This Week
flowers for Joyce
I've been wanting to write all week about the flowers we picked and made into an airy, natural casket spray for the funeral of Barney's completely delightful grandmother, Joyce, who thrived until she was nearly ninety nine years old, and then just grew weary of outliving everyone else she knew. However, the telegraph pole at the bottom of our lane has been skewiff all week, and the story...
narcissi
Having always disliked the very overbred large yellow trumpets of the daffodils planted under the fluffy pink cherry blossoms next to the cricket ground in the Yorkshire village where I grew up, it has taken me a long time to trust to the idea that some narcissi can be really heart-achingly, soul-scrunchingly, headily gorgeous. Last autumn, after having previously included only tentative...
from zero to hero
The first spring flowers for picking have arrived just in the very nick of time our first wedding of the year, that of Lesley and Dariusz, who are being married today from an idyllic Cotswold manor house. Lesley and her sister spent most of yesterday happily arranging buckets of flowers into small vases and jars all over the wonderful old house, while a delegation came to the garden...
the soil warms up
Finally, the spring is coming, and I am begrudging every moment that I'm not spending either pruning the roses before they put on too much growth, or busying about in the tiny polytunnel, out of which we have already moved the first batch of treasures for planting, so that there is space now for lots more seed sowing and potting on. There is much to do! But the team have been she...
the end of autumn
There is a much more relaxed vibe at the Flower Garden at this time of year, now that our last posy has been picked and all we have to do is make sure that the garden is as beautiful and as productive as possible for next year. Wintry weather can make November tasks a bit of a...
hunkering down
Returning to the garden after nearly a month away, and having left our lovely team behind working without us for the...
country wedding flowers
It was a labour of love to spend hours last week sitting in the sun on the old greenhouse steps, mixing together pots of lime and marigolds and mud to smear onto sixteen tall terracotta pots, in an attempt to give them an aged appearance, but it was all worthwhile when we set up the sparkling chrome candelabras on top of them, filled with soft rustic flowers, foliage and feathers. ...
lots of dirty gloves
These lovely sunny autumn days mean that we've been able to get lots of garden jobs done that we wouldn't have even considered this time last year, and thanks to our great team of gardeners we are pretty pleased right now when we look around the garden. I made myself dizzy this afternoon planting little tiny fritillary bulbs with a long handled planter under amelanchier trees, how lovely...
mildly eccentric
One of the very many best bits of my job is talking to wedding couples about their wedding plans, their tastes and lives, their vision for their flowers. Certain words pop up again and again: romantic, natural, wild, informal. As I worked out and planned the flowers for this weekend's wedding, however, the magic word which I had ringing in my ears was "power". Two all...
the earth breathes in
For the last week we have been building up for a big party at the weekend, moving round bales of straw, planning where to position the decripit-landrover-as-bar, building up the bonfires. We clung on to every precious minute of sharing merry times with old friends and new, and now the fun is over and we look round to see that autumn has unfurled its cloak and is taking us into its damp...