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!

Celebrating May

May has been a great month for working with flowers partly because of the bright, colourful spring flowers available, but also because I had a new space in which to do all my preparation. During the winter we painted the walls of our garage white, painted the floor grey and let in some natural light. The picture above shows the lovely light quality we have created. I ran 3 workshops in May. First of all, two back- to-back workshops to make 3 hand-tied posies in jam jars decorated with pretty vintage paper. Here are some of the jam jars:

 Here are the flowers ready to go in my new garage space:

The first thing is to get the flowers lined up in the right order for tying.

 I was really pleased to get quite a few action pictures. If you look carefully you will see lots of examples of wonderful spiralling of the flower and foliage stems. This is the main challenge of hand-tying, and as one the participants suddenly said ‘by Jove she’s got it’……and they all did.

Here is the finished product:

And here are the boxes that I made out of the large boxes that my flowers from Cornwall were delivered in. These worked very well for carrying the posies home and it felt good to do some active re-cycling.

Then this last weekend I ran another workshop to make a large, exuberant arrangement in chicken wire and I got some more action photos. We used wonderful bright yellow snap dragons and stocks in a range of pinks/violets as the main flowers.

First everyone fixed the chicken wire in the bowls and decorated the bowls with aspidistra leaves and raffia.

Then they made the central part of the arrangement.

 Then they added in alstroemeria, astrantia, sweet william and pinks.

Here is the final outcome. Stunning.

This weekend was the May Bank Holiday, but the weather wasn`t very good so I spent some of it looking around the vintage shops in and around the Abbeydale Road in Sheffield. I was delighted to find a plinth very like one I already have. The two plinths work really well together and would look good in a church or some other large venue.

To finish……let’s raise a glass to celebrate May flowers, good health and the coming summer.

Mother's Day - a showcase for British flowers

Ranunculus from Cornwall – I put lots of these beautiful, delicate flowers into my Mother’s Day bouquets. Mother’s Day is celebrated all over the world and mostly in the spring. According to Wikipedia, the UK version of the celebration derives from 2 sources. The first is religious, dating back to the 16^th century, when mothers were re-united with sons and daughters released from apprenticeships and work in service in order to attend their mother church. The celebration declined with the Industrial Revolution, but was revived after the Second World War by the second source – US soldiers spreading knowledge of the American celebration of their mothers. The religious roots mean that the date of our Mother’s Day is linked to the church calendar and it is always held on the 4^th Sunday of Lent – it could be as early as 1 March or as late as 4 April! Like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day is a fantastic opportunity for British flower growers, especially as interest in seasonal British flowers is expanding. My Cornish wholesaler told me he clocked up record flower sales this year as well as selling 1,200 bunches of Cornish foliage. Just look at the reason why – here are a couple of images of the tulips, ranunculus, white and yellow narcissi (avalanche and soleil d’or), alstroemeria, eucalyptus and pittosporum which made up the raw materials for my bouquets and flower workshop:

In the workshop we made grouped bouquets which we then placed in pretty Heron Cross jugs. The great thing about these bouquets is that you can look at the bouquet from different angles to see different groupings of flowers. I warned the workshop participants that their tulips would grow several inches in the vase and their bouquets needed to allow space for this. Just look at the growth in the third picture below - at least three inches (picture taken today,  five days after the workshop):

The idea was that participants would give their bouquets to their mothers, but I thought daughters and nieces deserved something pretty too, so we also made small posies in jam jars:

Then we put the jugs into green presentation boxes and everyone took a few photos:

I really like this picture of one of the participants who looks particularly pleased with her creations – and so she should be, they were lovely, and skilfully made.

I will finish this blog with a picture of a humble bunch of daffodils that Mike bought for me yesterday from our local supermarket. I see these as a symbol of optimism for British flower growers. Daffodil is the common name for the genus of flower called narcissus. The wonderful thing about narcissus flowers is that they grow really well in Cornwall, Devon and the Scilly Isles. The flowering season lasts from November to May and this means that they catch four great markets – Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter. When the Garden Museum ran their exhibition – Floriculture – Flowers, Love and Money last year they presented some interesting facts about the UK narcissus market. The UK is the world’s largest producer of narcissus cut flowers and exports them to many countries including Holland, Germany, Scandinavia and America. The UK also produces half of the world’s narcissus bulbs and exports 10,000 tons of them annually (worth around £7 million). Overall, growing narcissus flowers adds around £23 million to the UK economy. Hurray for our flower growers, the wholesalers who distribute the flowers and the florists and supermarkets who stock them for us to buy. Enjoy your daffodils – the season will soon be over!

A host of golden daffodils...and a leek

I had my first sniff of spring when my flowers for Valentine’s Day were delivered. There were yellow and white narcissi, tulips in all sorts of colours, pink alstroemeria, bright yellow daffodils and anemones – red, white and blue. The picture above shows some of the Valentine’s bouquets ready to go – not the usual florists’ offering of red roses flown in from Holland or Kenya, but British spring flowers and foliage. I made smaller bouquets than usual at a more affordable price (£20). I received great feedback about the flowers (both their freshness and their scent) and here they are closer-up:

Last Saturday was St David’s Day, the feast day of the patron saint of Wales. Mike and I are in Wales this week and we were here on St David’s Day. Lots of people pinned daffodils onto their clothes – daffodils are a symbol of Wales and so are leeks! The daffodils make a lot of sense because they are growing everywhere this week and are a wonderful sign that Spring is here at last. I`m not so sure about the leeks – but I think they are used to make a traditional Welsh soup. We are staying in Hay-on-Wye and I came across this arresting shop window display at Booth’s Bookshop. It included daffodils, a leek and a poem about Spring:

A new flower shop has opened in Hay called Dandelion Wishes. It is in an old building by the castle. It is just the sort of shop I would like if I had a retail space. Just look at the gorgeous narcissi, daffodils, ranunculus and the spring flowers growing in pots. You can also see the Welsh dragon on the flag in the background.

Here is the bunch of daffodils that Mike bought for me, and here is the arrangement I made with them using the foliage and berries I could find around the house.

The arrival of Spring has made me think about flower workshops and flowers for Mother’s Day. If you look on my website you will see new dates for spring workshops (including a workshop for making your own arrangement for your mother on Saturday 29 March) and my offers for Mother’s Day flowers (bouquets at £30 and £20 and posies at £16). I will finish this blog with a picture of a bouquet of grouped flowers in a vase which we made in a workshop about this time last year. We will be making something similar to this in my Mother’s Day workshop later this month (but in a different jug).