The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

We had one of those real downshifting days yesterday, when I realised that all the fun we had was for free. OK, I lie – there was some diesel involved – but so there must be if you’re going to go anywhere.

We headed for a gorge in a local forest. The forest we’ve visited thousands of times but the gorge is new to us. A hundred times we must have driven right by it without knowing it was there.

And what a discovery. We slithered down the slope practically on our backsides and found a path along a river, then wandered along it for half an hour or so, under trees and over rivulets until we came to an old chapel. Here there were picnic benches (God bless the French…), and since it was by now lunchtime we unpacked our sandwiches, washed our hands in bottled water and set to with gusto.

In the old days, we’d probably have eaten at a restaurant, where you can drop 40 euros without looking. But doing it this old-fashioned way was still excellent – tuna mexicana in one sandwich, peanut butter and jelly in another and my home-made lavender and thyme biscuits to follow.

A bit of a rest, then back along the way we came, taking the longer, shallower route up the hillside and back to the car. Then we drove round to the other side of the forest and took a different track back to the chapel.

This time we found a wide cycle route through a pine forest heady with essential oils, underplanted with wild solidago. We snacked on wild bilberries as we went, while the dog nearly struck lucky with a partridge (it got away). All around us there was nothing but the sound of water and birds and the heady almond scent of meadowsweet.

Then, quite tired, after a total of three hours or so walking we headed home to re-runs of Morse and a ratatouille I’d put in the slow cooker (another item that is unbelievably useful).

It was only later that it dawned on me that we hadn’t spend a cent. I’d taken my purse with me and it had been nothing but ballast. The food was stuff we already had in and we hadn’t even stopped for a beer at a local cafe as we used to do.

I admit to a faint twinge of longing as we passed the Manoir de Lys restaurant on the way back, but quickly shook myself out of it by remembering that not even when we had money did we ever eat there and besides, we were hardly dressed for it in our walking shoes and back-packs.

It just goes to show that we have got into the habit of not spending anything when we go out, and that the day is just as enjoyable as it ever was.

And instead of the point of going out being to visit, say, a local restaurant, it is now to get to a beauty spot and walk our legs off, so the bonus is that we feel fitter too.

I was truly heartened to read a story in the Telegraph about women’s co-operative Amazon Nails, which specialises in environmentally friendly housing, being commissioned to build Britain’s first straw council houses.

Only six have currently been commissioned, by North Kesteven County Council in Lincolnshire, but it’s hoped that many more will follow.

There are many sound reasons for building in straw. To start with, such houses cost far less than conventional buildings – £60,000 on average instead of £80,000. They are also less polluting, especially as they use less concrete. The houses are so well-insulated and energy-efficient that they save householders around 80 per cent on their heating bills (the planned houses will be connected to the gas grid for cooking only, and will be heated by woodburners in winter).

They also make use of a waste product – enough surplus straw is produced in the UK each year to build 250,000 homes, and God knows there is a profound need for social housing, which will probably increase rapidly as hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes in this recession.

My first encounter with straw bale housing was about a decade ago when our friends E and K built themselves a bale house to live in (above). They had been living in a 6ft caravan and E was now pregnant, so something had to give. Straw bale construction was in its infancy then and they build a load-bearing structure. Very few people do this now, as it means you’re very limited in the heights and widths of walls, doors and windows – instead, modern straw bale houss are usually timber-framed and you use bales as infill rather than bricks or breeze blocks.

Being a couple of feet thick, the insulation properties of the straw are truly amazing. We popped down from time to time while it was going up and it was astonishing to find how warm it was inside even when the openings weren’t glazed, it was winter, and there was no heating. Once E&K took occupation and fired up their tiny woodburner cooker, they lived with their big window open for much of the year round, to let OUT the heat. The walls, both inside and out, were lime-plastered – a wonderful finish that gradually turns (chemically speaking) back into rock over time. Like most straw bale houseowners, they left a ‘truth hole’ (right) to show that the house really is made of straw.

I have my secret fantasies about having a house built (too much watching of Grand Designs on telly) and it definitely involves straw for areas such as utility rooms and porches. Straw, lime plaster, lots of energy-efficient double glazing, exposed timbers, terrazzo flooring. Oh la, all a pipe dream really, unless my architect friend M decides to make one for me out of the kindness of his heart.

Still, a girl can dream…

I ordered my roses the other day and now I’m dreaming of spring.

They won’t actually arrive for ages, of course. They’re bare-root jobs from David Austin in the UK, and they won’t come until March or April. But in a bitter February, with frost on the ground every morning, a girl can still dream.

When we moved to France, I had no idea what an obsession the garden would become. I would never have thought I’d become a bulb catalogue sort of person, the kind of woman who ordered gardening books on Amazon. I associated that with old ladies in straw hats, but one of the enjoyable things about being in my 40s is that I no longer feel the need to apologise for loving my garden.

Gardening is one of the most rewarding, contemplative experiences open to anybody. From a windowbox to a 2-acre orchard, planting things and nururing them and watching them grow keeps you in touch with the seasons and the cycle of life.

Vita Sackville-West, for all her accomplishments as a writer, was far greater as a gardener, and I like to think there’s a connection between her and me and all the women gardeners of the past and present. All sharing those private moments out in the twilight, dead-heading and listening to the birds.

I am not a bedding-plant gardener. I am lucky enough to have a large garden, and shrubs and trees are what interest me, and of shrubs, above all, roses. Which is strange, because I grew up almost hating the things.

My friend Julie’s dad had the archetypal British rose garden – serried ranks of what I now know to be tea roses and floribundas with their angular petals and brilliant colours, each in its naked patch of earth, pruned to within an inch of its life, not a weed in sight and not a greenfly either. Freud would have had a field day.

I never knew then of the existence of the Old Roses – Ispahan, Duc de Guiche, Belle de Crecy, with their furling petals. Or the striped roses like Rosa Mundi or Ferdinand Pichard. Or the once-flowering ramblers beloved of the Edwardians, or the sweetbriars with their apple-scented foliage.

I’d never heard of the viciously-thorned rugosa roses whose leaves turn yellow in autumn, or of the gigantic Rosa Filipes Kiftsgate, whose original plant at Kiftsgate Court is now 40ft high and 60ft wide. But the more I read about roses, the more I wanted them, and slowly, gradually, five years ago, I began to plant.

I don’t have much money to spare on the garden, but there are now 35 varieties of rose, and 17 of them are species roses – the wildest forms of the rose. They are all very beautiful in their different ways, but it is a beauty that has to be looked for. Rosa Pendulina is the smallest, with her purple stems and sparely-carried bright magenta flowers like corn cockles: Rosa Filipes Brenda Colvin is the largest, and her thuggish behaviour takes over more of our fallen pear tree every year – much to our delight, I should add. Rosa Rubiginosa (the Eglantyne of Shakespeare) fills the garden with the scent of Granny Smiths apples after rain, while the amusingly named Rambling Rector, who smells of white linen, covers the ground with thousands of tiny, perfectly heart-shaped petals at the end of June.

All of my roses are my favourites, and I’m glad to greet each in turn as they flower, but my favourite-most favourite is Rosa Roxburghii, currently in her third year. She is a small rose (for me) at only seven feet when fully grown and last year, for the first time, she flowered, exchanging, after all-too-brief a period, her modest crumpled petals for enormous hips covered in spines – hence her other name of the Chestnut Rose. The whole of the bush is gnarled and ancient-looking, and her leaves are tiny and frondlike. When she’s not in flower, I think many people wouldn’t take her for a rose at all, but for something more exotic, perhaps Japanese in origin.

It is very pleasurable to think of gardening when you cannot garden, because of frost or snow or – in my case, a streaming cold. So although I only ordered yesterday, I am already planning my next order, to be fulfilled in autumn.

To order David Austin roses, click here.

As a devotee of the works of the late Rosemary Verey, for some years now, each Christmas morning, I’ve gone around the garden to see what’s in flower.

Ms Verey’s book The Garden in Winter is what first gave me the idea. Winter is my most dismal time of year and by February, after months of rain and fog I’m usually at a very low ebb. So when I first began to plant my garden, about seven years ago, my first priority was winter interest.

I’ve never bothered with herbaceous planting, as it will take me the next 20 years just to get the backbone of this garden in, so my focus has always been on trees and shrubs. That’s paying off in spades now, which is the happiest part of woody plants – they may be expensive to buy, and an effort to plant, but every year they just get better and better.

Quite by accident, this year my bouquet contains more flowers than other winter interest (berry, bark and evergreen leaves). The biggest surprise was the Graham Thomas roses, of which there were half a dozen still in bloom on Christmas Day. My Graham Thomas is a complete thug and flowers prolifically despite its windswept Western-facing site. Each year the wind rips it free of the wall and today I’ll cut it to the ground in the hope that the new growth will face upwards rather than straight out at 45 degrees.

Also in flower was rosa Evelyn, another English Rose by David Austin, and much more tender. So too was mahonia media ‘Charity’, planted over the body of our beloved cat Worthing, and abelia grandiflora with its pinkish flowers and modest, shiny evergreen leaves.

An unknown spiraea which flowered in the spring and once again in autumn this year has lent its tiny white flowers, and my subtle parrotia persica is in flower too, with tiny dark-red flowers encased in brown velvet, which betray its relationship with the witch hazels. Real hazels come next, with their dull winter catkins, and finally, there is the mimosa, often cut to the ground by the Normandy winter, but always reappearing, a little forward of its old site. Its flowers are still in bud, but if it makes it through the winter, they’ll be heads of fluffy, yellow, vanilla scent by March.

Yesterday I forewent the peeling bark of rosa roxburghii, preferring to let it grow a little more before I prune it, but I took the dark red twigs of cornus ‘Gottschaud’,  the fiery-red twigs of cornus sanguinea ‘Winter Beauty’ and the egg-yolk yellow stems of salix vitellina. For a bit of structure, I also added stems of salix tortuosa – the Devil’s Claw Willow – which has shot to 20ft high in six years in spite of the steep, barren north-facing slope on which it’s planted.

The lovely red berries – disliked by the birds – are from cotoneaster cornubia, which shares that same slope and even though it was split right in half by the wind five years ago, still towers over my head.

Walking around the garden in the bitter weather is a wonderful reminder that the earth isn’t really dead and that plants need their winter hibernation like human beings need their sleep. Gathering my Christmas Day bouquet each year gives me a real lift, with its memories of summer and the promise of spring.

Late on parade with this blog today.

The reason is, I’m trying to buy a new woodburner.

I recently had a small windfall when my pensions company demutualised and I found myself with shares I didn’t know I had. Since it was money I wasn’t expecting, spending it on a new woodburner seemed like a good idea. I don’t know how we’d ever afford one otherwise, and I want to do something to help my asthma.

Our current woodburner is 11 years old, and it’s the wrong type. So naive were we when we bought this house that we didn’t know the difference between a freestanding stove and an ‘insert’, so we simply bought the latter because it was the most powerful we could find.

For those who don’t know, inserts are designed to fit inside a closed fireplace. Only the front of them is visible, so the top, sides and back are all insulated to keep the heat in, and you drive the heat out of vents in the front by using fans.

However, we have an open fireplace, so what we should have bought was a freestanding stove, where the heat radiates from all sides. These generally don’t have fans, though some of the newer varieties use turbo chargers that redirect the hot air so that it comes out of the bottom of the stove, reducing the ceiling temperature and increasing the floor temperature (see drawing at right).

This is the type we’ve opted for – the Alsace Turbo 2 from a firm called Supra. The Alsace without turbo is the best-selling stove in France and several of our friends have it, and the result is houses that are far warmer and cosier than ours. It is also double combustion and a third more efficient than our current stove, which will mean should pay for itself over the course of two to four years.

Another mistake I made was that back when we bought this house, there wasn’t really an Internet, and I had a lot of trouble calculating how much kilowattage we would need (it was the kind of information heating engineers used to keep to themselves). Eventually Country Living magazine furnished some calculations, and I came up with a requirement of 12kw, so we bought a 12kw stove.

It’s never been anywhere near enough. Running both fans full pelt, we could just about cope, but our living room is 70sqm – the whole ground floor of the house – and it has quite a high ceiling. Recalculating recently on one of the many websites that now tell you how to do it comes up with a figure of 16kw – even more if you have an open staircase (which we do).

The room is also not insulated – none of these stone houses are. Instead, it relies on something called thermal mass to stay warm. You basically heat up the stone, which radiates heat back out, and the best bet is to do it slowly and gradually. We usually light our first fire on September 1st, well before we really need it, and stoke up the house a bit at a time. This summer’s been so rubbish, though that we actually lit one a day or two ago, more for psychological reasons than anything else.

Just to complicate matters, though possibly in a good way, the French are keen to push wood heating, so you’re entitled to a tax credit of 50 per cent of the cost of the stove if you install one of these whizzy new clean-burn jobs, which the Alsace Turbo is. The trouble is, we have no idea how to claim the tax credit, and I don’t know anyone who’s done it successfully. The criteria for obtaining it seem to vary wherever you look. One government site tells you that it doesn’t matter where you buy the stove, as long as you have it installed professionally. Another says you can only claim if both the supplier and the installer are professionals. Yet another tells you that the supplier and installer have to be the same person.

It is enough to make you tear your hair out, even if it wasn’t all in a foreign language. Though clearly, French people have no more of a clue than I do, as there are questions about it all over the French forums.

I am very nervous about getting this thing wrong, because, you see, I don’t know if we will ever have this kind of money to spend again in one hit, and there are plenty of other things that we need. For instance, I could easily buy a second-hand, more basic version of this stove for half the price and we could install it ourselves. No tax credit, but it would work out about the same in terms of money – a temptation when I’m not absolutely sure we’re going to get this money back. And for the same cost as a new stove, I could refit the bathroom or buy a new floor for this office, plus replace both of our office windows with double-glazed ones. It is a decision I don’t want to get wrong.

Oh la. Back to the drawing board. At least I’ve phoned the plumber already, and he will giving me a quote on installation. A lot depends on what he says, so wish me luck.

I saw a wonderful documentary on TV last night. It was about Michael Reynolds, and entitled Garbage Warrior.

Reynolds is my sort of bloke. Resolutely alternative, mad as a hatter and highly visionary, for 30 years he’s been building self-sustainable communities in the extreme climate of New Mexico’s desert, where winter temperatures can fall to 30 below freezing.

Called Earthships, the kind of monniker that is hardly going to endear him to the ‘straights’, these houses use passive solar for heating, and are constructed around a central greenhouse that enables a family to be almost entirely self-sufficient for water, heat, power and food. The walls are remarkable – mainly constructed from recycled plastic and glass bottles set into cement (resulting in igloo-like structures of stained glass beauty), or used tyres packed hard with earth to create thermal mass.

Thermal mass is something you become familiar with when you live in a stone house like mine, incidentally. With their granite walls 2ft thick, these houses have to be warmed up in winter until the heat sinks into the stones and radiates back out again, but once warm, they retain their heat brilliantly and don’t need much topping up. It’s something that the holiday-home owners rarely understand: because they’re never here long enough to warm the houses up, they imagine that for the rest of us, they are cold to live in during winter.

Anyway, back to Reynolds.

Establishing self-sufficient communities is the kind of thing that is hardly likely to please the powers that be, who would rather have us all firmly over a barrel where utilities are concerned (what do we exist for, if not to make money for the corporates?), and for around seven years, the authorities succeeded in depriving him of his licence and shutting him down.

But he was saved by the tsunami. Desperate for new ideas about building, architects in the Amdamman Islands called on him and his crew to help them rebuild after losing almost all their housing and half their population to the tidal wave.

Unhampered by red tape and over-regulation, he and his men showed the island communities how to build their houses from what they had lying around, and as usual with non-western communities, the hard labour of the local populace was shaming. We sometimes forget that most of the manual labour in the world is done by women and that 80 per cent of the world’s farmers are women, but I was reminded of it watching these frail-looking females in their saris, mixing cement with mattocks to build new housing for their families.

The film was short on some of the detail I’d like to see – about exactly how the water and sewage systems work, for example – though this kind of territory is covered very well by series such as Grand Designs, which are more about the ‘how’ than the ‘why’. This film focused more on Reynolds as a personality and his political battle, which has lessons for the rest of us. The end of the documentary was uplifting, with Reynolds – after years of fighting – managing to push a bill through his local senate to allow him to continue his experimental work in designated areas.

I highly recommend this inspirational documentary, which is by Oliver Hodge. You can also find out more about the film at Garbage Warrior.