This Week
sun bleached prettiness
These weeks of endless sunshine have had the interesting effect of bleaching the flowers of some of our longer flowering varieties, such as yarrow and larkspur. The peach variety of yarrow, which usually fades with time to a soft apricot, has this year turned a very pale parchment colour, almost cream. As cream is perhaps the most asked for colour amongst our customers, we are...
sweet peas
It was difficult to choose what to write about this week. Looking through our photos, there are so many lovely things to share, but by their nature the flowers are fleeting, and what we can pick in all its prime of perfection this week may well be going over by the time I next come to write, and something else be growing up to take its place. I've made three bouquets that I am...
gently colourful with a fairground feel
For the last two weeks the delphinium bed has been working very hard, throwing up huge spires of blue and white flowers. There are two shades of blue in there: a pale translucent one (maybe "Summer Skies"?) and another much darker variety. Summer skies is a lovely easy colour to mix with other pastel shades and we've found it easy to use. The dark one, however, seems to clash...
roses
There is a huge, spilling abundance of roses in the flower garden just now, perfect for picking for our six June brides to make romantic, richly scented bouquets and other arrangements. The David Austin rose 'Tranquility' has been planted for four years now and this year it has come into its own, its glossy-leaved branches heavy with fat creamy white many-petalled flowers which we have used for...
a country wedding
Last weekend's wedding flowers when to a most delightful address: The Old Parsonage at Acton Piggot. This kind of detail reminds me that I am in exactly the right job - I love the feeling that we could be providing flowers for a character in one of our little boy's vintage (my vintage) story books. It was a small wedding brief, just the bouquets and buttonholes, with buckets of...
foxgloves
This has been an exceptional week for foxgloves. Although there are many drawbacks to growing flowers for cutting on a garden scale, rather than farming them (no mass-spraying; no ploughing in of the old crops; no moving things about by tractor - a tractor couldn't fit in through the gate in our wall), there are many benefits too. A mini-environment, or tiny microclimate with...
impending abundance
There is a wonderful feeling in the garden of impending abundance - of a firework about to go off, a splendid water fountain just about to spurt with all its might. The foxgloves are like rockets, towering all over the garden, although we have to pick four hundred of them for an order tomorrow morning, so they will be sadly depleted for our open day (in aid of The Historic Churches...
lupins
The last month of fabulous sunshine followed by the last few days of magnificent rain have meant that the garden has put on a huge growth spurt over the weekend, and now everything is about a foot taller than it was a few days ago, and so many flower varieties look to be on the very brink of blooming. Flowering on full throttle right now are the lupins, thrusting up their luscious pepper...
The allium
Alliums abound this week. It is magical to get to the garden early, when the sun is low and sparkling through the purple spiky globes. Used to picking our flowers as I am, I still feel a pang as I harvest the alliums because they give the garden such drama. They also make a kind of orange sap which stains my clothes and makes the water in their buckets turn pink. They...
flower class
It wasn't really a floristry class, more an opportunity for eight women to get to know each other better over coffee, cake, and a sun-flooded flower garden. As the merry hens laughed and chattered at their tea table in the sun, I hovered about in the background, not wanting to interrupt their enjoyment, but aware that they had all come to have a go at making hand tied posies, and to see...