MY COUNTRY PASSION Hedgerow foraging

When she’s not running her floristry business, Susan Bailey West loves foraging for hedgerow finds to decorate her own home with, particularly at Christmas.

- JACKY PARKER

As an only child growing up on a hill farm in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, I spent endless hours by myself creating dams in the burn, looking after my own animals and climbing miles over hills, helping my father with his cattle and sheep. A childhood in the wildness and raw beauty of Scotland has left me with an innate connection with nature.

I suspect I absorbed my love for flowers by osmosis, playing on my own, creating an imaginary world from the primroses, foxgloves and berries that I found. I had a deep sense of the seasons. I was extremely dyslexic however, and out of school and in the wilds of the farm my imagination was caught by what I could create in the landscape.