Living a More Seasonal Life

I’ve talked about the environmental cost of imported flowers before - how a bouquet of imported roses can have up to ten times the carbon footprint of locally grown seasonal flowers. 

But quite apart from the environmental cost, growing seasonal flowers has taught me so much about how to live more in tune with nature.

Always “connected”

In this modern world we are expected to be “on” and connected (to each other/the web/the world) pretty much 24/7 365 days a year.
We end up with apps to help us sleep at the end of the day, caffeine to help wake us up in the morning and a lot of us feel really sad when the nights draw in and the days get shorter. But we were never meant to live like that.

I look at my flower farm and it’s now so obvious to me where we’ve all gone wrong and how easy it is to follow nature’s guidance and live more seasonally.

Carisbrooke Flower Farm in Summer

What the seasons can teach us

Spring is the time when we start to see life emerging again. We might even still be sowing our seeds for things we want to grow later in the year. Now is not the time for “go, go, go”, now is the time to be building our lives for the year ahead.

Summer is when everything is in full bloom. This is our time to shine! This is the season of doing, of energy, of fullness. This is where all your plans from the rest of the year all come to fruition. Summer is a beautiful, colourful season.

Autumn is where we let go of things. As the leaves drop from the trees and the last of the petals fall from the flowers, this is where we physically and emotionally let go of all the things that don’t serve us anymore. Holding onto things we don’t need just causes the space to be blocked - and who knows what will fill that space come Spring if we let go of it now?

Winter is the season of rest. Sadly not a full hibernation though, just a wintering. Underneath the soil life is starting to form again ready for Spring. Winter is the time for us to start thinking about plans and setting goals, not doing them. With intentions set they will grow properly come Spring again. Winter is the time to slow down and notice how far you’ve come and where you’re now headed.

Carisbrooke Flower Farm at Sunset

I’m definitely heading to a more seasonal way of life, last winter I embraced the wintering and really felt the benefit of properly slowing down and going inward.
We can learn so much from nature that we’ve forgotten as we live our modern lives.