What she does know, however, is that the next big plan involves getting her hands dirty. “What I’m reading about at the moment is gardening. I absolutely love it. I don’t do it enough myself—I have done some volunteer gardening, but I’m a fraud of a gardener because I don’t do it enough. I just love reading about it and try to do it as much as I can,” she says.
Slightly surprised by her admission, I wonder, why gardening? “It makes you so happy. It’s so good for you,” Windsor says. “You are outside all the time. The soil gives you amazing bacteria, gives you serotonin. It’s a way to meet different people if you do volunteer gardening. I’ve met some of the nicest people, and if it’s done sustainably, it can be a great thing for the planet. So it’s a win-win situation.” In fact, it turns out that this grounding hobby is a metaphor for her own life. “It’s just so therapeutic and peaceful, and it’s also just a way of accepting that you just go with the seasons. If something doesn’t work in your garden, it’s like, ‘It’s all right. I’ll try again next time.’ And realizing it’s just a part of nature that things might not grow or something might eat them, you just go with it and just carry on. It teaches you to go with the flow,” she says.
I look out of my window at my dying plants, and I turn to Windsor as my new gardening guru—my millennial Alan Titchmarsh, if you will—and ask her if talking to the plants might resurrect them. “I actually do it with my houseplants a little bit,” she admits, letting me know they are called Geraldine and Esmerelda.
As our chat wraps up, our previous plan of a night out turns to Windsor volunteering to come over to help me with my plants. Always expect the unexpected from this lady.
Amelia Windsor x Pretty Ballerinas is now available.
