South Yorkshire has been like the South of France for
most of July. The sun shone nearly every day and our garden has flourished. We
have had glorious roses, poppies, cornflowers, astrantia, cosmos, alchemilla,
phlox, lavender, mint, geraniums, verbena bonariensis, scabious, sea holly,
campanula and penstemon…..and the tomatoes have just started to turn red. I ran
a couple of flower workshops in July and the main challenge was to keep the
flowers in a good state in the tremendous heat. The first workshop was to make
a grouped bouquet of summer flowers and here are the main ingredients.
Most of the flowers were from my Cornish wholesaler –
pinks (gorgeous smell), agapanthus, pink dahlias, pink cornflowers, ‘misty
blue’ limonium, white alstroemeria, white astilbe and powder blue scabious.
Then I supplemented these with flowers from our garden – blue cornflowers,
alchemilla and dog daisies (leucanthemum). We also included two different sorts
of eucalyptus and ruscus. Once the different groups of flowers had been made
into individual posies they were bound together into the bouquet. This was then
wrapped in cellophane, filled with water and finished off with some candy pink
raffia.
The bouquets were then placed in their Meadowsweet gift boxes.
They had a light, frothy, mid-summer look. Lovely.
The second workshop was to make three posy arrangements
in hand-painted jam jars. This is a really good workshop as participants get a
chance to practice hand-tying three times…everyone feels that they really get
it by the end. We used similar ingredients as in the previous workshop, but with
a few additions from the garden – spiraea, snapdragons, astrantia, lavender and
alliums. This meant that the flowers were just as fresh as they possibly could
be as they had been cut from the garden that very morning.
Here is the finished product and some pictures of the
participants with their arrangements. Between the four of us we made 12 jam jars
– quite enough to use as table centres for a wedding or a party.
Talking about parties…we had a celebration this weekend
to welcome my father to Sheffield (he has recently moved here from Cheshire). I
decided to fill our house with flowers and I bought a bucket of flowers from
Rachel Dyson who grows flowers on her farm on the outskirts of Sheffield (you
can`t get much more local than that!). My idea was to combine her flowers with
mine. Here are the flowers that I bought from Rachel.
Her flowers had a really fresh just-picked country feel
to them and the things I liked the best were the different sorts of mint, the
clary sage, the love-in-a mist and the hydrangeas. I added my own cornflowers,
cosmos, dog daisies, hydrangeas (ours have only just started to flower) and
scabious to Rachel’s and I also added some phlox, sea holly, penstemon,
lavender, spiraea and verbena to the mix. Our flowers combined together really
well. It was interesting to see the similarities in our choice of flowers,
though Rachel is growing on a far bigger scale than I can achieve in my small
domestic cutting garden. I made lots of posies
in jam jars similar to the ones we made in the workshop and also three jugs of
flowers – I used the same Heron Cross pattern in all of the jugs to give the
room a sense of coherence.
To finish, I have selected a couple of images that
capture the vibrancy of our garden at the moment. Look at these vigorous
daisies and this exquisite rose. It is wonderful to be surrounded by such
incredible beauty and we still have all of August to look forward to…..
