British flowers at the Summer Tumblr Eco-Design Fair

I had a stall at the Summer Tumblr Eco-Design Fair at the Garden Museum. It was like the Christmas fair, but summery!

I had buckets of British flowers from the garden, from a friend's garden (she let me raid it with a bucket and scissors), and from Pratley and Dennis Edwards at New Covent Garden Market. Summer is certainly the best time to buy flowers - the prices are cheaper and more things are local. You can't get outdoor-grown sweet peas in January, and if you could (like imported peonies at Christmas) they would cost a bomb!

I got lovely, small poppy seedheads from my friend - the cultivated ones at the market are great for bigger arrangements, but are too dominant for smaller ones. I also snipped some feverfew (which means protection in the language of flowers) and scented dianthus (aka carnations).

Pratley was full of boxes of beautiful flowers...but the heat was getting to some of them. Even though the market is temperature-controlled, of course if it's hot outside (it was like a furnace outside on Saturday morning at 6am) it's going to seep indoors, particularly with doors opening and closing all of the time. I bought pale blue delphiniums, powder blue scabious (which I love to buy, in case you hadn't noticed), and white, lilac, and pink larkspur. Delphiniums symbolise levity and larkspur, their annual sisters, lightness. I was told that the (boxed) larkspur weren't happy with the sun, but I took a chance and bought some - hoping that several hours in water, flower food and a cold shed would perk them up (which it did).

Dennis Edwards (where you can buy David Austin cut roses and Withypitt dahlias) had British stocks, peonies, veronica, garden phlox, sweet peas, and alchemilla mollis. I bought pale peach stocks (which were in water and seemed much healthier than the stocks I sometimes see in boxes) and veronica.

This is how to condition garden hydrangeas - upside down in lots of water. Their delicate petals tend to wilt if they are not properly conditioned, and I guess it's hard work for them to suck up water from their woody stems if you condition them the usual way. After a few hours like this, I turn them upright.

I had a calamitous morning on the day of the fair, with a nosebleed ruining my outfit and my face, and my two left feet tripping up the stairs twice. But after that, there was calm (followed by a downpour of rain).

I made lots of tall bouquets in buckets that people could cut down as they liked when they got home, rather than aqua-packed handtieds with shorter stems. I made up bunches of flowers, from gorgeous seedheads to hydrangeas that are at that pretty, pastel pink-pale green stage. I made small posies in tins and bigger posies in posh coffee tins that I've been saving for years.

And I had some plants grown from the seeds that were given to me as a thank you for doing some funeral flowers last year - these are Impatiens balsamina.

The most popular seller? My friend's poppy seedheads!

And the posh Fortnum and Mason coffee tins of scabious and veronica.

I had a wonderful day, made even nicer by family and gardener friends from the museum helping out or stopping by to chat. And at the end of the day, two lovely things happened. A Swedish woman told me that the word for carnation in Swedish is the same as the word for clove, because of the scent. Ooh, what about stocks, I asked - they smell like cloves too. She smelled some stocks and smiled - oh yes.

Then a family bought a plant to give to a friend, and were going for a tea in the cafe and picking up the impatiens later. I was about to start packing away, but I had a small bucket with larkspur trimmings. So I made a posy with these and tied it with yellow ribbon. When they came back to pick up the plant, I gave the posy to their little girl. The shocked look on her face reminded me of when I went to Dickens and Jones (an old House of Fraser on Regent's Street) with my mother when I was a little girl, and a sales assistant gave me two perfume samples, which I thought were real bottles of perfume. At the stall, the girl's mother said, "Oh! You look like a flower girl," and the girl said a shy "Thank you" to me.

And that's what flowers are for.

Blue Patch Christmas fair

I did another Christmas fair a few weeks into December. Jane and Julia of Blue Patch invited me to join them at their Herne Hill sustainable fair, after seeing my flowers at Diggin' Design.

It was a lovely day, but much colder - I think we had lost feeling in our fingers and toes by the end of the fair! I focused on Christmas wreaths this time - making traditional, decorated pine wreaths (all British pine, of course), and various foliage wreaths (with British moss and mostly British foliage).

I also made candle tablecentres and a few tin posies. Foliage and flowers were nearly all British, with the exception of the snowy thistles, gold-painted waxflower, and silver brunia. The marshmallowy chrysanthemum blooms were popular, as were the tulips and heather, and they were all British.

The loveliest part of the day was when a mother and daughter decided to buy a wreath made with three kinds of moss, decorated with a few snowy thistles and white heather. I don't know whether they knew that moss is the symbol of maternal love in the language of flowers.

A few details from the day - I love working with this beauty!

And finally, I got to see what two of the wreaths looked like in situ - both Julia and Jane sent photos of their beautifully-dressed front doors!

Diggin' Design: a sustainable Christmas Fair

The Diggin' Design fair at the Garden Museum bade a gentle goodbye to November, and a Christmassy welcome to December with its mince pies, wrapping paper, and woolly hats. There were so many stalls - I managed to do a quick tour before the fair got busy - with many beautiful things that you can't find on the high street.

The illustrators and designers who created cards, other stationary, and textiles were incredible. I didn't see Liz Temperley, the artist behind Blank Inside, but her friend kindly managed the stall and seemed to do a great job of selling the work! You can see her with Liz's products on the left in the photo below.

The two men at the Supermarche Studio were so friendly and enthusiastic about their work, which was so cool itself, I went back later and bought some London wildlife cards. And Sophie Richardson's pretty teapots will have made wonderful presents for some lucky people! 

There were filo mince pies being baked in the Garden Museum cafe, and carol singers entertaining us in the afternoon. They sang a song that I recognise from Love Story, when Jenny is teaching a choir of children, but I've forgotten the name of it. I had a good view of them from my stall.

I shared a stall with Annie, who works at the museum on different days from me (so we'd never met before). She chatted to me as we sat at our stalls, and she looked ever so peaceful as she knitted for most of the day. I felt like I too should have been industrious and brought work with me!

As for me, it was lovely to promote my flowers, especially as these were all British. There was a lot of surprise that all of the flowers were British, and much smelling of the rosemary, freesias and paperwhites.

I chatted to a lady with a tiny garden who would like to grow cutting flowers - I recommended two Twitter colleagues' books: Georgie Newbury's The Flower Farmer's Year and Louise Curley's The Cut Flower Patch. She bought a posy to take to a dinner she was going to and, in true sustainable style, declined a biodegradable hessian bag in favour of carrying the jar of flowers in her hand.

A little girl visited the stall with her father and shyly asked me how to make "that" (pointing at my favourite handtied). I explained the process, in simple, pidgin toddler style. I like to think she will go off and collect flowers in the spring to make a posy.

The day was made better as I had just received new business cards and stickers from Wendy Bell - the most wonderful designer (in keeping with the design theme of the fair!), who I've worked with in the past and who I can't recommend enough. She's a delight to work with, incredibly intuitive and creative, and got the essence of both my desert island flower (the forget-me-not) and me down to a tee.

This is south London

Last weekend, people from Lewisham and neighbouring boroughs came together for the Chinbrook Meadows art and craft fair. The fair ran for both days, and what glorious, sunny days they were. Children laughed and ran, adults and toddlers played football together, a lovely lady called Jo Jo bought chips for everyone to share, and music was provided by Alioune and his African drum.

There were stalls selling homemade jewellery and greeting cards designed by Ved Yilkan of V Seven Designs, photography by Lisa Hafey of Lemonade and Lamingtons Art, African clothing and art by Alioune and Helena Samb of SAMB Arts, as well as a charity tombola for Dementia UK, face painting, and portrait painting.

V Seven Designs

Lemonade and Lamingtons Art

And I did a flower stall for the first time! I absolutely loved it. I enjoyed the learning experience of seeing what people liked and what they were less keen on (everybody likes roses, especially when co-ordinating colours are massed together.) I also learnt which cut flowers can stand the sun (single stem roses, chrysanthemums, hypercium berries) and which are a bit more delicate (dahlias, spray roses) – I was spraying all of the flowers with water every hour, which prompted one man to nickname me 'The Reviver'! I made my first buttonhole with a Blizzard rose on Saturday, which reassures me that I'll be able to do the same for my friend's wedding in October!

One lady wanted small posies for her kitchen, and another wanted roses and flowering mint to thank her friend for babysitting. Jo Jo kindly bought all of my remaining bouquets and posies at the end of Saturday for herself and various people at the fair, including Carol who organised the fair and had been working flat out in the cafe all day.

Friends from Chislehurst, Bromley, Croydon and Blackheath came to visit me – one minded my stall while I ran home to get sundries that I’d forgotten, and another entertained us with his drumming and footballing skills.

I’m grateful to them, Carol for organising the event, and the other stall holders I met. But the biggest thank you goes to my dad, who helped me enormously, took lots of photos, and was pretty good on the drum.

The day after the London riots last week, people from towns that had been badly affected grouped together to clear up the mess and help locals restore their businesses and homes. Young people in particular wanted to prove that they should not be stereotyped as trouble-makers in a broken society. Lewisham at 9am on Tuesday did not seem ‘broken’ at all. And last weekend, it was idyllic. If only the world had seen these pictures instead.