In Search of Wisteria

When I was twelve years old, I began planning my escape. Escape from the normal boringness of my life. Other kids saved up for video games, shoes, and cell phones. I was saving up for a trip to London. 
    
​Yes, London. I was very specific in my desires. To me, there was something about London, about the entire country of England, that I felt nowhere else in the world could compare to. London, in my mind, fulfilled my desires, that foreign city echoed who I was.

Later on in my teenage years, my friends were saving for cars, college, and clothes, but dear reader, I was saving for London. A sort of literary retreat, a city where history and writing and everyday life collided in beautiful misfit harmony.
  
I have spent my high school years in search of everyday beauty. The flowers that come up from the cracks in the sidewalk. Looking for beauty in the mundane, or as I now like to call it, searching for wisteria. 
  
 And everyone knows that the best place to search for wisteria is in England. 
  
​ So my parents and I got onto a plane, and they willingly followed me through the streets of London, as I sought my escape. In the nature of Betsy Ray, Amy March, and Jane Bennet.

I just got back from England a few days ago, my first time out of the country, and I had the most wonderful time. So, for the next few weeks here on the blog and over on my youtube channel, I will share bits of that experience with you. The museums I visited, the food I ate, the places you must visit when you go to England for yourself, my time in the cities of London, Oxford, and Bath, and so much more.

If you have read my blog or other writings of mine before, you may be familiar with the fact that I firmly believe in a sense of place. I believe the places we visit become a part of us, I believe that the places we love affect us creatively, and I believe that we create best when creating about places we know and love. I have a deep connection to my region of the United States, and Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts, these are places that I feel most myself, most at home. And now, added to that short list, is London, England.
    
​It’s beautiful when you dream for years of a place and it is even better than you imagined. 

I think part of the reason why London, and England as a whole appeals to me so much, is that many of the things I dearly love, are such a common part of life across the pond. Bookshops dot every corner, and everywhere you go you’ll see someone with their nose stuck in a book. Randomly on buildings all around the country you’ll see plaques commemorating that such and such a poet or novelist dwelled in that building. Of course, England is also home to some of the greatest writers of all time, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, J.R.R. Tolkein, Lewis Carrol, C.S. Lewis, Sir Aurther Conan Doyle, P.L. Travers, Noel Streatfeld, The Bronte sisters, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and so many more. 
    
​Other than these literary reasons, English culture is full of history in every cranny, tea is life, flowers grow rampant in garden after garden, in little alcoves under a flat, and across buildings. So much of England satisfies me.

There was something so very beautiful about my trip, and I am so excited to share more with you. 
    
​Trips like these are so exciting, so broadening and life changing, but they also push you to appreciate the mundane a little bit more. Once it’s all over, once your plane touches down again on your native soil, you have to find the beauty in home once more.

In many ways, I went to England in search of wisteria (the real flower), but also in search of unusual and unfamiliar beauty, the type of beauty I have only ever seen in photographs. I found wisteria, I found beauty, but as we drove home, back in the United States, I noticed something, huge purple vines of wisteria growing amongst trees on the highway. Either the wisteria followed me, or going to England opened my eyes to see that the wisteria was truly here all along.

Belle Thomas

​Belle is the writer and dreamer behind An Old Fashioned Girl. She is passionate about reminding girls of their identity in Christ, classic books, history, Louisa May Alcott, and earl grey tea.