Winter Weddings

As the nights start to draw in, my thoughts are already moving to winter weddings. What a romantic time to get married. Instead of light, airy summer flowers, this is the time to use darker tones, perhaps contrasted with white. This blog tells the story of Fiona and Jonathan’s wedding which took place at the end of November last year – on the first day of winter snow! They chose a colour scheme of white and deep reds for their flowers. To stop them looking too Christmassy we also added some blue as a striking contrast. It all starts with me making the arrangements in my workshop. Here is Fiona’s bouquet ready to go. Fiona would be wearing an ivory dress and I made a large bouquet for her with lots of snowy white flowers – gorgeous avalanche roses, alstroemeria, gypsophila and veronica. Then the blue sea holly and blue anemones (just lovely at this time of year), together with the red hypericum berries provided the contrast.

Her four bridesmaids would be wearing long navy dresses and I made their posies with a more restricted colour palette. The predominant colour was dusky pink created with some of my favourite flowers – astrantia, sweet william and wax flower (and some pink alstroemeria). I also added in small pops of blue and white to harmonise with Fiona’s flowers and their navy dresses.

Jonathon was brave with his choice of buttonholes for the men – he wanted them to be like mini posies to match Fiona and her bridesmaids. I made these with a rose, sea holly, wax flower, gypsophila, sweet william and a little foliage. Everything – bouquet, posies and buttonholes were tied with lace and string.

All the decorations for the venue were made in different sized kilner jars. The flowers I used were similar to those used for the wedding party – but I also added in some kaffir lilies and snapdragons (the very last from the English growing season) as well as some pink veronica. Here are just a few ready to go.

Once I had delivered the flowers for Fiona and her bridesmaids to her house (where they were all very relaxed drinking buck’s fizz and getting their hair done) I drove on to their wedding venue – Halifax Hall in Sheffield. This is a splendid boutique hotel (run by the University of Sheffield) which was originally a Victorian steel baron’s mansion.

I set up the flowers on the registrar's table:

In the entrance hall:

On the drinks table:

In the dining room:

I also met up with Jonathan and his best man and pinned on their buttonholes – don`t they look wonderful! 

This is often the end of the story for me as I exit before the guests start to arrive. It is as though I have set the stage and placed the props, but I never get to see the show! Luckily I was given lots of pictures taken by the official photographer Mark Tierney. He took some really good photographs of the flowers (please see his website to see more of his work - http://www.tierneyphotography.co.uk/ ) as you will now see. First of all, here is Fiona with her bouquet (with a snowy backdrop!):

And the bridesmaids, followed by a great close up of the flowers in their posies.

Then here is the registrar’s table with Fiona and Jonathan, followed with a picture of them in the grounds of Halifax Hall.

Finally I will finish with a couple of pictures of people in the dining room surrounded by flowers.

What a great time of year for an atmospheric wedding!

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.