The Tablescape Series: Pistachio
Pistachio sits somewhere between spring and summer, moving through sage, pale olive, young grass, and the creamy green found inside the shell of the nut itself. For me, it has always belonged to landscapes where green appears in layers rather than as a single shade. Golf courses are perhaps the clearest example: clipped fairways, darker rough, water, trees, and long grasses all holding slightly different versions of the same colour. That contrast became the starting point for Pistachio.
The dinner was originally imagined for May, when the landscape first begins returning to green. After a pause in the series shifted our timeline, however, Pistachio ultimately took place in August. By then, gardens were full, grasses were high, and the softer greens I had first associated with the colour had become something much more abundant. Rather than trying to recreate spring, the table began to respond to the season we were actually in.
Then came the weather. In the days before the dinner, the forecast moved from rain to torrential downpours, and I became increasingly convinced the outdoor setting I had planned might not happen at all. In the middle of that panic, I returned to one of my earliest references for Pistachio: a greenhouse. I had always loved the idea of being enclosed while still feeling surrounded by the landscape, and suddenly the weather gave that abandoned idea a reason to return.
White chiffon and cream drapery wrapped the covered space, with glimpses of the garden still visible beyond it. Two long pistachio tables ran parallel to one another, divided by a dense strip of grasses planted through the centre. The tables became the fairways and the planting became the rough, creating a narrow stretch of wildness between two more ordered planes.
The rest of the setting was intentionally restrained. Embossed white plates, gold cutlery, etched glassware, dark green wax seals, velvet ribbon, and Queen Anne’s lace added texture without competing with the grasses. Green Trick dianthus offered a subtle reference to golf balls, while small glass lamps glowed low between the stems as daylight disappeared. One guest described the setting as feeling “like an amphibian in a lily pond,” which somehow captured it perfectly.
The rain arrived exactly as promised and stayed with us for most of the evening. Food and wine travelled back and forth beneath umbrellas while chiffon shifted in the wind and the garden blurred beyond it. What I had been so certain would compromise the dinner became one of its defining elements. The lamps glowed brighter against the dark garden, the grasses moved around us, and the sound of rain enclosed the table in a world of its own.
Around the table, Pistachio quickly became about much more than the landscape I had started with. For Kate, it was the simple act of shucking corn. One guest remembered grandparents who wintered in Florida and pastel houses where soft greens appeared among pinks and yellows. Another returned to childhood in Saskatchewan, to fields stretching in every direction and a family photograph taken in a canola field. For another, the colour belonged to Jamaica, its lush landscape and the enormous avocados she remembered there. A colour I had approached visually had once again become a way into places, people, and memories.
Kate’s menu drew from late summer with cucumber, herbs, zucchini, melon, sweet corn, basil, pistachio, white peach, and lamb. Divya also returned for the final dinner, pairing wines through the courses and telling the stories behind each bottle. With rain hammering above us, some of those stories had to be delivered considerably louder than usual, which only made the evening feel more memorable.
Yaelly Designs became part of the final table in a different way than originally planned. Remy had initially been going to sketch guests live when Pistachio was scheduled for May, but when the dinner moved to August, the idea evolved. Instead, she worked from a year of photographs, flowers, installations, objects, and colour to illustrate all twelve tables together in one composition. After experiencing the series one table at a time, seeing the entire year gathered on a single page felt especially fitting.
There was something appropriate about the final dinner being one that changed so much between its first imagining and the night it actually happened. Pistachio shifted seasons, moved beneath a canopy, rediscovered an abandoned greenhouse reference, and absorbed a storm I had desperately wished away. After twelve dinners, it felt like a reminder of what the series had become. I could design the table, choose the colour, and imagine how the evening might unfold, but the people, stories, weather, food, and unexpected moments were what ultimately gave each one its life.
Pistachio may have been the final dinner, but The Tablescape Series is not quite over. On Saturday, October 3, all twelve colours will come together for one final immersive celebration and the launch of The Tablescape Series: Stories of Colour, bringing the year’s food, music, installations, collaborators, and memories into one room.
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