travel towards a common paradise

We travel in spring not least because age has lent greater understanding of Lao Tzu’s message “to be worn out is to be renewed.” Returning to Stockholm and Copenhagen afforded us great art and food, while time spent with our family in London, Sussex, and Gloucestershire was filled to the brim with ambling walks and resonating talks through fields, meadows, and forests filled with wildflowers and animal life, alive with all manner of sentinent being.

This brief but highly recommendable list is to give thanks, and point vigorously towards the gardeners, writers, artists, chefs, farmers, hoteliers that gave us so much pleasure the past three weeks. We travel to renew friendships and make new ones, but really, we travel for beauty, in all its forms. It’s a huge gift to be alive. Travel is a magical handshake with the world just outside your door wherever you are, every minute of every day. The name of our two favorite art exhibits, The Time is Always Now, and Trust Memory over History, really says it all.

Wherever your plans to travel this season, Carpe Diem.

Tokyorsbar (Prunus x yedoensis) in bloom alongside Lake Brunnsviken, Stockholm. The Bergius Botanic gardens consists of large systematic sections, a wetland, an orchard, trees and shrubs from all over the world. It also holds Victoria House and the Edvard Anderson Conservatory.

Firelei Baëz’s Trust Time over Memory exhibit at the Louisiana Museum. Maps and fragments of book pages emerge from beneath sumptuous lavers of paint “reminiscent of persistent ghosts of the past, haunting the present moment.”

Stages in the life of a Liu Chao Yu Ye, Nelumbo Nucifera, white lotus variety, Edvard Anderson Conservatory, Bergianska Trädgarden (Bergius Botanic Garden), Stockholm.

Firelei Báez, ‘How to Slip Out Of Your Body Quietly’; Trust Memory Over History, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

The standout art for us in London: The Time is Always Now, Artists Reframe the Black Figure, at the National Portrait Gallery, curated by Ekow Eshun, brilliantly showcasing the work of artists from the African diaspora.

In Copenhagen, three stunning exhibits are running alongside the permanent collection at the Louisiana Art Museum, a 30 minute drive from the city along the waterfront. This was art acutely attuned to this moment in history. We were able to spend the day at The Louisiana Museum, wandering from room to room, across the sculpture lawns, lunching beneath enormous Calder mobiles. I’ve long been a fan of @louisanamuseum. Exhibits included an extensive and stunning Chaïm Soutine exhibit of his magnificent portraits, and rooms filled with the mixed media art of Roni Horn spoke to the power of self reverential influences that now invade our waking and sleeping lives. Most thrilling was the premier European exhibition of Firelei Báez, an Dominican-American artist who overlays explosive color and figurative form on colonial maps which speak truth to power: “Confronting historical concepts we have for too long taken for granted.“

Amy Sherald portraits, and far right, Nathanial Mary Quinn, all at The Time is Always Now, National Portrait Gallery, London

Roni Horn, In Dialogue with the Film, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Roni Horn, The Detour of Identity, Poured Glass, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Chaim Soutine, The Groom, or The Bellboy, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Detail, Untitled (Drexciya) 2020, Firelei Báez

Writer Olivia Laing’s new book ‘The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise’ chronicles her response to the pandemic through the restoration of a walled garden in Suffolk which she wisely considers alongside an investigation of real and imagined paradises- a sub-text I find particularly relevant right now. Her talk with Internationally recognized garden designers ( and Daniel Carlson friends, lucky chap) Dan Pearson and Jonny Bruce was the initial reason for our visit to The Charleston Festival, a summer-long celebration of talks and workshops on all things gardening- historic, visionary and possible.

Opened this year by Queen Camilla, long a patron of The Charleston Trust (Bloomsbury in Sussex), it is held on the grounds of the home and gardens of that indefigable Bloomsbury couple Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. A guided tour of their house reveals every corner of the lives they supposedly once lived there, and shared intimately with their Bloomsbury Brethren - Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and as I learned on the tour, John Maynard Keynes, apparently looking out a second floor window to the pond when he conceived ‘Keynesian’ economic theory. That depressing tidit aside, you can’t help but love these guys, obsessed as they were with philosophical questions, literature in transition between the wars, and the coming impact of modern art. The rooms feel haunted, as well as curiously small for a couple with so many friends with such varied appetites. Virtually every surface is inlaid or overpainted, rooms are chock full with books and canvases. From 1907-1930 they talked, drank, painted, coupled, decoupled, and lived a life of the mind no longer imaginable.

The talk we’d come for, “An Ordinary Paradise,’ was guided by Jonny Bruce, followed by a short but pointed Q & A. I have not yet read The Garden Against Time, but Laing more than held her own with these two rising stars of the international gardening and landscape world. Both of their remarkable careers to date have been at the heart of an ongoing re-consideration of Gertrude Jekyll’s Magiot line between the formal and wild. It’s exciting to watch a fuller understanding of the possibilities that Fergus Garrett has been espousing for decades at Great Dixter, where both Jonny and Daniel Carlson, the guiding light of our journey here at barndiva farm, have spent formative years.

For information on Festival of the Garden which will take place 18-21 of July, go to Charleston.org.uk. Dan (@daniel.carlson.co) and Suzanna Grant are teaching a workshop Friday July 19th “Gardening for Beginners.”

Follow in real time the life of an ‘ordinary’ paradise, Dan Pearson’s farm in Devon, @digdelve; for his many impressive ongoing installations, which include recreating Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvillle-Wests never completed Delos at Sissinghurst, @coyotewillow.

To keep up with Jonny Bruce, a remarkable writer and brilliant plant consultant we hope to see in Northern California again soon, (among his many exciting projects, he continues his guardianship of Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage) @j.bruce.garden.

Preceeding our time at Charleston, Dan and I enjoyed a ramble through the private walled garden at Knepp Estate - the 3,500 acre re-wilding / love child / groundbreaking life project of Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, which they embarked upon in the mid-1990’s. Its various parts are known as Knepp Wilding Estate, Knepp Castle, Knepp Safari (which makes sense given the size of the project, which controversially re- introduced rare breeds back into the land - you would need to go on safari to see it all).

Here’s the thing about re-wilding: even If your interest in gardening begins and ends with a consideration of no longer mowing your lawn, how we relate to all that’s alive and buzzing in nature - i.e. do we kill it in order to seemingly control it - is an essential conversation to be having right now. The Knepp garden restaurant under the direction of Chef Ned Burrell does wonderful things with the regenerative farm’s animals and produce. Wild range meats we bought at Knepp’s shop adjacent to the restaurant, which we cooked through and devoured at our VBRO house in Firle, was exquisite.

Given Englands historic and ongoing obsession with all things gardening, re-wilding is unsurprisingly a galvazing subject right now. Trying to envision any worldly paradise is no ordinary task, but considerations of Dante aside if we mere mortals are to seek it in this lifetime I am on team Olivia in believing it will be found - can only be found- in the ordinary.

@kneppwilding, @kneppwildingkitchen, @kneppregenfarms, @ned_burrell96, and of course @daniel.james.co for his passion, inspiration, and guidance.

All Images in Eat the View copywrite Jil Hales. Above, off the lanes near Lukka and Dan’s cottage near Tetbury, Gloucestershire; below, fields and gardens near our VRBO house in Firle, near Lewes, East Sussex. Thank you for sharing Anna - your gardens are lovely.

One of our favorite hotels in the world is Ett Hem, which means ‘at home in Swedish.’ All we can say to that is ‘as if.’ Ett Hem defines a quality of hospitality that extends to every piece of an experience you can have here through its art, design, stunning lighting, and ever present in the most delightful and delicious ways, food and drink. Ilse Crawford was the original inspiration for the design ethic back when the hotel was one building, but it is owner, Jeanette Mix, is the force of nature who ensures every vase is full, every candle lit, in room after room and gardens that overflow with moments of delight. The hotel is now two co-joined buildings with original windows and exteriors that date back to 1910. Situated in an elegant residential neighborhood, the truly impressive cross trained staff are unfailingly engaging, informative, and honestly dedicated to the mission. The tasting menu at Ett Hem proved to be our best meal in Stockholm, served in the heart of the open kitchen. @etthemstockholm

In Copenhagen the best dining was found at the Flo Campbell and Michelin Recommended Restaurant Frank, @restaurantfrankcp; @michelinguide; the most memorable at Marv & Ben celebrating life, love, and the joys of travel with new friends Robert and Sam.

We are still huge fans of Sessions Art Club in London, @sessionsartclub.

Hand carved ash vase by the artist, framer, and cabinet maker Emanuele Maria Marchi, a gift to Barndiva from the artist. He can be reached for commissions @ema.marchi

Arne Jacobsen’s Petrol Station, designed in 1938 for Texaco, as a new standard model. Now a class A historic monument, it was never put into production. Skovshoved at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen, Denmark

The Best of 2023, Celebrated!

No skirting it, 2023 was a challenging year. It seemed like every time we looked up from from the gardens in Philo or out the windows to a seemingly flourishing Healdsburg, the news of the day brought us up short with yet another human or planetary catastrophe. A reminder, as if we needed one, of how truly fragile life is everywhere. How fortunate we are to live and work how and where we do.

This last post of the year celebrates some of the best moments of 2023 for us, giving props to the people and places who made our year appreciably better, the world we share glow a bit brighter.

Our New Years Resolution: To focus even more on joyful moments like the ones captured here. To build collaborative bridges where and how they are needed.

Thank you for dining with us, throwing a party, planning a wedding, gathering a group of friends for a dinner party, showing up at one of our annual wine events - we so appreciate you! We look forward to showing you how much in 2024!

Diptych: Spring & Winter. Photo: Chad Surmick

Photographing Barndiva in all its many beautiful facets is something I love doing, and rarely entrust with another photographer, which made collaborating with the intuitive and extremely talented Chad Surmick this year an unmitigated joy. Together we captured Barndiva’s life in food, cocktails, wine parties, and studio b dinner parties. The most enjoyable work was a series we conceived for our website landing page - four color-resplendent still-life images of the raw ingredients that informed Eric’s brilliant menus. Our hope was that they brought the food conversation about seasonality home for everyone who visited our website. They were also very much an homage to the farm, to Misha and Renee, who joined us this year in Philo, and to the many many other farmers and fisherman, foragers and gardeners who work with us in the creation of our food and cocktail menus: we are grateful to them all.

Chad and I also had the honor to photograph the men and women whose labors transformed those raw ingredients for a B&W portrait series celebrating our 2023 Michelin star.

Barndiva’s Beverage Director Scott Beattie, Bar Manager Charles Rodenkirch and their team rocked the cocktail program this year with creations that lifted our spirits and then some. These were inventive, intriguing, satisfying and absolutely gorgeous cocktails. The bar team also maintained a weekly floral and herbal ‘garden’ for the bar (shout out to Buck), most of it from our farm, that took guests breath away (and invariably cellphones out). Through Scott’s long and legendary career he has had an indefatigable interest in everything growing around him - always with an eye toward how it might end up in a cocktail.

Our cocktail classes were also a highlight of the year, and we embraced gorgeous NA cocktails like never before. A stellar year in drink, with exciting plans for next year.

To learn more about the classes, read the wonderful article written about them in Edible Marine Magazine. Scott can be reached directly scott.beattie@barndiva.com,

We re-launched Studio B events this year with a community series called “Conversations Worth Having” hosted with three of the most formidable women - Dawnelise Rosen, Amber Keneally and Susan Preston. CWH has been a lifeline for us, and we were deeply gratified for others as well, judging by the success of Conversation #1, Gorgeous Garbage. The idea for the series flows from a long held desire to share what we’re reading, listening to, and thinking as we try to live more lightly on the ground in our lives and various businesses. We hope to introduce some of the fascinating people we are meeting on this journey, explore issues that affect us here in Healdsburg, across Sonoma County, and beyond. (No surprise, they are interconnected.)

By opening these conversations to a community we love, gift -wrapped in art, incredible speakers and - this being Barndiva - kick-ass cocktails and wines, we hope to make manifest the changes we long to see in the world. Our only ground rules for the series is that they be fun, and that there is no place for judgment as we explore some pretty complex subjects. Do we believe change starts with small and well considered actions? Yes, we really do.

Next up: Trash Talk, just scheduled for February 16th. We’ve got some incredible speakers coming to town for a panel led by the eco fabulous Zem Joquin, founder of The Near Future Summit, which Dawnelise and I were thrilled to attend this year. To hear about CWH first, Follow us @barndiva.com, or sign up to receive barndiva.com/blog. We will not share your information with anyone.

Above: Conversations Worth Having, A paint and distressed paper canvas by Susan Preston; Photo: Chad Surmick

At the end of the day, everything we do comes down to fostering a genuine feeling of joy in people, and nothing we do comes even close to producing more of it than our weddings and wedding rehearsal dinners. The connections you feel from seeing generations of family and friends gather is electric. Weddings always generate the best moments of our year - they keep us alive in more than ways than one. For that we give thanks to all our wedding couples and their families, who chose Barndiva this year.

Looking forward to 2024, we are so pleased to welcome Susan Bischoff to lead our wedding team - she is already busy with tours and fielding inquiries from across the country. As we say adieu to 2023, a truly grateful thank you, with big love, to our wonderful Natalie Nelson, who after ten years at the helm of Barndiva Weddings has started an exciting new life with her growing family in Utah.

barndiva.com/events

Flowers have always been central to our lives, no surprise they are integral with our farm program, our weddings, and front and center in every dining experience we create. We are hopeful that the increasing world wide support we’re seeing for regenerative farming for food production will also inspire a similar approach when it comes to growing flowers. Because of our many weddings and private events we are able to recommend flower farms and floral designers who source this way - but it’s up to all of us to ask our favorite markets and flowers shops to support slow flower farming! The only critique we hear is “they don’t last as long,” and the most honest response is ‘ask yourself why.’

These are some of our favorites farmers and floral designers we follow near (to source) and far (for inspiration!) : @dragonflyfloral; @apple_farm_flowers; @longertablefarm; @singlethreadfarmstore; @frontporchfarm; @filigreenfarm; also: @daniel.james.co ( Daniel Carlson still directs the orchard & floral programs at our farm in Philo, now alongside the prodigiously talented Misha Vega); @nicamille; @cultivatingplace; @digdelve;@pithandvigor; @jimiblake_huntingbrookgardens; @clairetakacs

What does it take to be part of a ‘real’ restaurant food community? Michelin is clearly the most vaunted, then there’s James Beard and Slow Food, all of which seek to honor talent, innovation, hard work and tradition. But we are all businesses, from Michelin to the local diner. When we lose restaurants that nurtured talent and supported an ethical approach to food sourcing and labor, their absence is sorely felt. We will especially miss dining at Matt Orlando’s Amass in Copenhagen and The Ethicurean in Barley Wood. Both were truly inspirational in the dining experiences they presented.

We did dine in some remarkable restaurants this year, and want to give a special shout out to two that reminded us why we got into this business in the first place. Sessions Art Club in the Clerkenwell section of London (thank you Linda & Nick) is magical, from the moment you find the semi-secret door and they buzz you in, take a wonky elevator and arrive to a curiously elegant great room where history has it Charles Dickens once dined as a law clerk. The cocktails are unfussy, brilliantly balanced, perfectly served (very cold), the food a delight. The staff both nights we dined were absolutely brilliant - a gleam in the eye of jollity primed with the smooth joy of being part of something very special. We can’t wait to return.

The second memorable experience was at a ‘new’ french bistro on the quieter end of Main Street in Venice, Ca, an area I know well as I raised my first two children up the street in Ocean Park. Full Disclosure: one of those children is a co-owner of Cou Cou, Formerly Chez Tex. Jesse and Hayley Feldman started out with no experience in restaurants, though both are world class diners and share a passion for how design affects our ability to open ourselves to a shared experience. There is no gas on property, all food is cooked by wood fire, and the addition of a cocktail license has brought classy cocktails to their bright, locally sourced seasonal menus. Cou Cou perfectly captures the nostalgia and comfort of a French bistro - the kind where you want to order everything on the menu. Those menus will grow exponentially in the next few months when Hayley and Jesse open a second CouCou in WeHo.

Pay them a visit in the New Year, and order a “Bitches of the Seizeme, a Barndiva classic, on us. We know they make it correctly because, for all those Isabel Hales fans out there, she helped set up the Cou Cou bar when they first opened.

Stay healthy, sane, engaged with all the good things going on in the world.

Hope to see you in 2024!

Love thy Neighbor

80% of all species living on earth are anthropoids, they are the largest phylum in the animal kingdom. These include bees, ants, spiders, butterflies, and moths. Live on a farm and they are happily your daily companions, going about their business, as you go about yours. Though I was admittedly once a diehard city girl who would quickly default to ‘is this a predator?’ toward anything unknown (whether it walked on two legs or crawled on four) I’ve come to love the muck and tosh of farm life. Yes, it has taken me years to stop killing spiders – who for the most part do not bite – but I now marvel at the beauty to their balletic grace, the cunning in their designs for living.

And I am not squeamish. Or so I thought, until one sunny winter day just after the recent torrential rains when Dan, Nick and I began to tackle the ¼ acre of ‘treasures,’ aka trash, that had grown to fill a neglected corner by the front gate. A few minutes after we started, Dan lifted the edge of a rotting tarp and a family of centipedes scurried out, followed by a score of creatures, all webbed feed and slimy exoskeletons. I jumped back, fully creeped out. Dan, on the other hand, was positively joyful. He immediately set about transporting them, giggling like a child as he ran the ten feet to the edge of the forest where he deposited them to a new life.  It went on: Beneath a pile of warped ply from some long forgotten project he found blue tailed skinks “beautiful!”; in the grassy muck around an old stove, several alligator lizards. Then beneath a stack of rotting ply, for Dan, a treasure trove of “three species of Salamander!”

Revulsion is the act of stepping back from something, it is generally instinctive, rather than rational. Like all forms of prejudice, it usually comes from ignorance. As the sun crept beyond the canopy of trees casting us in shadow, it was hard to miss the difference between what Dan and I were experiencing. If I have learned anything in over three decades dry farming organically up here on the ridge it’s that while insects may make strange bedfellows, they make grand partners in building the layers of biodiversity our farm has needed to survive and flourish. Why then, do most of us treat things that crawl out from under rocks- arguably where we all started - differently than those that float from flower to flower? We anthropomorphize some creature and not others, easily finding connection to ‘anything with a face,’ but repulsed by slithering snakes and slimy bug eyed creatures. Even within a species most of us hold to established standards of coherent beauty. Why else do we more frequently ooh at the butterfly, ignore the dusty moth circling the porch light on a summer night?

Dan is still, happily, the director of our big farm programs in Philo, though he now delegates from London most of the year, coming back to do a big push in winter and again in fall. He is especially wonderful at reminding us to always take a closer look at the impact our lives up here have upon the surrounding ecology of this ridge; reminding us that as form often follows function, so too beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This trip he gifted us with the knowledge that its often the unseen life on the farm, that over time contribute essential layers necessary to healthy biodynamic structure. These creatures happened to be feasting in the dump, but it is the feces of arthropods which are the basis for the formation of soil aggregates and humus, which physically stabilize soil and increase its capacity to store nutrients. Ecosystem engineers.

As for all those piles of trash we’ve kept around that we no longer have hopes of someday using, we are going to take another look at them before we pay someone to haul them off to yet a bigger trash pile we just can’t see. Before he left he urged us to listen to a John Little Podcast - John, who founded the Grass Roof Company.Co.UK (@grassroofcompany), in 1998, has been a seminal force in both macro and micro thinking around fly-tipping (dumping) and how it adversely affects biodiversity.

If  you are in the least bit curious how to come to meaningful terms with all the junk that invariably surrounds us - how to cultivate your living situation in ways that encourage and protect wild life so it might thrive alongside you, how to cultivate plants that will more easily adapt to our changing climate, I recommend spending some time with this gentleman. Choose any podcast that strikes your fancy - and look at his website. John Little is a marvel rethinking how we live, especially in cities and towns, where every day we pass refuse in both private and public spaces that could be transformed to be pleasurable, have purpose. He grows things in unimaginable places, with very little resources beyond his ingenuity and vision - even top soil has a relegated place in his world. His work in the private and public spheres offers imaginative and inexpensive ways to create remarkable gardens and landscaped installations. So much to learn here.

And yes, upon much reflection, the skinks were pretty awesome.

There is breathtaking beauty everywhere you look in Anderson Valley this winter, and it’s easy to see while passing vineyards which are dedicated to cultivating more than grapes. Handley Cellars Vineyards, always a Barndiva Family Favorite, is particularly stunning. And check out a recent @barndivahealdsburg post about Navarro’s remarkable annual approach to sheep season, captured during a joyful visit with the incomparable Sophia Bates.

Finally, We’d be remiss in closing this newsletter failing to mention how pleased we were with the turn-out for our Book & Film Event on Sunday January 22, which launched Studio B in 2023. It exceeded our expectations. Thanks to the help of Copperfields Bookstore the authors sold a great many books and fully half the sold- out audience stayed for the end of Elizabeth Falkner’s documentary “Sorry We’re Closed” which resumed after a probing, and frank Q & A about the state of the restaurant industry. A difficult conversation at times, it was a necessary one for anyone who loves dining out and is having trouble getting their heads around why and how it has become so expensive. We were proud to have helped facilitate it. Hopefully, there will be more to come like this for Studio B!

Our thanks to Heather Irwin and the Press Democrat ( @pressdemo, @biteclubbeats) for advance publicity for the event; to @shoplocalhealdsburg, @heatherfreyer, @jillkd, and our good friend @alexisconis for their IG follow ups - which we are admittedly dreadful at - so many reached out to say they were sorry to have missed the event but wanted to attend the next one!

And of course Big Love to our incredibly talented divas - Tanya Holland (@mstanyaholland, #californiasoulcookbook) who started the ball rolling, Jennifer Reichardt (@duckdaughterjj, #thewholeduckcookbook), Elizabeth Falkner (@cheffalkner, #sorrywereclosed) and the inimitable Duskie Estes, who guided the Q & A so deftly. (@farmtopantry).

We’ll leave the last word to @shophealdburg and their succinct take-away from the afternoon: #eattheview!