“Spending time with friends and family, my children and our animals,” is what photographer and stylist Cathy Kasterine says brings meaning to her. It’s an appropriate statement given that she has just spent the day in the Cotswolds [in southwest England] with her longtime-friend the landscape architect Miranda Brooks at her 17th Century farmhouse. This July, Kasterine captured Brooks, her two daughters Grey and Poppy, and their friend Secret Snow, horse riding and hanging out in denims and Mary Janes amid meadows of corn, wild blue geraniums and daisies. With Poppy styling, lunch made largely from Miranda’s garden, Le Monde Béryl’s creative director Lily Atherton Hanbury’s son Hanmer filming, this was truly an intergenerational happening. 

Kasterine, who is a contributing fashion editor for British Harpers Bazaar, spent a lot of her childhood in the darkroom with her father who was also a photographer. After leaving school, she moved to New York and began assisting on advertising campaigns and editorials with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Horst P Horst. Her career break came when she styled Kate Moss in chiffon knickers for the British Vogue cover shoot of 1993 shot by Corinne Day - an image from this story hangs in Tate Modern in London. A recent commission saw her photograph Violet Hume for the cover of the Financial Times HTSI magazine who she describes as a “young warrior.” She says: “I wanted to capture that spirit in my photographs.” 

Brooks, is also a contributing editor - for American Vogue - and first met Kasterine in New York through the stylist and fashion editor Camilla Nickerson. Her architect father was a founding member of the Soil Association and she recalls as a child discovering gardening through growing peas. “I had peas and was very obsessed with them. I played my recorder to them every night to make them grow,” she laughs. Brooks studied art history at the Courtauld Institute and read landscape architecture at Birmingham University in England before eventually setting up her own practise in New York - she created Anna Wintour’s Long Island garden. She moved permanently to the Cotswolds in 2019. 

Simon: Let’s begin. How would you explain your rituals, process and practise?

Cathy: I approach connection with my subject from the heart space, not the head. I like to shoot on film as it slows down the process and brings the subject into view in a more considered way, especially with the medium format camera as it is big and heavy and I can only take one picture at a time. I have to breathe and exhale as I focus and so it is relaxing for both myself and my subject, and I feel that they are in the zone with me. 

Miranda: I’m always led by the land. In my own garden I’m less disciplined that I might be with clients as I need to experiment and make mistakes. My garden will always be a work in progress in a way. I have some projects which I have been working on for many years and I find that as some of these clients become more involved with their gardens, we can experiment a bit more like I might in my own garden. But with other projects it’s more strict, more clear cut. I like both. 

Simon: What is joy?

Miranda: I love gardening. That is an incredible pleasure. Joy is very much a spontaneous emotion. So I feel that, that could be anything. That could be watching my ducks or galloping [on a horse], or seeing the children come home. Or actually my vegetable garden gives me a lot of joy. The family teases me about the vegetable garden! They’re not allowed to insult my vegetables so there’s a lot of leg-pulling when I say how extraordinary one of my beans taste. 

Cathy: An unquestioned lifting of the spirit and heart connection - it is fleeting and should be. There is always more to come.

Miranda: Joy is also when I’m not thinking about the list in my head or what I have to do that day, and I can come outside in the morning, particularly in the morning, and I'm really present. And I really see things, like the dew on the roses. 

Simon: How do you know when something you have created is ready?

Cathy: I involve other people in the process - editing and retouching so its a process of bringing in other eyes which I find very important. It’s ready when all involved have done their bit and the  images comes together as a body of work.

Miranda: I’ve always loved shoots because they’re super focused for a few days and you capture a world and it’s relatively instant whereas with gardens, I’ll be working on that for maybe ten years. Our garden [in the Cotswolds] is a baby. It’s a good three or four years from being ready to be photographed as a fully formed garden. There is a lot of growing to do. You can have a strong concept for a garden but things have to adapt and soften. When you live with a garden you start to learn how the light moves and you start to obsess about the views from a window as you’re cleaning your teeth. Then as you extend out into the landscape there are new puzzles to figure out as you start to understand the nature and the specifics of the land.

Simon: Where do you find inspiration?

Miranda: It comes from so many different sources. It could be something that I've been reading. There are some projects that are more conceptual, so what lies beneath a design is also more conceptual, so it could be, for example, a series of Avalonian meditations that I’ve been into. Colour often comes from art. Or maybe a Valentino show. I do find the couture shows really inspiring for colour combinations.

Cathy: Every where - I love finding inspiration in the most mundane of places as well as the highest.

Miranda: I've noticed that I have more ideas when I'm moving. In New York, it used to often be when I was riding my bicycle. Movement seems to really help me. You get the chance to ruminate. 

Simon: What was the last book you read that you really felt a connection with? How did it make you feel?

Cathy: I love Deborah Levy, I feel she writes well about the every day and also the phase of life that I am currently going through - children leaving home.

Miranda: Whilst I was recently in Greece I read Madeline Miller’s two books, retellings of Greek myths, ‘Circe’ and ‘Song of Achilles’. Wonderfully alive and magical. From a garden point of view Olivia Laing’s ‘The Garden Against Time’ is beautifully written and a searching look at what makes us garden. 

Simon: How would you define beauty?

Cathy: Beauty can be found everywhere. I feel that it is whatever moves you. I often feel that a beautiful weed growing from the cracks in the pavement defines this.

Miranda: I do believe that beauty is uplifting and moving, and it can really touch something in somebody's core. Can a landscape do this? Yes, absolutely, I think a landscape can do that.

Simon: Whose wardrobe would you most like to explore and why?

Cathy: I have never thought of this before! Maybe Miuccia Prada? She is wonderfully complex and I think this would be reflected in her wardrobe.

Miranda: Probably Amanda Harlech's, she has a similar existence to mine, high / low. Mucking out and gardening interrupted by moments of glamour. I just don't have the couture. Bunny Mellon's Givenchy designed gardening outfits would be great, I love having a uniform.