What Remains
Winter has a way of revealing things.
The garden empties. The trees stand bare. The dahlias collapse back into the earth. The long evenings disappear almost overnight. What remains becomes easier to see.
A favourite chair beside the fire. A stack of books waiting patiently. The ritual of lighting a candle before the day begins. A beloved dog asleep in a patch of winter sunlight – the essentials.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. When we are younger, life often feels like a process of gathering – experiences, possessions, achievements, plans for the future. We build careers, homes and identities, convinced that a good life lies just beyond the next milestone.
The older I get, the more carefully I choose what I carry forward. A good life, I am learning, is often built from ordinary things. A walk through the garden before breakfast. Fresh flowers on the kitchen table. A well-worn sketchbook. The scent of woodsmoke drifting through the village on a frosty morning. Familiar objects made with care. The rituals and routines we return to again and again.
This winter marks nine years of Southern Wild Co. It also happens to be the year I turn sixty.
Nine years since those first market stalls, first candles and first hopeful steps into something I could never have imagined would become such an important part of my life.
At the time, I thought I was building a business. Looking back, I can see I was building something else too: a creative life, a community and a way of paying attention.
Over the years there have been workshops in timeworn shearing sheds, long lunches beneath old trees, collaborations with artists and makers I admire, and conversations with people who discovered us through scent and stayed for the stories. There has been joy and there has been loss. Seasons where everything felt possible and others where the path ahead disappeared from view entirely.
What surprises me most is not that the business still exists, but the community that has grown around it. People who have followed along through different homes, different seasons and some very significant chapters of life. Friendships that began through a shared appreciation of scent, art or the Australian landscape and became something more enduring.
Sixty feels less like an arrival than another season. Another marker in the landscape. I still find myself curious about what comes next. There are places I want to see, gardens I want to wander through, paintings I want to stand in front of and ideas waiting patiently in sketchbooks.
In a few weeks, I will pack a suitcase and head overseas for a long-awaited trip to Rome, Hydra and back to my old stomping ground in London. Some parts of the journey have been years in the making. Others have grown from a long-standing curiosity about the places that have shaped artists, writers and creative lives.
More than anything, I am looking forward to slowing down enough to notice. To wandering unfamiliar streets, visiting gardens and galleries and filling the well after a busy few years.
Before I leave though, I find myself feeling grateful. Grateful for this place and my community in Rockley. For Matt's legacy and the creative life it has made possible. For the people who continue to support this small business from their own corners of the world.
Most of all, grateful for the reminder that the things that matter most are rarely the grandest. They are often the quietest.
The people we love. The work that still feels meaningful. The places that feel like home. The rituals that anchor us.
The things that remain.
Thank you, as always, for being here.
Tania x
