walked, I noticed how the temperature on the skin shifts first. A cooler edge at the wrists, the back of the neck. Wind meets the face unevenly. Breath shortens, then settles. The shoulders draw in and the hands find their way back into pockets.

These small bodily responses are not separate from what’s happening around us. As living beings, we are constantly adjusting to the conditions we move through, our bodies responding to space, exposure and shelter before thought catches up. The body reads changes in light, temperature and air in the same way the wider landscape does. Growth slows, surfaces harden, movement alters. Long before anything is named, life has already responded.

There is something quietly reassuring in recognising this. The body doesn’t wait for instruction. Even when we are distracted or preoccupied, it continues to adjust instinctively, without direction, keeping us in relation to what’s around us.

Walking becomes less about movement through space and more about noticing that ongoing exchange between ground, air, weather and the body moving through them.

Perhaps that’s part of what walking offers at the edge of winter: a reminder that change doesn’t always ask for effort. Sometimes it is already being met, simply through being alive in a changing world.

January is often framed as a beginning. A reset. A clean slate. But I don’t experience it that way. It feels quieter than that. It’s a time when things are dormant, resting, held rather than moving forward.

I’m interested in what happens if we look at this period differently; if we resist the urge to hurry towards renewal, and instead pay attention to what rest actually looks like.

In the landscape, very little appears to be happening in January. Growth has slowed. Surfaces are hard. The ground can feel closed. And yet, beneath that stillness, there is ongoing work, in soil structure, in root systems, in microbial life, processes that don’t announce themselves but are essential to what comes next.

In practice, it can be difficult to value this kind of quiet. We’re used to marking beginnings and ends, setting intentions, moving quickly towards outcomes. There’s a pressure to see January as productive, to make plans, to signal momentum.

I notice this impulse in myself too. The desire to define what comes next, rather than staying with what is here.

But winter asks for something else. It asks for patience, for attention to what’s happening below the surface, for trust in processes that can’t be rushed. In landscape work, ignoring this often has consequences. Soil compacted too early, systems forced before they’re ready, decisions made without enough time to listen.

This January, i’m trying to let dormancy be what it is; to see it not as an absence, but as a necessary phase. One that supports what follows.

Spring will arrive in its own time. For now, I’m interested in what it means to rest with the land rather than pushing it forward.

This feels like a place to keep thinking, slowly.

I’ll see where it leads.