Dan Pearson on Landscape Design, Mindfulness & the Alchemy of Gardening

0:03I felt like I was affected by things deeply. the world that I made for myself was a safe place. In a way, there was an unknown element about the natural world that wasn't with people. People are more scary.

0:18The gardening for me is a complete mainline access route into feeling better. You're based in real time, you can't rush it. And I think that's enormously grounding.

0:32You know, it's somewhere that's self-defining and somewhere that I loved. Why does it make you emotional talking about that? I think you're extremely lucky in this life if you're able to be in a stable environment when you're kids and that provided that place.

0:50Hello and welcome to Homing. My name's Matt Gibbard. As a parent, I know you're not supposed to have favourites but I am particularly excited about sharing this episode. Today's guest is the wise and wonderful landscape designer Dan Pearson. Over the course of a 40-year career, Dan's designed everything from a forest garden in Japan to private gardens for the likes of Johnny Ive, Paul Smith and Juergen Teller. Together with his partner Hugh Morgan, he also produces Dig Delve, an influential online journal documenting what they're planting, harvesting and cooking in their own garden in Somerset.

1:29I recorded this conversation with Dan in their outdoor kitchen where they prepare and eat food all year round whatever the weather coming in over freezing hill. He also took me on a tour of his incredible garden and Japanese inspired studio which is available to homing members on Patreon. Spending time with Dan it becomes clear that working with the landscape isn't just his profession, it's how he understands himself and the world around him. For the past 15 years he's been gently shaping the land around his home and slowly putting down roots of his own. This is a conversation about living in rhythm with nature and about learning to belong to a landscape rather than trying to master it.

2:13I hope you enjoy listening. Hi Dan, thanks for being on the podcast. So starting at the beginning where did you spend your earliest years because I've read that you you lived in an arts and crafts cottage and sort of Hampshire Sussex way but what age were you there from and and did you have a place before that yes we were brought up in um in Hampshire yeah Hampshire Sussex border and um mum and dad had a house Victorian house in a so small group of houses in some woodland outside the village and there was an old lady called Miss Joy who lived along the lane behind an enormous hedge which had sprawled into the lane and all you could see of the house was a chimney with a tree growing out of it.

3:02There was a hole in the hedge that she would come out of in the autumn with windfall apples which she'd leave on people's doorsteps. And she was very wayward looking and she made her own hats and seemed very, very old to somebody under 10. and when Miss Joy eventually, she had a series of strokes and mum befriended the executor who was a neighbour and when Miss Joy eventually died, mum went in to see what was behind the hedge, this hole in the hedge and mum had been brought up in vicarages during the war time and so she'd been brought up in big buildings, rather wonderful buildings, cold big houses with histories because her dad was a vicar so she she's got this interest in architecture she's always been interested and she found this building which Miss Joy had been living in since the early 1900s and it was an acre of garden that had overwhelmed her and was literally pressing against all the windows and there was rat holes under every single door and vegetation got in through the windows and underneath the skirting boards and was wrapped around the furniture in the house.

4:14And mum fell in love with the building and the feeling of this house, which was rather wonderful. It was an arts and crafts building a builder had built, obviously because he was interested in the era. So it wasn't like a Lutian standard, but it had many of those beautiful details and aesthetics but built by builder. So it was still really interesting but very, very dilapidated. And mum and dad bought it. When mum took her mother to see it, her mother cried because it was so overwhelming. And as children, it was terrifying. My brother and I were terrified of it in a good way. You know, it was like, it was scary.

4:58It had corridors and darkness and vegetation, again, as I was saying, pressed up against the windows. And we spent the next, until I left home at 17, the next kind of, I suppose, what, seven or eight years clearing this garden to find this rather wonderful garden underneath the undergrowth. And mum and dad then spent all their spare time, they were both teaching, doing this house up by themselves. So that became a life project. So home there was very, very important. We didn't really go on family holidays because there's always an adventure of discovering something new in the garden. Like we discovered an orchard.

5:38We discovered an old greenhouse at the bottom. Everything on a small scale. It wasn't grand. We discovered a pond under the undergrowth. And there were amazing old trees which were all falling down. And it was a very, very wonderful and strong, potent atmosphere. and the building had, in Miss Joy's room, which was, she lived in two rooms. Downstairs, the kitchen was piled high with copies of the Sunday Times, literally almost touching the ceiling. She had these little corridors in the kitchen between such, such Miss Havisham's. There were swags of cobwebs from the corners of the room to the light fittings in the middle.

6:21the the the curtains had rotted up from the floor um there were dust sheets over all the furniture in the rooms that weren't being used she used two two rooms and um underneath each piece of furniture there was a perfect imprint of uh dust where the woodworm had been eating away at the furniture so it was kind of a wonderful place and um so we were brought up i moved into this house that had this incredibly strong identity and sense of place. And in clearing the garden, which had an equally strong identity and sense of place, I fell in love with this whole idea of the natural world, really. What happens to a place when it's taken over by nature and people are overwhelmed?

7:10It's been a constant kind of dialogue in my work of that teetering point between things being maintained and nature having the upper hand, you know, that naturalistic feeling that's so wonderful. And it's something I revisit all the time. And interestingly, I think because the home is so important to us as a family there and because I've always gardened, you know, I like to be rooted in one place or rooted in a place by being engaged with it and doing rather than somebody else doing it or not getting hands dirty. So you think that actually getting your hands in the soil connects you to that plot of land somehow?

7:56So much of what I think caring for a piece of land or a garden is about is the process. It's the process. It's not necessarily the end result. It's about being in the moment and in the process of making that place something or nurturing a place, making a place better for it being loved in some way or seen.

8:21So that's been key, I think, to the way that I've approached everything. Since moving there, it was an absolutely pivotal experience for my brother and me. He was younger than me and had different experiences as a result. But I think it really formed the way that I, that world seemed enormous. It was only an acre, but it seemed absolutely enormous. And we had camps inside overgrown hedges that nobody knew about, that were worlds in themselves. And it was a whole environment. That was the thing that I loved about it. It was an environment. And your parents gave you a plot, didn't they? I think I read.

8:59And in fact, I think I read that your dad would come and give you crits on what you'd planted. Yes, yeah, yeah. No. Well, because I was mad gardener, mad gardening, I was more than happy to be quite isolated as a child, I think. I did have friends, but I didn't need them in the same way that my brother did for company. And I took over this. We discovered two long borders that led down to an orchard that were completely enveloped in brambles. and I did the right hand border and dad did the left hand border um and we kind of met in the middle in the evenings and talked about the progress of both and my dad taught fine art my mom taught fashion and textile so we were in a environment Luke and I my brother and I where um process and making and you know talking about that process or engaging with it I think it was quite key and important so that crit that I would have from dad on a regular basis about color and form and texture and he was an amateur gardener the both mom and dad were quite good at amateur gardeners she grew the vegetables he grew the flowers he was really interested in color um I learned about how to look at things I think through those evening sessions of talking about the work that we've been doing during the day um and in a way i had the beginnings of a an art school training before i before i left home you know it was really i probably it was a very privileged thing to be part of to be to have caring parents who thought about how to get the best out of everything yeah because your your brother luke has a design studio doesn't he Pearson Lloyd yeah which I'm sure some people will know so that's kind of interesting you both ended up pursuing creative avenues and endeavors and things that are the product of a making process yeah right you know so it was it was definitely a making household you know mum was always at her sewing machine and dad was painting and it was we were very lucky you know I realize now we were very lucky to have and mum and dad had their both quite separate lives within the house doing their different things and we were all doing our own projects.

11:23Okay. So in a way, both Luke and I, we are both very project-driven people as well. You know, we love to have a project and get our teeth stuck into something. That's interesting. So that's instilled at that early age. For sure, yeah. If you think about that house, what's the emotion that you think of?

11:43A sanctuary, a place that the outside world doesn't need to exist. It's somewhere that's self-defining. Yeah. And somewhere that I loved. Why does it make you emotional talking about that out of interest? I think you're extremely lucky in this life if you're able to be in a stable environment when you're kids. And that provided that place. Yeah. Yeah, so important. There's this lovely quote that I read of you, Dan, which is that I felt like a freak because all my friends were ladies in their 60s and 70s. It's really lovely. But tell us about that. What does that mean? Well, my friends are still ladies in their 60s and 70s.

12:40You're catching up. I'm catching up. But then I did feel a bit unusual at school because gardening was the domain of older people mostly. And is it, I mean, just to dwell on that a sec, so you felt unusual at school. Did everyone just sort of think that you were a bit odd? Nobody didn't, nobody knew. Nobody knew about the gardening. So it was my secret. Okay. And I had this really great friend, Peter, who was from a very wayward family who lived, who came to live in the house opposite. And they were wayward in the best possible way. They were Australian and they'd come over to, it was 70s, mid 70s, and they'd come over to be part of a fellowship, a commune in the local village.

13:21So it was slight hippie, really, I guess. And there were four kids and they had never worn shoes before. So they came from Australia and they spent the first winter because their feet were so wide because they'd never worn shoes in plimsolls, these rotting plimsolls, remember really distinctly. But there was a real freedom to those kids that we didn't have at school in our English ways. And I just, I loved hanging out with them. And we had some wild times, you know, in the woods and climbing trees and doing things that we shouldn't have done that our parents wouldn't have allowed us to do, you know.

14:00And that was great. So it's not like I didn't have friends that were my age. But the kids at school, I suppose a lot of them were farming community kids or it was the beginning of commuter belt because it was Hampshire. I just never really felt like I fitted in with the majority of the people at school. And I felt more comfortable, I think, with my Australian friends who were outside the loop anyway. Okay. Or with my older gardening friends. So I had two older women who were, yes, in the 60s and 70s, one of whom had a very, very good garden in the village that I went to garden for on Saturdays, Mrs.

14:46Pumphrey. This is Mrs. Pumphrey at Greatham Mill Gardens? Yes, Greta Mill. Greta Mill. And then Geraldine Noyes, who was our immediate neighbour, who was a retired history teacher from St. Paul's School of Girls in London, and she was in a wonderful spirit. She'd fire-watched on St. Paul's in the war. You know, she was a fearless person. And she used to go off every summer in her Morris Minor with her friend Enid, and they would collect plants from the Pyrenees and mountains in Europe, you know, and bring them back and bring these plants to life for me. So she'd unwrap these plants. I'd meet her when she came back, so I'd look after her garden while she was gone, do her watering and things.

15:31And she'd unwrap these things from foreign newspapers, you know, from the back of her boot of her car and tell me where these things were growing what they'd been growing with and what the environment was like they'd grown in and it was all about nature connection and then her garden was completely wild and woolly and she was just as much of a naturalist as she was a gardener so um i had that kind of wild thing reinforced in a different way uh so there was the hill cottage wild environment that we were living in and she was our nearby neighbor who let me go into her garden whenever i wanted it was completely open access and she made this connection really between the things that shared the garden with you and and the plants so there was the whole nature part of it was really a big part of it and then mrs p down in the village um was just a really brilliant gardener and a great colorist and a fantastic plants person and she had a little nursery so she taught me how to grow plants that she then sold um from the nursery and so i really got a very balanced horticultural training in a way from those two women.

16:39And then mum and dad, of course, who were interested in the garden, but gardening wasn't their first thing. How do you explain why you were so obsessed with it at such a young age? I think I just understood that there was an alchemy in the process. And if you allowed yourself to be part of the alchemy, it was um well for a start it's kind of magic um but it's not magic because it's about inputs and it's about caring for something and nurturing something so once you get once you understand that it's about the nurturing it's about the day-to-day observation it's about noticing why something might be doing well or not and then adjusting it your behavior around that um to make it do better So I think that became a very key thing for me in terms of there was a reciprocity in it, which is contagious, actually.

17:43So very early on, it just became something I wanted to do more of. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So I gather that you dropped out of doing your A-levels and thought, I just want to go and do gardening, right? I kind of fell out of love with school quite early on. you're not alone in that tell us about that why is that well I was I was quite I was quite good at certain subjects I was good at the arts um I was good at English I had a really really wonderful English teacher another woman uh in her 60s called Mrs Wiggins Joan Wiggins who opened up this connection for me between writing and gardening so she could see that I was very myopic and I wasn't studying and I was just gardening and she she showed me the work of Christopher Lloyd and various people who were writing well about gardens and it just opened up a whole world for me in terms of pinning down thoughts through words and I started to really love English and then we moved schools when I was 13 and left Mrs Wiggins behind I just got lost in a big school and I learned quite quickly that I could just slip through the cracks.

19:00So I did the subjects that I loved and was good at. And then I simply stopped going to the ones that I wasn't. And somehow I didn't get pulled up for not going to maths. You just wouldn't attend? I just stopped attending because I was doing very well at geography at one point. And I remember my maths teacher because I was so bad at maths because I got the fear of maths. Some of the summer I missed a building block and I just got the fear and then I stopped concentrating and then I was out of the loop I was behind everybody else and I couldn't catch up because I had the fear and I remember my master teacher saying to me did you do that work for your course study for your O level or your pre whatever it was exams and I remember thinking you shouldn't be saying this to me you know because of course I did that work and you obviously just had written me off completely and I remember thinking I'm not coming to the class again so I didn't and so I never got my O levels and maths and I kind of got through and I've managed as an adult it's not been a major problem but it was nice to feel that you could slip through the cracks without having to be a major rebel so there were friends of mine at school who were rebellious and getting into trouble and I didn't get into trouble I just slipped through the cracks you know so it was quite interesting learning that quite early on and I think that's maybe allowed me to approach my work in a slightly different way as an adult in a slightly more maverick way maybe what do you mean by that there was this like um epiphany moment where I was preparing to go to art college because that was a strength and I was good at it and um mum said to me because I was so obsessed by the gardening why don't you follow your heart and we find the best way of you doing horticulture and at that point horticulture in the early 80s late 70s very early 80s it was then um you didn't really go into horticulture you could go and study sciences or the more scientific side are ecology or landscape architecture but it was there was a big divorce between those subjects and horticulture and horticulture was mostly for people who weren't very good at school who could learn a trade but I didn't see that there was anything wrong in that and as soon as she said why don't we see the best way find the best way of you doing something that you love why don't you follow your heart you always come back to the art you know which was such a good piece of advice so I put a portfolio together because mum and dad help students put portfolios together I took it to Wisley and they said did you do this because they hadn't ever seen anybody at the interview take a portfolio or that's what they told me just to explain to people what what is wisley to those who don't sorry wisley is uh wisley is a the royal horticulture society's um kind of flagship garden uh in surrey and at that point they had an apprenticeship for students between 17 and 19 which is why i needed to leave school before my a-levels um to study horticulture and it was basically you worked in the garden you did course studies on a wednesday and then you you did studies in the evening to supplement the work that you did in the garden so for them it was like um youth for labor in the garden they gave you some teaching and in turn it was like a proper apprenticeship and i was like this major sponge i just went there and just absolutely loved the learning and the gardening and being taught by people who spent lifetimes learning about specific aspects of horticulture and for me I was really ready to leave school you know um I just I just didn't want to be there I didn't want to be in that confined environment it wasn't the right place for me at that time and and Wisley ended up being a great stepping stone to move on to other things but just in terms of the maverick thing I I when I finished Wisley I looked into doing landscape architecture and I could have done that but it felt very dry because at that point there was less of a crossover into the world of the arts.

23:14So it was very much more about architecture outside. And I knew that I wanted to include the plants and I knew I wanted to make places with plants. I didn't want to just garden plants. I wanted to make places with plants. So I then went, I thought, okay, well, I'll study more and I'll find more about plants so I can basically work anywhere I want to with plants because I'd become interested in travel by that point and seeing plants in the wild, which was that connection back to Miss Noise, Geraldine Noise, going out to look at plants in the wild. So I then got a place, I spent a year at Edinburgh Botanics and I met a whole load of people, wonderful people who became my first gardening friends really.

23:59We went out to look at plants in the wild on the West Coast and wild west coast gardens. And then we got a small scholarship to visit the mountains in northern Spain, and everything opened up for me then. And I came back down to Kew for three years, did a course there, which was like a degree course, really, in horticulture. And meanwhile, I'd already started making a garden for a friend of mum's Sunday she worked with. And so I'd sort of started the process of garden making and applying horticulture to making places with plants. So I didn't study landscape architecture. I found a way into making landscapes.

24:43And through work now we employ, I've got a wonderful team of people, most of whom are landscape architects. So they've got the skills I haven't. I've got stronger skills in horticulture that I might not have through just studying the landscape architecture. and we're making plant-led environments. Yeah. And working with some really interesting people. So there's crossover into the art world, there's crossover into the interesting architectural world, institutions that are doing interesting things and you suddenly find yourself in this place that you'd never dreamed of being at when you were gardening at Wisley as a teenager.

25:23Well, it is phenomenal, isn't it? I mean, I can name drop on your behalf, but people like Paul Smith and Johnny Ive and Juergen Teller and all these people that you've made gardens with and for, it's just an extraordinary group of other creatives. How do you put your finger on why other creatives are drawn to your work? I think that's an interesting question. The first person I started working for to make a garden for, at age 17 when I was at Wisley, 18 I was, was a wonderful woman called Frances Mossman, who's now become a really great friend. And she was teaching, she'd set up Next in the early 80s, and so she was working in the commercial side of fashion.

26:08But she has always had interesting connections to other people in the more creative side of our commercial world of fashion. And she was friends with a woman called Priscilla Coluccio, whose husband is a man called Antonio Coluccio. She was Terence Comrade's sister. I made a garden for her. So when I started working with Frances, she said, there's somebody else I think you should work for. So when I left Q, I set up my own business, basically working out the back of a yellow van and by myself. And I went to make a garden for Priscilla Coluccio, who was, she was the main buyer for the Comrade shop at that point and being terence's sister you know they were creative family so she taught me how to look at things in every particular way in terms of everything being connected and uh how to look at the essence of things um and she embedded that process of so making the garden for her was an enormous education making the garden from francis was an education because she was a textile person So we'd crit the garden, looking at the plants with form, texture, colour, all those things that you'd, if you were talking about a textile, you'd go through the same, like, what's the weave, what's the feel, what's, you know, all those same languages come into how we were looking at the way the garden was being made.

27:37so I had the art school training I never got um through working with these talented people again often often women um then I ended up working with Terence on a big book Terence and then you suddenly find yourself in a different world um and then I was picked up because I was of a certain age in my late 20s and up and out there and doing things with quite an interesting crowd of people i got picked up by tv and and then i think you then become very visible very quickly all too quickly um and i think that's how people start to see what you're made of yeah so i think initially those it was by word of mouth through a very interesting little tribe of people and then the tv people picked up on that and then you're suddenly out there in tv and then what you find is that you lose complete control of it and then you have to make your life smaller again so during the time that i was doing tv i i worked on the first makeover programs i i loved it because it wasn't solitary it was working with a very interesting production company um and we were making something quite fast so you could turn ideas over really quickly but tv is a hungry beast and they don't look at you as an individual they look at you as a product um so i just got sapped of all my um creative energies you know it's like a hungry hungry thing and they want more and they want more and they want more and you're projected into a world which isn't really anything about you as a person so the dan that was out there on tv is not the dan that i feel i am and there was this big displacement thing that happened um that ended up with me getting completely overloaded and having a crisis at age 32 and thinking okay i can't do any of that i've got to go back to concentrating on what i i want to do so i i made a big stop a big full stop and then put my energy back into my safe world, which is the garden and making gardens and environments.

29:53So going back into that world of being on the ground with your feet rooted again, rather than out there with no control. So that's been quite an interesting part of it. But I think that now we're working with people that come to me for a particular thing that I'm doing. And I think I was very lucky quite early on to be able to communicate what that was and to establish a kind of feeling around what I do, which is that the work is about an opportunity to get under the skin of things and make a place that might be more about a feeling than an intellectual idea, but it does something to you because it's taking you somewhere.

30:34And there is an intellectual idea in there, but it's not necessarily the thing that you're wearing on the sleeve. It's more about the feeling of something being right in its place. And there's a quietness about that which demands that you need to be in a quiet place to be able to do it properly. Is there such a thing as a Dan Pearson style of garden? If you could put your finger on it, what would you call it? I think there's a language. There's definitely a language which is adaptable as language is. To be something that is more animated or quieter or sometimes more visible, sometimes less visible.

31:12but there's always a people often say when they come into the places they've been taken somewhere and i think that ability to recalibrate people and take them somewhere that feels people also use it's not a term i use freely because it it can sound wrong but there's a spiritual quality to the places because you're being rooted in something that's often quite subliminal um something you don't quite understand but is essential and sensual and important in some way you might not understand it but it makes you feel better it's quite simple in some ways um and you can't quite put your finger on it so in a way it's more about a feeling um and there's a softness about the aesthetic which i think you could say this is what the gardens look like they might have frayed edges they're not hard they're soft um they're informal they're not formal um they're mutable they're something that can change according to the light you know they're they're quiet places really that allow other things to happen you use the word spiritual there just spending a bit of time with you this morning you you come across as someone that's i don't know if that's the right word you'd apply for yourself but sensitive maybe is a word do you just come out that way do you see what i mean or or has as you go through life working with the landscape does it make you more sensitive to it i mean i'm kind of interested in whether someone who's as immersed in landscape as you are is born or they're they're sort of made i think you're i think you're i think i always did feel i mean we all feel different to some degree don't we i'm sure all of us could say but i felt different at some point um i don't think everyone does actually but go on tell me why you felt different um i just felt like i think that quote you i'd be feeling like a freak i i think maybe the word's too strong i used it um but just feeling like you don't you don't fit in i think is is possibly because you're observing things you're affected by things um yes exactly i felt like i was affected by things deeply um and i think the world that i made for myself was a safe place that that allowed things to be more in a way there was an unknown element about the natural world um that there wasn't with people people are more scary somehow and the natural world was something that if you understood it became more known you know it wasn't as um volatile um i think people can be complicated and volatile and wonderful because of that but it's when you're forced into environment i.e school at an early early point it's volatile you've got no control over your a gang you know in school who for whatever reason might pick on another gang or a group or one person um and because people didn't understand me you know I did get picked on and it wasn't I dealt with it because I'm also quite enterprising and I slipped through the cracks you know I found a way of dealing with it that meant I didn't get horribly bullied or anything um for being different but I ended up hanging out with the people that were different at school and you know and we kind of at the end of the day you ended up being you're hanging out with the cool kids actually or a group of who you now realize were, you didn't know it then.

34:56That's so interesting to me. When I spoke to Nigel Slater on the podcast, he talked about his sensitivity to certain environments, which I must admit I really identified with. But he talked about sometimes he gets a feeling of falling. He talks about how he finds staircases and things like that quite difficult to deal with, especially as he moves into later life. I just wondered if for you, your sensitivity, does it manifest itself anywhere in the built environment in particular that you can put your finger on? Are there certain spaces that you feel are quite difficult in everyday life? Oh, I've just come back from Paris.

35:37And I've been going to Paris for many years because I went to Paris with mum with her students at the Pret-a-Porter during my teenage years. And she just let me roam in Paris on my own. and I remember this feeling of exhaustion, and I've just literally yesterday come back, feeling that same sense of exhaustion, because the city planning there is so enormous, inhumanly enormous, and it was designed to be like that, because it was the big gesture. It's opulence and views that go for miles in one straight line, and it's exhausting to be made to feel small by a man-made thing that's what what I've loved about Japan so much is that you're often encouraged to be in those intimate places and the small is beautiful it can be beautiful it's not always about the big gesture which man feels they need to make so I think in a way those places that are they can be wonderful like New York Manhattan you You know, those enormously tall buildings and hard landscape, you know, it can be incredibly exciting and wonderful.

36:45But I always gravitate to, if I'm in New York, I always gravitate to the Lower East Side where the buildings are smaller and the streets are not straight. You know, you're not on a grid anymore. And there's an informality to those spaces. And it's about that human grain breaking down and feeling more like it's been naturally colonized than there being an organized system. So I can see how interesting that Parisian landscape is, but it makes me feel tired. And I feel much more naturally drawn to things which have evolved organically over a time or a conversation which is not linear, it's divergent.

37:27and I think those are the ways that make me feel more comfortable and the ways that are about us dominating landscape are less comfortable. Yes, I'm thinking about the savannah hypothesis here when you're talking about, of course, if we were raised on the savannah, it's clear that we must be drawn to that kind of combination of legibility and mystery, I think. And if we think about the landscape you've got behind me here, it's exactly that in that you can you know we're perched quite high yeah so you have a vantage point but also the way the hills interlock mean that there's also mystery because you don't quite know what's around the corner exactly and actually in manhattan or paris it's sort of the definition of a breakdown somehow because it's just all so grid like right and that's kind of what you're describing i think and i think here it was interesting isn't it because it's um it's that whole idea of prospect and refuge yeah so they think that early settlers you know they often did find somewhere that was on a hill with some water below um and some tree cover near that you know for the animals and to come down to the water so they could see literally what their hunting grounds were um and they'd have the hill behind them so they you know were safe and interestingly this place here is exactly that you know we literally built into the hill so the house is built into the hill at the back and then we've got this 180 degree view at the front where we can see everything and it makes me feel incredibly comfortable also because it's not too big so we can imagine walking to the hill and I do um opposite you know but as you exactly as you say but you don't know quite what's around the corner so there is mystery and magic here but there's also prospect and that's one of the great things and I think we can the house becomes as part of the safe place that's a counterpoint to that prospect and the big skies and the big view.

39:24So for me, that's kind of wonderful. I was brought up in a woodland, you know, and we always used to, Dad used to take us cycling because it was lovely landscape. And so we'd go cycling in the evenings and we were very close to the South Downs and that feeling of coming out of the woods and then the South Downs were there and all their nakedness, you know, with all their soft, billowy outlines and that was always a really wonderful part of popping out of the woods and there they were, you know, this big landscape where I could travel. So that combination of the two things I think has always been interesting to me.

39:56So lovely. So let's move on to talking about this house then. Just tell me, I mean, you kindly walked me around earlier and that tour we'll make available on Patreon, but for those that are just listening to this, how long have you been here and what was here when you got here? We've been here now for 15 years. It's amazing how fast time flies. And we were 12 years before in Peckham. And I was drawn to this place really because at the point which we arrived, it was just a little stone house on the hill, two up, two down, without buildings, two barns, small barn that we've now converted into a living space and then a big barn which is for the use for the land.