The Grass Isn't Always Greener

I'm So Glad I Was Evicted

The best solutions often come at the worst cost. For two decades, Kim grew a business and a life inside the protective casing of fear—terrified of what would happen if she were ever forced to leave the farm she called home. But human time moves fast, and when an eviction notice arrived to signal that the land was being developed, a twenty-year tenancy vanished in a blink. In this audio essay, Kim reflects on the long, overlapping histories we leave on borrowed ground, the difference between a grand illusion and a true sanctuary, and how a sudden uprooting led her to the 200-year-old threshold of Lavender Hill. We are all just passing through, but some evictions force us to transplant our lives into much richer soil. In This Episode: The Ghost of Morpheus: A twenty-something dream of a grand estate in Tryon, NC, and the warning hidden inside a beautiful illusion. Pot-Bound Roots: Navigating twenty years as a "humble apologist" on borrowed land, overshadowed by the footprints of those who came before. Operating on Land Time: The sudden shock of a six-month eviction notice and the confrontation with a geographic clock. Discovering Lavender Hill: An impossible listing beside a prison, two juvenile armadillos acting like puppies, and a hidden meadow that became a love song. The Reality of Sanctuary: Learning to live in a place that demands partnership rather than deference. Notable Quotes: "Like a garden bed filled with mint, my shoots overlapped with the Turk’s broad trunks, and the shared history of other trainers who had come before us in that space, on that land." "It felt like I was walking into a dream, but one that didn’t come with a warning." "To a mountain or a pasture, a twenty-year tenancy is just a blink, a single season in a vast, geologic clock... Every landlord, every trainer, every husband, and every writer is eventually evicted by time itself." Connect with the Farm: If Stable Roots [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe] feels like a conversation you'd like to keep having, join our community. Every week, Kim Carter writes about horses, land, grief, belonging, and how we sometimes have to get lost to find ourselves. Read the original essay & see the photos: at Substack [https://stableroots.substack.com]. Support the work: Consider upgrading to a paid subscription [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe] to directly support the horses, the land, and the stories harvested at Lavender Hill. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Dreaming

This week's essay started as a dream about a house I didn't know I owned. Then, it became something bigger — an investigation into why the nature of my dreaming changed the moment I moved to Lavender Hill Farm, and what it means that I'm finally, for the first time in my life, sleeping straight through the night. In this episode I'm reading the full essay, which traces the dreaming through the science of REM sleep, the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript — a fifteenth-century illustrated codex full of plants that don't exist and a script no one has decoded in six hundred years — and into the work of Carl Jung, who went into his own basement at thirty-eight and came back with a map. The essay also visits my cousin Janette, a botanist who told me years ago that she no longer daydreamed, which terrified me at the time. It took me decades to understand what she meant — and to recognize that something else was moving in to take daydreaming's place. If you've been paying attention to your own dreams lately, or noticing that something in your interior life has shifted, this one is for you. In this episode: The house as the self — Jung, Bachelard, and why so many of us dream of rooms we didn't know we have What actually happens in the final hours of sleep, and why most of us never stay down long enough to find it The Voynich Manuscript and the long human tradition of trying to record what lives inside us Active imagination — Jung's practice of going back into the dream and asking the figures what they want The second half of life and the gold that's too close to see Links and references: The Voynich Manuscript [https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046] — viewable in full at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Carl Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus [https://amzn.to/3PN4r4e], edited by Sonu Shamdasani, W.W. Norton & Company, 2009 (affiliate link) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [https://amzn.to/4vd3nFS], 1958 (affiliate link) If my work resonates with you: Stable Roots [https://stableroots.substack.com] publishes weekly essays on the land, the interior life, and the slow work of paying attention. Free subscribers [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe] receive each essay in their inbox. Paid subscribers [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe] support the farm and the writing, and get a little more of everything. Stable Roots is written and read by Kim Carter and recorded at Lavender Hill Farm Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Grass Isn't Always Greener

This week's episode is the audio companion to the Stable Roots essay — and it starts with Hero, my little chestnut Quarter Horse, army-crawling under an electric fence in the middle of the night to graze the forbidden rushes by the pond. I thought he was being a pain. Turns out, he was a prophet. What begins as a pasture management problem in the middle of a Foothills drought opens into something much bigger — the difference between forcing compliance and allowing recovery, in the land, in our horses, and in ourselves. In this episode: — Why drought weeds are nature's emergency response team, not a sign of failure — What tall fescue's vault strategy teaches us about resilience — The one-rein stop as a metaphor: compliance isn't the same as willingness — How Hero accidentally saved the topsoil by escaping at night — Why I'm trading a perfectly managed life for a recovery-driven one Read the full essay and subscribe at Stable Roots [https://stableroots.substack.com]. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

We Don't Save Old Farms

We Don't Save Old Farms: (They Save Us) In this week’s Stable Roots, Kim Carter traces the layered history of Lavender Hill — the 200-year-old farm in Simpsonville, SC now home to Bramblewood Stables — through old letters, photographs, buried spring stones, and an antique hand plow that may have originated from the land itself. What begins as research into the farm’s past slowly becomes something more intimate: a meditation on stewardship, memory, and the feeling of stepping into a conversation already underway long before your arrival. This episode explores: - The transformation of Holly Springs Acres into Lavender Hill - Charles and Alona Lavender’s restoration of the farm after the Korean War - The excavation of the original spring house - Forgotten infrastructure and old ways of living with the land - And what it means to enter a relationship with a place instead of simply owning it Read the full essay and explore Stable Roots: Stable Roots on Substack [https://stableroots.substack.com] Learn more about Bramblewood Stables at Lavender Hill: Bramblewood Stables [https://www.bramblewoodstables.com] South Carolina Department of Agriculture listing for Lavender Hill Farm: Lavender Hill Farm and Bramblewood Stables [https://agriculture.sc.gov/agritourism-farms/lavender-hill-farm-and-bramblewood-stables/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Last week’s companion piece on disappearing farmland in Upstate South Carolina [https://stableroots.substack.com/p/your-new-neighbors-are-costing-you] continues the larger conversation around land stewardship, development pressure, and preservation. Follow along with the ongoing restoration and history work at Lavender Hill on Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/kim.carter.equestrian] and Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/two_point/]. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Your New Neighbors are Costing You a Fortune

In 2020, the world tilted on its axis. For the Upstate of South Carolina, that tilt sent a wave of 100,000 new residents crashing into our pastures. As we cross the milestone of one million neighbors, the infinite horizon of the American South has officially hit a bottleneck. This week, Kim dives into the canyon between agricultural value and development prices. From the ingenious survival strategy of European track systems to the personal desperation of cashing out a retirement to save her farm by purchasing thirty acres, we’re talking about the high cost of holding the line. Is a farm just a vacant lot waiting for a purpose, or is it the essential, self-sustaining lung of a growing city? In this episode, we discuss: The Million-Resident Milestone: The rapid expansion of the Greenville-Anderson-Greer, South Carolina metro area. The Mother of Invention: Why land scarcity in the Netherlands and the UK forced a smarter way to keep horses, and why we’re next. The Hidden Subsidy: The math that proves farms actually lower your taxes, while subdivisions send you the bill. Legislative Victories: A look at the Old White Horse Road Corridor victory and the new SC laws fighting to protect 7 million acres by 2050. Lavender Hill: A raw look at the survival of a 30-acre heart of a 1,100-acre legacy. Once our dirt is buried under six inches of concrete, the conversation is over. The soil doesn’t get a second chance. And neither do we. Connect & Support: Read the full essay and see the data: at Stable Roots on Substack [https://stableroots.substack.com] Subscribe to Stable Roots: Join our community [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe] of land stewards and help us hold the line against the asphalt funnel. Follow on Facebook: @kim.carter.equestrian [https://www.facebook.com/kim.carter.equestrian] And on Instagram: @two_point [https://www.instagram.com/two_point/] About Stable Roots: Stable Roots is a weekly exploration of land, legacy, and the grit it takes to keep them both. Hosted by Kim Carter, a farm owner and advocate in the Upstate of South Carolina, we look at the intersections of agriculture, economics, and the equestrian life in an increasingly crowded world. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe [https://stableroots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]