Summer in the city

It is now high summer in Sheffield and we are spending a lot of time in our garden – both tending it and enjoying it. I can`t quite believe how fantastic the weather has been throughout June and July. August has also started off with a blast. At the beginning of the summer we had a wonderful crop of astrantia – you can see them here arranged with peonies and white snapdragons from the garden. I love the light quality created with the glass jug and the whiteness of the flowers.

The sweet peas are in full flow now and I am cutting them just about every day.

 We have also had a great crop of cosmos, scabious, dog daisies and love-in-a mist.

I made a repeating arrangement with flowers and foliage from the garden for our front porch. They look fresh and welcoming for visitors to our house. Those dramatic seed heads are love-in-a mist. You can just see my feet in blue sandals in the lower picture – I think they match the blue flowers rather well!

I ran a flower workshop in July – the last before the holiday season. It was quite a celebration of frothy summer flowers. Here is a bucket of flowers from Cornwall (white astilbe, ‘misty blue’ limonium, powder blue scabious, pink alstroemeria, white gypsophila and bright blue agapanthus). Then there are flowers and foliage from the garden (ivy, jasmine, lavender, alchemilla mollis and verbena bonariensis). We also used pinks, brodiaea, astrantia, hydrangea, spirea and sweet peas. Here are the flowers before they were arranged.

The plan for the workshop was to make three arrangements. The first used a parallel hand-tying technique and we made it in the tall up-cycled container (a juice carton covered with pretty vintage paper). The second used spiralled hand-tying and the arrangement was placed in a pretty glass container tied with ribbon. The third was made in a small jam jar decorated with lace and string. Here are the containers ready to go.

And here are the finished arrangements – all different, but also complementing each other beautifully.

And….as there were some flowers left over, I made this pretty bouquet with garden flowers and a few of the Cornish brodiaea and alstroemeria.

Finally, I would like to show you this fantastic harvest of apricots which we have grown in our garden. We have eaten some straight off the tree (delicious) and Mike has made a good batch of apricot jam. It’s like living in the Mediterranean!