BREAKING #286

A good acorn year

Nicole Ex

Column

October 2025

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

October 2025

Acorns rattle down from the trees onto the roofs of parked cars in the street. They crunch and crack under the pressure of rubber tires that turn. It’s a satisfying sound. Like a walnut in a nutcracker, but times a hundred thousand. It’s a good acorn year.

Acorns also lie scattered in the front garden, next to the white, ghostly mushrooms that stand like little ghosts above the soil, and in the shade of the tall perennials: asters, echinacea, geraniums, lavender, sedum, calamint, fennel, and quaking grasses. I planted them two years ago, fresh out of their P9 pots, with the help of Anke, guided by Piet Oudolf’s planting scheme.

Every morning I stop to look at them, and every evening, when the sun rises or sets, I follow the play of light and shadow across that small sea of flowers. I swear the phlox change colour – red-purple in full sun, blue-purple on grey days – and that this shift in hue is greater than the change in light itself. But so far, I’ve convinced no one.

Looking at the same thing every day, under different (light) conditions, looking at something close by that remains, yet shifts ever so slightly with each moment – a few meters of garden, a street, a child, a piece of art – brings happiness. I’ve even come to the conclusion that we only truly grow attached to things that change (no matter how much we might wish they’d stay the same).

Last spring, I noticed something missing in the front garden. I had forgotten to plant bulbs in autumn, Anke had tucked away a few hundred of them during our original planting, and so I missed the exuberance of the crown imperials, alliums, spring starflowers and snake’s head fritillaries. I still have dried versions of them in the kitchen, but they lack that vibrant sense of change.

Time to get some bulbs in the ground.

— Nicole Ex,
founding editor

In collaboration with grower Huiberts, we’ve once again put together a unique bulb box this year, featuring 7 stunning varieties (such as the crown imperial and wild tulip) for vibrant blooms and the first pesticide-free nectar of spring. To be planted until mid-December. Suitable for gardens and balconies, in pots and borders.

Discover the bulb box here.