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.

Iris Day and the prettiest ranunculus

As we woke up (or not for those who stayed up all night) to the news of the election result on Friday and felt whatever feelings the results brought up for us personally, across the Channel, preparations were under way for something celebratory.

The iris is the mascot of Brussels, apparently, and so at the start of May each year, they have a festival to celebrate Iris Day. I think it fell on the Friday this year, with the festival on the Saturday and Sunday. I only heard about Iris Day on Friday night, and by coincidence I had been on the hunt for irises earlier that day! I wanted white ones but couldn't find them anywhere and so got purple ones from a florist.

I had ordered flowers from The Flower Union, a florist and grower of flowers just outside London, which they kindly delivered to the Garden Museum where I was to made a pedestal for a post-wedding party. I brought along ivy, hesperis and wild roses from the garden, and the irises (which were the only flowers that were specifically requested).

The Flower Union provided beautiful ranunculus in the softest pink and yellow shades, alstromeria, apple blossom, lilac, dainty white orlaya, viburnum, and pittosporum.

The flowers are each so beautiful. And the scent of roses started to fill up the windy porch.

There were a few stems left over, so I made up a little posy of ranunculus and hesperis to sit alongside the cake. The cake is safely hidden away in its box here, but I was given a sneak peak at it - it was a work of art! The mother of the bride had hand-painted birds and flowers all over the tiered cake.

This is the sort of wedding party I adore - family were helping set things up in the morning and it was lovely to meet some of them and to see how special the wedding and their family were to them.

Cherry Blossom Boy

I keep banging on about this, but plenty of boys and men like flowers too. So it was a joy to do these flowers for a wonderful man who's a writer and an artist. His vase went perfectly with the pink cherry blossom.

It was lovely to use cherry blossom while it flowered for such a short time. It's amazing stuff - you see nothing, then tiny buds for weeks, then suddenly there's pink blossom everywhere. It means impermanence, the European Victorian meaning taken from the Asian countries where the trees originated from.

I used garden spiraea for the first time. It made me think of Maggie Smith in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. 

"In the best tradition of my floral arrangements they look like the poles of a wigwam, so I go and see if I can cadge a bit of backing from Mrs Belcher. 'Are you using this?' I say, picking up a bit of mouldy old fern. 'I certainly am. I need every bit of my spiraea. It gives it body.'"

I used some more at the Garden Museum. It will probably only last until the end of the week, and then the petals will fall like pink confetti. That's the thing about impermanence - it encourages us to enjoy things while they are around.

Floral cupcakes and toxic daffodils

I did some flowers for the Garden Museum's cart, which is part of the museum's stand at the Edible Garden Show at Alexandra Palace this weekend (you can still buy tickets for tomorrow!). I bought some edible (if they are grown organically) flowers from Alagar at New Covent Garden Market, to mix with the herbs and bulbs that are in the museum's cutting garden.

I learnt yesterday, during Jonathon Moseley's weekly #flowertalk hour, that tulips petals are edible. Unfortunately, the tulips in the cutting garden are not ready yet, but there are loads of daffodils. Daffodils are definitely not edible - apparently, some people have been getting them mixed up with spring onions as they are often sold in the same section in supermarkets. Don't mix them up! But as the flowers are so seasonal and there is an abundance right now, it didn't seem right to leave them out of the display.

I wanted to make some rosemary bowls to use as bases for a couple of arrangements. I reused two plastic plant bowls and reused floral foam (cutting out the horrible bits and turning it upside down), cutting the foam into a rounded shape and taping it in place. Then I covered the two bowls with rosemary. There is loads of it in the cutting garden, and it's certainly edible - the staff in the Garden Cafe use the herbs in their cooking. I stuck double-sided tape around each plant bowl, and then placed a large rubber band around the centre. I cut the rosemary into similar-sized lengths that just came higher than the bowl, and added them close together around the bowl, using the rubber band to keep them in place. Once the bowls were covered in rosemary, I tied raffia (again reused) around the centres to cover the elastic bands.

I left one looking quite green and natural, with lots of edible sage and lavender from the cutting garden, and a few inedible daffodils. For the other, I wanted to make a giant cupcake, so I used layers of pink and yellow carnations (which would be edible and scented if grown organically!) and more sage.

I had been saving carefully broken eggshells (using a knife along the very top, rather than tapping the egg on its side) with the intention of making a "bird's nest" planted arrangement as Isabelle Palmer does in her wonderful book The Balcony Gardener. But I didn't trust myself to a) plant up the eggshells without breaking them or b) plant plants that would actually survive the week! So lovely gardener Liz at the Garden Museum took them off my hands and returned them filled with wild strawberry plants.

Liz wasn't due to work on Thursday morning, when I was getting the flowers ready in the museum's knot garden, but she happened to walk past and see me, and decided to join me and help. She found me some violas (more edible flowers) and some mixed planted gifts that she had made up earlier. She also cleared out the flower cart so I could fill it with the new flower display. She also found me a flowering herb called cardamine that I had never heard of before, but whose delicate pink flowers grace the garden in front of the museum.

I crumpled some chicken wire into two metal buckets and threaded lilac, quince blossom, the stems of the poor beheaded carnations, and a few leftover carnations into the gaps.

And I made a few posies with daffodils (definitely toxic), snowflakes (also toxic, I suspect), and edible lavender, rosemary, sage, and cardamine (the leaves are edible, I think).

You can buy edible flowers from here and here - which is the safest bet if you aren't sure whether something is edible or how it was grown! Later in the year, there are lots of edible flowers, from roses to borage to lavender flowers. Another reason to look forward to the summer.

Mothering Sunday in the Garden Museum

I made some posies yesterday for the Garden Museum's Mother's Day treat - a personal Q&A with Matthew Biggs (of Gardener's Question Time), cream tea in the lovely cafe, and a bunch of flowers and a planted gift to take home.

The beautiful cutting garden is choc-a-block with different narcissi, hellebores, and the promise of tulips.

I think this daffodil is called Pink Pride - what a wonderful name! (And on a side note, I was delighted to see Paul Harfleet interviewed in the Guardian yesterday. His Pansy Project is one of the loveliest and most peaceful acts of defiance I've heard of.)

I filled buckets full of spring flowers, mixing tulips. and sweet-smelling hyacinths and genista (broom) with the daffodils.

Once I'd finished making the bunches, I went to see Liz, one of the museum's talented and dedicated gardeners.

She had finished planting up gifts for mothers/children to take - florists' favourite Narcissus 'Erlicheer' along with violets and something else...ivy, maybe?

She was writing labels for the gifts when I came over. I admired her shiny new hand trowel!

I took some pictures of the knot garden and the spring bulbs that have flowered or are on their way.

There are primroses too - the perfect flower for Mother's Day because they symbolise childhood!