The ending of The Snowman

Last year I wrote a little piece on Christmas Eve, inspired by Ian McMillan's beautiful article about his memories of Christmas with his father. When I read it last year, I was aware that it would be my last Christmas Eve with my friend Helen who I met most years for a pre-Christmas drink.

This morning I woke up early, and felt a gentle sadness that this is our first Christmas without her. I've written about her illness and my memories of her. The knowing but not quite believing she's gone is something that has marked the months since her death. I made a heart-shaped, mossy wreath and took it to her grave this morning, and I'm meeting her mum later in the cafe where Helen and I used to meet (moss symbolises maternal love in the language of flowers). I haven't been there since she died, and I think a part of me will be expecting her to walk through the door.

I'm sad I won't see her smile, her pretty writing on my Christmas card, the sparkle in her blue eyes when she decided to have a kir royale or a mimosa instead of a coffee or tea. I'm sad we won't wait for the bus together at the same bus stop where we used to wait when we worked together as teenagers. I'm sad that instead of wrapping up a present for Helen yesterday, I was wrapping presents for her sweet nieces who've never had a Christmas without her.

Last year I watched The Snowman like I do every year, but the ending had me in tears like it never had before. It's funny - we did a play of The Snowman at primary school and I played the boy, but that was back when I didn't really understand the ending.

There's comfort in crying about people you've loved and lost, and I've already cried a few times over the last week when I've talked about Helen. I was lucky to have had her as a friend for so long. I felt her love a few months ago when I had a big birthday, and I am sure I will feel her love this Christmas. I am lucky that I am still close to her family, and I can share the love with them. And I am lucky to have other friends and family who have made me feel so loved over the last few months.

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, full of joy and love.

Autumn blues (and pinks)

It's officially autumn. I was wearing two layers at the weekend, it was dark when I got home from long days at work at the start of the month, and I'm pretty sure I saw frost on the grass earlier this week.

But as it warmed up this week, I could enjoy the late roses and pink sedum. And butterflies have come out dancing again.

I know some people love autumn - the friends I visited last weekend were happy it's autumn now, and last week when I went to a Write and Shine workshop, a lot of the writers seemed excited or happy or at least gently optimistic about the autumn equinox. When we went round the table, each saying one word that came to our mind when we thought of autumn, I said "sad".

I feel blue when the days get shorter and colder and darker. I feel sad when I see the summer flowers shutting up shop for the year. And my heart sinks a little when I see the Halloween and Christmas things in the shops before the summer is over.

The photos above were taken at Selfridges on a beautiful warm day in August. Christmas comes very early to Oxford Street each year, but it's still strange to see. The David Bowie bauble is pretty cool if you have money to burn. I am sentimental though, so my favourite Christmas decorations are the oldest ones with the fondest memories attached to them.

Today is the big Macmillan coffee morning. This time last year I went to Helen's parents' house where Helen and her mother ran a coffee morning as they had done on previous years. But last year's was poignant - the beautiful young woman in the green Macmillan t-shirt serving us tea, coffee and cake had been diagnosed with terminal cancer six months earlier, and would leave us seven months later. The last few weeks, several of her photos and videos have suddenly brought me to tears. My grief is cyclical and I feel like I'm back at disbelief and deep sadness.

The last few Septembers, Helen's mother and I met at the local allotments and bought dahlias. I love the bundle of dahlias wrapped in newspaper - it reminds me of a passage from the late Jane Packer's book, where she remembers her grandfather bringing allotment dahlias for her grandmother. Last September, I gave flowers for Helen - Darcey David Austin roses (named after her fellow dancer Darcey Bussell) and sunflowers with British lisianthus - and a smaller posy for her mother. I love the deep pink-reds and yellows of the season. The colours almost banish the blues of the shorter days. This year her mother and I meant to go to the allotment open day, but life got in the way.

Tomorrow I'm going on the first Twilight Walk organised by both St Christopher's Hospice and Greenwich and Bexley Hospice, walking around Greenwich and Blackheath. St Christopher's looked after Vicky as an outpatient for a few years and as an inpatient for the last five weeks of her life. Vicky's fundraising page is here. St Christopher's also looked after Helen as an outpatient and at home. Helen's fundraising page is here. And Greenwich and Bexley Hospice is where I've received bereavement counselling for the past year (as I'd worked as a bereavement counsellor at St Christopher's for three years, I couldn't have counselling there because too many people knew me). My sessions are about to come to end, and I'm utterly grateful to the hospice, the bereavement service, and my incredible counsellor for the support they've given me during this wretched year. You can donate to Greenwich and Bexley here.

I hope you have lovely weekends and the sun shines for you.

Hearts and dreams

I haven't posted much lately, although I do have some flowery photos to share.

This morning I had a lovely dream about Helen. She still had cancer but she was so joyful and I talked to her after she'd been cycling in one of the royal parks in London (not something Helen did in real life). I have been thinking about her more than usual this week, so this dream was an incredible comfort to me.

I didn't share this photo here before, but I will now - it's the one Dawn Selway took as I delivered Helen's bridal flowers two and half years ago. Dawn is one quick photographer...but as I managed to hide my face in time, I guess my reflexes are pretty sharp, too!

I made a floral heart for Helen's church back in June. It was all homegrown British flowers, before the heatwave scorched half of them. There were scented roses and sweet peas, strawflowers, honeysuckle, and flowering hebe, Even though I'm not religious, I appreciate the fact that Helen was, and that her faith was personal but strong. Taking my heart to her church felt like a way to connect to her.

Today I visited Clayton at Varley and Varley's beautiful new premises in Beckenham, and I took a delivery of flowers. Scented roses with the fantastic name 'Lady Killer', red snapdragons, fluffy grasses, and some British flowers and foliage: yellow dill, pittosporum, and dark physocarpus. It wasn't intentional, but now I can see it was the sort of arrangement I would have done for Vicky - those reds and those textures.

It was nice to see the place where families and friends can come to talk to their funeral director, at a particularly difficult time of their lives. We talked for a while about our work and the people important to us. He asked me about Helen, and we remembered Vicky (it would have been her 35th birthday today). I still find it astonishing and bitterly unfair that I met Vicky on the night of the US election in 2016 and met Helen the morning after, but both of them are gone now.

Sweetness and misanthropy

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, my little sister has had a difficult year. It's horrendously tough for everyone - you have battles and tension almost every hour of every day, and a constant worry about the future.

I'm off work for a while, partly because it was getting too hard to do bereavement work when I was grieving for Helen, and partly because I need to help out more with my sister (and it's been hard to grieve because of the situation with her as well). This morning she was aggressive and anxious and her mood would change in a few seconds. But eventually she sat down and watched me while I went outside and cut a bucket of flowers. I'm growing strawflowers for the first time, which is exciting.

She let me sit near her arranging them in a couple of vases, and she even added a few cosmos herself.

Then I made a little posy and she modelled it for me before hiding away - she's more camera-shy than me. I hope the gentle, sweet scent of the roses and sweet peas is as calming for her as it is for me. I know she gets overwhelmed by noises and people because of her autism, but she does appear to be soothed by some scents. We used to go to Nymans in Sussex, and she seemed to love the rose garden there.

In other news, only one of my cornflower seeds successfully made it into a flowering plant. It's not blue, but hot pink, which I think would have pleased Vicky as much as Helen.

Thistles are growing stronger this year. There's a quiz I do every few months, and I get different results each time, even though the questions remain the same. I often get "misanthropy" as one of my qualities, and thistles symbolise this. The association between thistles and misanthropy is written about beautifully in the novel The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, which Helen bought me five years ago. I'd never heard of it, but I read it after my ex and I broke up. The ending made me cry. As Mandy Kirkby says in her reference book, also called The Language of Flowers, "to brush against [a thistle] is to risk a sharp wound, and to tread on it is a painful experience indeed...There is no doubt as to the thistle's intention: stay away from me." She goes on to describe how the thistle became an emblem for Scotland - its defiance and durability was seen as a strength.

British Flowers Week 2018: Yellow cosmos

My computer is being mended, so I can't use it to write or to upload or edit photos, and yesterday turned out to be a pretty awful day. So I didn't post as planned.

But it's a new day now, and even though I'm just using a camera phone and filters, and I'm posting using my mobile, I want to share pictures of my first yellow cosmos.

I grew cosmos a few years ago, and it amazed me how a £2 pack of seeds could produce buckets of flowers all through summer and right into November. They are such versatile flowers and the movement they add is wonderful - they dance around in the garden and the vase. The only problem I sometimes have is the pollen dropping - but that can be remedied by a quick, gentle spray with hairspray or artist's fixative.

I think I first saw yellow cosmos when Mike Rogers posted photos of his Xanthos cosmos and I thought pale yellow would make a nice change from white and pink, and yellow seems to amplify the Victorian meaning of cosmos: joy. You can read Mike's blog here.

So here are my yellow cosmos with pink sweet peas, in an old diffuser bottle. I love pink and yellow - it's such a cheerful combination.

British Flowers Week 2018: Canterbury bells

After a couple of years of nurturing and patience, my Canterbury bells, which I grew from Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants seeds, flowered this year.

I used campanula for Mother's Day a few years ago - you can read about their symbolism here, and why they are a lovely flower to give to someone.

And here they are now with scented roses and pink escallonia from the garden.

British Flowers Week 2018: Not quite orange blossom

Today's post is about philadelpus, also known as mock orange because it has an incredible scent like orange blossom. It grows tall and it looks beautiful against a clear blue sky. It also looks gorgeous massed together in an arrangement.

It looks beautiful on its own or mixed with a couple of other colours. In the picture below it's with physocarpus.

Close up:

Here it is with delicate nigella (which I no longer have this year after a fox or two jumped all over them...I was not impressed!):

I wanted to use a Snapple bottle because of the Clueless line: "I gave him my lemon Snapple and I took his sucky Italian roast." The character Cher uses her unwanted thermos of coffee to try to set up two teachers on a coffee date.

This was for British Flowers Week a few years ago - with white alliums, jasmine, and ammi. The beautiful jar is orange blossom honey from Tiptree. And the lovely scent of mock orange and jasmine overpowers the not-so-nice scent of alliums!

British Flowers Week 2018: Sweet peas

British Flowers Week starts today, so I thought I'd try to post every day this week. Starting off with a small gardening victory.

I met up with Sara from My Flower Patch and her husband when they came to London for a few days back in March. It was snowing and cold so we found a nice tapas restaurant in Bloomsbury and stayed there in the warm all afternoon. She told me about the planning and organising ahead of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show - Sara is a member of Flowers From The Farm and they had their first stand at the show in May. I didn't envy her - it sounded like so much hard work. It paid off in the end as they won a gold medal!

When Sara asked me what I was growing this year, I told her I'd planned to sow sweet peas but I had left it too late. She told me a tip (which I think Gill Hodgson, who founded Flowers from the Farm, had passed on to her) which was to sow them in the small pots you get from a takeaway, on damp kitchen paper or cotton wool pads, and keep them indoors until they germinate. She said if I was lucky I would have flowers in September!

So the week after that, I washed all the pots after a Friday night thali from the local Sri Lankan grocery, I lay folded strips of kitchen paper inside each one, added a few drops of water so they were damp, and spaced out a few sweet pea seeds inside every pot. Then put the lids on and placed them on a window sill above a radiator. I checked them each day, and if they were drying up I added a few more drops of water. It was kind of like growing cress on blotting paper at school, except these were covered. And I never got excited about eating cress, whereas I do get excited about cutting sweet peas for a vase.

After a week, most of the seeds had germinated. I planted them in small, tall pots.

Fast forward three months and I have my first sweet peas flowering! The stems are a bit stumpy; unlike the amazing long stems I've grown before from winter sowings.

But they're pretty and they smell gorgeous.

The day after Helen died, I took some flowers round for her parents and nieces. I had cut some hellebores, apple mint, and bluebells from the garden and bought British sweet peas, narcissi, and tulips. I hoped the gentle scent would be comforting and not overwhelming or even irritating. Fortunately, Helen's mother said it was nice to have flowers again because they'd had to throw out the wilted ones which were given when Helen was ill.

It's hard to find the motivation to do things when you're troubled or when you're grieving. When I visited Helen's parents after the funeral, her mother told me that she didn't feel like gardening, and I could really empathise. I asked if she'd like some plants because I had too many, and she said OK. So the next time I went round, I took some sweet peas and cosmos. I went round last week and saw the sweet peas are in a beautiful homemade wigwam, and the cosmos are in the flower bed. Busy Lizzies are planted up in containers hanging from the fence, and the garden is looking lovely and loved. We talked about Helen and there's sadness and anger and confusion and guilt. But there's tenderness and tiny pieces of joy as well.

Sweet peas mean delicate pleasures in the Victorian language of flowers, but I've just seen that they also symbolise departure. This feels especially poignant this year. I also have another friend in mind - I don't want to name them in case they don't want me to, but I know they're going through a hard time now and sweet peas are special flowers for them.

For all of the healing these flowers can bring, I'm glad I managed to grow them. So thank you for the nudge, Sara.