The Slow Life of Jonathan Denby

Jonathan Denby, the owner of South Lakes Hotels is a well known gardener, garden designer and advocate of the Slow Life. The idea of a Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where Jonathan Denby lives with his wife and three daughters, they have a kitchen garden where they produce their own food. They know that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising their lives but they do it because they enjoy it and because it forces them to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening and farming are all about patience; a crop will take months to mature; a cattle breeding programme will take years.

The principles of Slow Food are “good, clean and fair” - ‘good’ means that the food should be of good quality, ‘clean’ means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, ‘fair’ means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why they, as a family, don’t use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. Jonathan likes the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general.

Slow Life | Yewbarrow House | Garden Design