This Week
in go the tulips
In go the tulips! This is one of seven beds we will be planting before the middle of the month. It is hard work but we are so looking forward to the abundant crops of magical flowers in the spring.
last pick of the year
The first hard frosts have arrived, blackening our dahlias and bringing an end to our flower deliveries for the year - the last delivery, of asters, chrysanthemums, snapdragons and scented leaf pelargoniums, was made today. The garden feels peaceful and still, and begins to look more organised and tidy now that we have more time to get on with the garden tasks. All the bulbs except...
soft late summer wedding flowers
Rosie and Geoff are certainly the most laid back couple for whom we've provided wedding flowers. As I decorated their house - a beautiful converted church - the day before their wedding last week, they were mostly concerned with their three black labradors, two of which are adorable frolicking little puppies. One of the tall church windows has the stone head of an unknown ...
bulb catalogues
After a wet dash around the garden to pick flowers on Friday morning, it was the perfect day for putting on the kettle and the radio, and settling down with some bulb catalogues. The weather became so heavy that I had to heave the bothy door shut, closing myself and the dog up in the semi-dark, but stopping the sheets of rain from blowing right in to where we...
end of season draws closer
The blankety mist this morning, followed by rich golden sunshine lighting up the fallen apples in the orchard and picking out the white sheep on the hills, is powerfully autumnal. We still haven't suffered a frost at the flower garden, where we are sheltered by excellent high walls, and although the dahlias and other powerhouses of the garden are slowing down, there are still some new...
bijoux opulence
For the last wedding of this season we picked buckets of decadent, plumptious flowers in shades of burgundy, cream and blush pink, along with lots of spilling foliages (jasmine and clematis tendrils; fruiting fig branches; lacy black elder leaves) for the wedding party to use for decorating their tables, and three big buckets of fragrant, silvery eucalyptus for twining up the bannisters. ...
country house flowers
What fun last week to fill the bothy up with buckets of interesting things from the garden - Chinese lanterns, great long boughs of climbing roses, a jumble of feathery old man's beard, fuzzy peach chrysanthemums, fleshy fragrant tomato stems, brilliant blue late delphiniums, the papery puffs of pink-turning hydrangea - with no especial colour theme, and then to transport them...
buckets of flowers
The leaves are beginning to turn golden and we feel the change of season in the garden, but we have still been picking buckets and buckets of flowers. In the last week we've sent buckets of flowers to London, Birmingham, Hereford and Shrewsbury, and we've provided wedding flowers to fulfill a light but very colourful brief, and funeral flowers for a lady who loved to garden. ...
new things
It's taken me a long time to feel confident enough to use things like fully blown roses and things going to seed in our floristry, even though I've often used mature seed heads - they look much more on purpose, whereas I think I worry that if an exquistely lovely stem has some bits fresh and other bits seedy, the customer may think that I'm fobbing them off with something not at its best or -...
Everything softens
As Henry rattled off with his trolley for collecting leaves this morning, taking the dog out, the sun was rising behind the apple trees and beginning to spread a warm orange glow across the far fields, but the air was still very cold and it felt like autumn; it didn't take us long to fill the little trolley with fallen golden brown oak leaves and little bits of twig. Now the sun is...