The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

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.

Mmn. I have a feeling I did something wrong here…

As so often when I try something new, the first attempt is a dismal failure. My bokashi compost is a load of old skank.

I was so excited when I bought these things – two ‘family size’ bokashi bins that were so clean and neat and – I fondly thought – would save me the endless slog to the compost heap and back in my leaky Uggs (note to self  – next time put the compost heap closer to the house).

I dutifully layered my household scraps with my bokashi starter, and drained off the liquid to use as drain cleaner, but being me, managed to fill both bins (two month’s capacity) in a week. This is what happens when you decide to make 40 jars of apple compote.

Still, so far so good. The fermenting compost smelled very nice (since it was mostly apples) and the liquid actually looked quite a lot like cider. Come to think of it, it practically IS cider.

Anyway. The only problem was, it didn’t seem to be breaking down. And now, after leaving it for three months, it’s become perfectly apparent that it isn’t. I tipped out both composters just now, and all that’s in there is a compressed brick of kitchen paper and food scraps, looking pretty much as it did when it went in. Nothing like the pictures of what it’s supposed to.

Oh la. Back to the drawing board with this one. Doubtless I didn’t use enough bokashi or something…

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.

Europcar was named the world’s ‘leading green transport solution company’ at the 2008 World Travel Awards ceremony on December 2. The award is a new environmental award launched this year.

“We are truly proud to have won [this] award,” said Guirec Grand-Clément, global sales and marketing director of Europcar International.

“The ‘Green’ award recognises our commitment to a sustainable environmental policy that focuses on the safety and well-being of our customers, employees and partners.”

Last June, Europcar announced that it had received certification from Bureau Veritas for its “Green Charter,” which formalises its commitment to protecting the environment. It is the first such certification for a company in Europe by Bureau Veritas, the world leader in inspection and certification services applied to quality, health and hygiene, safety, the environment and social responsibility.

Downshifting leaves you time for the things you love

It wasn’t until recently that I finally realised that I’m a downshifter.

I mean, I know we live in the country and we survive on about a tenth of our previous income, and I make all our meals from scratch and we can’t afford to eat out… But it hadn’t quite dawned on me what a paradigm shift we’d made from our old lives in London.

We live in France, I should point out, and we were having a visit from close friends for the first time in a couple of years. S and I went out to lunch – a rare treat for me – while the boys went off to the Normandy landing beaches to paint the gun emplacements.

After we’d had our fill of wine and food, S turned to me and said gleefully: “Let’s go shopping!”

And I thought: “Where on earth would you do that?”

It suddenly occurred to me that it is literally years since I ‘went shopping’. Shopping in the sense of wandering around with money in your pocket looking for something to spend it on, or window shopping, or trying on dresses in department stores just for the hell of it.

I SHOP, of course. I shop every week at the market, at the supermarket -  food shopping, essentials shopping, picking up the socks and knickers with the groceries. And I allow myself a book every couple of months on Amazon, and once or twice a year I look at the gaps in my wardrobe and I get on Ebay to fill them. But one thing I don’t do is wander into shops looking for things I haven’t got and don’t need but just might fancy. Frankly, what’s the point?

I suppose that attitude might strike the average non-downshifter as rather grim. After all, shopping is fun (we’re constantly told). And it’s not, of course, as if I object to OWNING things. I own my house and my car, and a cupboard full of vintage cashmere that I delight in wearing – I am not quite ready to knit my own yoghurt just yet.

But the other side of the argument is that I don’t want to be owned BY my things. There are plenty of other things I can do instead of shopping that are more worthwhile and fulfilling – make jewellery, bake a crumble, make preserves, tend my garden, chat to a friend, walk my dog, do my yoga.

The trick, it seems to me in life, is to strike the balance between enjoying your things and being burdened by them and that is what downshifting is partly about. I never want again – and cannot afford – to buy something daft on impulse and then regret it. Nor do I want to live in a house that is a burden to clean, or own a car that is too expensive to run, or have a job that leaves me exhausted and angry at the end of the day.

People often a have a romantic idea about downshifting, but it isn’t about moving to the country and growing your own veg. It’s really about making a mental decision to free yourself of the endless desire for MORE. Then you can decide where you want your life to take you – a part-time job, perhaps, or one where you work partly from home; a smaller house that costs less to run; more free time for the things you enjoy.

I was talking about these issues to a friend recently – a ‘comfortably off’ wife of a lawyer, who is finding that the things in her life that were once assets have suddenly become burdens. The house in Spain, the two houses in France, the five-bedroom house in England that once gave them so much status. They’re all lovely to have, of course, but they’re also all items that have to be insured and maintained, and which incur taxes, just as her husband is retiring and they have to live on a greatly reduced income.

What, really, is the point of all this STUFF? After all, you can only live in one house at a time, only inhabit one room at a time. But it can be difficult to make the shift to wanting less when you live in a society that encourages you to want just the opposite. In the West, we judge our success by how much we own, not by how much we contribute. The more successful you are, the more things you HAVE – more houses, more cars, more books, more art, more clothes. We accumulate our shiny toys like bower birds.

We also live in a world that bombards us constantly with images of things we don’t really need or even really want, but which – the advertisers tell us – will show the world that we have really made it. We ‘need’ the right house, the right clothes, the right car, the right toilet paper. And we forget – or are not even aware – that this vast army of advertisers has only one role in life: to fill our hearts with discontent so that we will buy their products.

Freeing yourself from this pressure is difficult, but the good news is that you can do it in stages. You don’t need to pack up all your things and become Tom and Barbara Good overnight. You can turn off the TV one night a week. You can switch to a non-advertising channel. You can refuse a work promotion and opt for a four-day week instead.

For most of us, our real needs are simple and so is what makes us happy. A comfortable house, enough to eat and the ability to spend time with the people we love are more important than a high-end car, a month in Bali or a designer wardrobe. Money can bring comfort and it is very nice to have nice things – but it can’t bring fulfilment. For that, you need to work on your emotional and spiritual life, and success in those areas is not something you can buy.

Ten years ago, the DH and I earned £120k a year. I had over 40 work suits, a huge wardrobe of shoes, ate out at the best restaurants and spent £100 a month getting my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon’s. We also worked every hour God sent and were ill every weekend with stress. We barely saw each other and I ate three meals a day at my desk, putting £5,000 a year the way of Pret a Manger. Lucky them – it’s a lot of bagels.

Now we earn about £15k a year, and we don’t eat out or take expensive holidays, I dress in jeans and Uggs all day and we go out once in a blue moon. But on the upside we have far more free time, live in a beautiful place and are far more tranquil and contented. I no longer work 16-hour days or make five-hour commutes and the DH can spend much more time on creative writing and photography. We would not change it for the world.

At times, downshifting isn’t easy. Of course it would be nice to have a bit more money, especially now, in winter, when the fuel bills mount up and I’d give my eye teeth to be able to buy more wood for the burner. But isn’t it always nice to have a bit more money, no matter how rich you are? The trick is to know when you have enough.

It is also true that necessity is the mother of invention, and that the more you know, the less you need. Downshifting, though at times precarious, has made me more confident as a person, which is something I didn’t expect.

If I had had the money to buy plants, I wouldn’t have learned how to propagate them. If I had had the money for clothes, I wouldn’t have learned how to sew. If I had been able to afford meals out, I wouldn’t have become a good cook.

My skills were perhaps acquired unwillingly, but they are now mine forever, and having them makes me feel capable and confident about life and my place in it. As a friend once said: “The thing about you is that you could wash up on a desert island and you’d be just fine”.

That is one of the many benefits downshifting gives you – the ability to find out how competent you truly are. And that’s something else that money can’t buy.

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.

Scared by the economic downturn?

Tired of ads pressuring you into buying worthless crap?

Wondering whether there might be an alternative?

Well, there is. At FreeShift.com we’ll be exploring the joys of downshifting – how being a non-consumer can set you free.

We’ll be offering tips, tricks and musings on all aspects of leaving the rat-race behind.

We’re still setting up the site, but do come back soon as things are about to start happening.