DIY Wedding Workshops

This summer I have worked on a few DIY weddings. These are fantastic fun. It involves me working with the lead flower person (this is usually the mother or father of the bride, or the bride herself, or perhaps one of the bridesmaids) to plan the wedding flowers (design, colour scheme, containers etc) and also to source the flowers they would like to use. Then I run a workshop the day before the wedding to help a small team make the arrangements. In this blog, I am showing you pictures from Eden and Phiroze’s wedding. We ran the workshop in Phiroze’s parents’ garage in Nether Edge in Sheffield (set up as a workspace). Here is the team (Eden with two of her bridesmaids, together with two family friends) getting to grips with preparing some of the flowers.

As you can see the colour scheme was pink and white. Phiroze’s parents had sourced some wonderful flowers from the Sheffield Flower Market, including these exquisite light pink roses.

The idea of the workshop is that I show people how to make the different things and then provide help and guidance as they make them. First of all we made 6 posies for the bridesmaids. We used gerberas with gypsophila and a little greenery. These were made using a parallel hand-tying method which works very well with gerberas. We finished them off with lace and white ribbon – really pretty.

Next we made lots and lots of buttonholes. These were made with a single orchid head backed up with a couple of loops of bear grass. It was all held together with florists’ green tape. They were very effective and not too difficult to make.

Then I moved on to help Eden make her own bouquet. This was going to be pretty big using lots of roses with a little gypsophila and greenery around the edge. Eden made it using a spiralled hand-tying method. This is quite a difficult thing to do with no previous experience….but with one-to-one guidance Eden made a truly wonderful bouquet. Here I am helping her, and here she is with it finished. Spectacular!

The final thing we did was to decorate these lovely white birdcages which would make the table centres along with a few roses in pretty jars. We used beautiful pure white orchids and ivy, attached with wire, for the decoration and they looked really striking.

I am very grateful to Eden and Phiroze, and also Lloyd Bunting, the professional photographer, for giving me permission to use a few of the official wedding photographs so you can see how everything turned out. Have a look at Lloyd’s website to see further examples of his work by clicking here: http://www.lloydbunting.co.uk/  First of all, here is Eden walking down the aisle with her parents – I think her bouquet looks absolutely beautiful.The edge of greenery works really well in giving some definition to the bouquet against her white dress.

Next you can see a close up of a buttonhole on a jacket.

Then, here are Eden and Phiroze together, first in the church and then in the grounds at Wortley Hall where they had their reception.

The next picture shows how the posies looked with the bridesmaids – so pretty, and so lovely with their pink dresses.

Here is the whole wedding party – this picture shows how the flowers pull everything together by giving a consistency of colour and design.

Finally, here is a black and white picture of the flowers we made to put in a bike basket and a pair of wellingtons to welcome the guests to Wortley Hall.

The DIY wedding workshops have been really successful. They are a wonderful, bonding activity on the day before the wedding, and the workshop participants feel a real sense of pride in the arrangements they produce. It is hard work though, and there is a lot to do in a limited time period. Part of my job is to make sure everything is made in time! This is what Alison, Phiroze’s mother, wrote to me just after the workshop:

Many thanks again to you - I think you took them through it and helped them relax a bit at a point where things were beginning to get fraught so it was brilliant AND the flowers are beautiful.

If you would like to arrange your own wedding flowers with some help from me, please get in touch. I can talk to you about different models of support, whether it is just a bit of advice, or helping you buy flowers and then running a workshop for you.

The Dutch Flower Auction

Last month Mike took me to Holland for a few days (it was my Christmas present). The main purpose of the trip was to visit the Flower Market at Aalsmeer, just outside Amsterdam. This is the market where most of the flowers sold in the UK and all around Europe are traded through the Dutch auction process. FloraHolland is the cooperative company which runs the trading platform. The company was set up to support its member growers from Holland and from around the world. It enables growers to bring their products to Aalsmeer where they are sold and then dispatched all over Europe.

Seeing the operation in action was a mind-blowing experience – it is a fantastic logistical triumph. I am going to try to give you a flavour of it. As we entered the building at about 6.30 in the morning, the first thing we saw was acres and acres of metal trollies which are used to transport the flowers around the massive building.

FloraHolland has members in 60 countries including Kenya, Columbia, Ethiopia, Israel, Ecuador, Italy and the UK – but it is still the case that 65% of the flowers sold are grown in the Netherlands. We took the bus from the centre of Amsterdam at about 6.00 in the morning and we passed by many flower growers with extensive greenhouses in the vicinity of the market. Very convenient for the growers, and one of the main features which strengthen the Dutch flower industry.

After the growers have harvested their products they have to prepare them for sale using standard boxes, buckets and trays supplied by FloraHolland. There are support companies who prepare the flowers airfreighted in from countries like Kenya. Growers are given lots and these are drawn every day to determine the order in which their product will be taken into the auction. The flowers are then stacked up on the trollies and sent along rails like these to be gathered together in what are called buffer zones.

From the viewing platform we could see all sorts of flowers moving along the rails and then held in the buffer zones waiting for their turn in the auction. Here you can see gypsophila, peonies, pink roses and orange roses making their way along the rails.

The lots are then put up for auction. In the early days, individual growers carried. or wheeled, their produce into the auction. The idea of the auction clock is that the circle shows a set of numbers which indicate price. Bidding starts at a high price, then the price reduces until a buyer bids for the produce at the price shown on the clock. Buyers have to hold their nerve to get the lowest price possible, without waiting too long to bid and failing to buy anything.

Today the auction clocks are projected in a room in Aalsmeer (rather like a lecture hall), and on computer screens. The clocks show a wide range of information, including price per stem, stem length, maturity, country of production and quality. Increasingly, trading takes place remotely and only 20% of the bidding takes place in the auction room at Aalsmeer.

One of the things that hit me was that virtually all the people bidding at Aalsmeer were male. I suspect that this is also true of the remote wholesale buyers since nearly all the wholesalers in Sheffield and in the New Covent Garden Flower Market are male…by comparison the large majority of florists at the retail end of the chain are female….I think there is scope for a spot of gender research here!

The next stage of the process is the most fascinating to watch. Each buyer has a numbered bay in the building where their purchases are added onto trollies. Individual workers collect trollies of flowers from the sold lots and then scoot about the building delivering the bought flowers to the individual bays. It looks just like organised chaos.

Here you can see one bay building up with different flowers.

When an order is complete all the trollies are hitched up like a little train and moved off to the place where lorries are waiting to drive the flowers to their final destination.

In Sheffield the destination is GT Flowers or Flower World just off the Parkway. Flowers start to arrive from 4.00 am – about 2 days on from when they were harvested. This is a seriously impressive operation and it made me feel very supportive of the flower wholesalers I use in Sheffield. The Dutch flower trading platform makes the flower industry work all across Europe, and it provides a trading avenue for flower crops from the developing world. If you ever go to Amsterdam, think about taking a look – it only costs 7 euros and a bus fare. You will be amazed.

Monet, Mother's Day and Killer Daffodils

My Mother's Day present from Jessie was lunch at Brasserie Zadel in Piccadilly (I could have been in Paris!) followed by a visit to the Royal Academy of Art's current exhibition - Painting the Modern Garden:

The exhibition has received ecstatic reviews, and it was absolutely wonderful. It brought together a stunning collection of paintings which celebrate gardens, flowers, growing and garden design. I especially liked the work of Monet, Kandinsky, Renoir, Klimpt and Nolde. For me the really stand out thing about the exhibition was the way it linked the painters with the gardens they had created and the canvases they painted. It was as though both were part of a seamless creative process. These pictures from the catalogue (a fabulous piece of research in its own right) capture the essence of it. The first shows Monet in his garden at Giverny and the second introduces Monty Don's interview with James Priest, the Head Gardener at Giverny.

The exhibition is not all about Monet, but the star of the show is a massive, more than room-size triptych of Monet's lily ponds. Here is a sample.

Sheffield Hallam University runs an Events Management undergraduate degree and, during March, groups of students run live events which they plan, market and deliver themselves. One group had the idea of running a flower workshop where participants would make posies for Mother's Day. I was asked to help them with the floristry part of the event. They called it A Floral Touch

The students had some really good creative ideas and they put together a thoroughly enjoyable evening. They showed the participants how to decorate jam jars in different ways and then I showed them how to make a hand-tied posy. The flowers and foliage were lovely. The flowers came from a range of supermarkets - but the students stuck to a colour scheme of pinks and white, and a limited range of flowers - roses, alstroemeria and gypsophila. The foliage was fresh and vibrant and had been gathered from the countryside. Everything looked gorgeous. The event took place in the Leopold Hotel, where the evening started off with canapes and wine. It finished with everybody carrying home a pretty posy in a unique jam jar. A great success!

Just about every floristry book I own tells me that I shouldn`t mix daffodils with other flowers, especially tulips, because the sap which exudes from the daffodils is toxic. Hmm......this is a difficulty because I like to mix up flowers in my arrangements and, at this time of year, it is hard to avoid daffodils because they are abundant and relatively cheap. So, I have conducted an experiment to see if the claim about killer daffodils is true. I took three kilner jars and put just tulips and just daffodils in two of the jars, and a mix in the third. I placed the jars in a south-facing room, but out of direct sunlight. I didn`t move them throughout the experiment, nor did I change the water. Here they are on day 1:

By day 4 the daffodils had opened up nicely and the tulips had grown a couple of inches - but there was no difference between the tulips in jar A and B.

By day 7 the tulips were all a bit taller still and all starting to leach colour. Two of the tulips in jar B were bending over, but otherwise looked pretty much the same as those in jar A

By day 10 all the tulips were looking worse for wear, but I really couldn`t see much difference between those in jar A and B. All the daffodils were ready to chuck out.

So, my broad conclusion is that exposing the tulips to daffodils doesn`t appear to make much difference to their longevity. Perhaps things would have been different if the flowers had been crammed into smaller containers with less water. But if that were the case, in normal circumstances I would have changed the water every 2-3 days. In the absence of any better evidence, I have decided to stop worrying about mixing spring flowers. On that note, here is an example of a posy of mixed spring flowers (tulips, daffodils, narcissi and ranunculus with ivy mixed in) in an up-cycled container which I made for Valentine's Day.

And, finally, another Valentine's Day gift. This time a classy little handbag made with red ranunculus, succulents and ivy. 

Handbags - new workshop

Last week I ran a new workshop for a group of friends. The idea was to make a handbag and fill it with flowers. We used an up-cycled carton which we covered with aspidistra leaves and then decorated with all sorts of materials. Then we filled the handbag with beautiful flowers. I was really pleased with the results. This workshop provides a great opportunity to be creative and develop your own style. Here are some close-ups of the handbags. This one has a bit of glitz in the handle and a pretty silver bow.

This next one is rather romantic and whimsical.

I like the way this one uses ivy leaves at the top of the bag and I like the candy-striped handle.

This last one has some lovely detail on the handbag itself.

Last week I also took the opportunity to revamp my woodland log. I added some new dried materials to it and replaced the succulents. I also added some fresh flowers which appear to grow magically out of the log. Then I placed it in our porch to greet visitors to the house. It is hard to capture the shape and all the detail on the log, but here is my best shot.

I haven`t yet offered the woodland log or the handbag workshop as an open workshop yet.They both include some clever ideas for construction and produce individual, slightly quirky results. I really enjoy them both and so do the participants. The great thing about the log is that it lasts for ages (I made mine originally last May). After a bit of thought, I`ve decided to run a handbag workshop this spring and then I will add a woodland log to the autumn schedule. Please have a look at the information page of my website to see details of up-coming workshop dates.