Something has been quietly taking shape this year. I have been building it steadily, in the landscape and at the desk, through research and recording and a great deal of looking carefully at plants.
It is called Snoseas. snoseas.co.uk
The name began as the word seasons written backwards — a simple reflection. But in the making of it the letters shifted, the way seasons themselves now shift. The sea crept in. What arrived was not the correct reversal but something truer — a word that had adapted in its own formation. That felt right. It felt, in a small way, like the aquilegia in the garden.
Snoseas is a creative practice rooted in the Devon landscape, exploring our relationship with the natural world through Shakespeare’s flowers, natural history, folklore and the slow process of making. Each experience — in the studio, in the landscape, or through the podcast — moves toward a moment of stillness. What Japanese aesthetics calls Ma. The pause in which the real thing happens.
The first episode of the Snoseas podcast is now live. It follows the aquilegia — or columbine, as you may know it — six point nine million years old, toxic, beautiful and perpetually adapting. We move from its evolutionary intelligence to Norse mythology, from Ophelia’s grief to the shifting seasons it has already begun to answer.
It ends with a poem that arrived, as the best things do, by itself:
Aquilegia scape in spring — we are one now.
I would love to know what you think. Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GqC9sFfc4iN3XzQQkS0n0?si=IA2p8uCPTCy4z15IwvwEcg
The studio is being redesigned in the centre of Totnes. The wildflower terrace is seeded. The seasons are shifting. And Snoseas, like the aquilegia, has begun.
