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.

Scent to sleep: Blue Jasmine

I was given a jasmine and lilac scented diffuser as a gift at the start of the year. The scent has been lovely, especially on warm mornings.

It's reaching the end now, so soon I will be using the bottle for tiny flowers. But before that happens, I was able to use the jasmine that's been flowering for a few weeks to make up a posy of leftovers from yesterday's flower stall.

How beautiful is the powder blue scabious? It reminds me of a Degas ballerina.

The larkspur trimmings began to flower in the heat and looked so pretty.

The poppy seedhead is so smooth and nature's design on the top is wonderful.

And that jasmine.

Jasmine smells amazing late in the evening and early in the morning.

The jasmine in both the diffuser and the posy scent me to sleep last night.

Shakespeare's birthday

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet

As well as being St George's Day, 23 April is also the day that Shakespeare was born. It's the day he died as well, apparently. So here's an arrangement from the archive, before I half-killed my poor David Austin rose bush! A hat box with scented William Shakespeare 2000 roses, Sweet Williams, clematis and jasmine.

Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey will always be my favourite Romeo and Juliet, so here's the balcony scene in Zeffirelli's 1968 film. It's the play that taught me to love language and Shakespeare when we studied it at school - girls would walk around the playground reciting this scene off by heart just because we loved how it sounded!

Romeo: What shall I swear by?

Juliet: Do not swear at all;

Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,

Which is the god of my idolatry,

And I'll believe thee.

Harvest flowers at the Garden Museum

I've recently started doing some flowers for the Garden Museum. I wrote about the London museum in March, when I visited it for the first time - it's such a lovely place, it's a joy to do flowers there now.

This week, the flower cart needed to look especially bright and beautiful, so I cut, collected, and foraged as much as I could: conkers from Greenwich Park, purple grasses and pretty ivy trails from Hither Green Station embankment (thank you Lewisham Gardens for the invite), and berried ivy, mystery tree foliage, jasmine, cotoneaster, lavender, sedum, zinnias, cosmos, borage and nicotiana from the garden. I also cut a bucketful of prettiness from the museum's cutting garden: rosemary, euonymus, more zinnias, verbena, grasses, Michaelmas daisies (appropriately, since it is almost Michaelmas), tagetes, and a beautiful blue flower that I still don't know the name of. Finally, I bought sunflowers, celosia and carmanthus for the bold "autumn flowers" and artichokes, radishes, peppers and fresh dates for the "pretty harvest".

With some help from a kind assistant, we made a couple of wooden boxes, and drilled holes in half of the conkers. I wired some of these conkers and made a garland with the others. I mossed up a wire wreath frame, and decorated it with conkers, dried hydrangea heads (thank you Sara Willman for prompting me to dry my flowers), sedum and wired radishes. I also made a garland with berried ivy, mystery foliage, hydrangeas, sedum and snowberries.

And today I put it all together, along with more arrangements for the cart.

One of the loveliest things about doing flowers at the museum is the visitors; many stop and watch and have a chat about the flowers and why they are visiting. It's wonderful.

Today a few people commented on the conkers, saying that children don't seem to play with conkers anymore, so it was nice to see so many of them!

Sunflowers: reminding us that despite the cold nights, it's not winter yet!

Carers Week 2014 and the story of Genova

This week, in between last week's Volunteers' Week and next week's British Flowers Week, is Carers Week. It is an awareness campaign to draw attention to carers in the UK and the unpaid, vital work they do, which is estimated to save the economy £119 billion each year. Several organisations have worked together for this year's Carers Week: Age UK, Carers UK, Carers Trust, Independent Age, Macmillan, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Multiple Sclerosis Society, Parkinson's UK, Skills for Care, and Stroke Association.

I volunteer as a counsellor at two organisations - one is a local carers association, and the other (pending the results of my role play assessment last week) will be at a local hospice. I will be taking flowers and seedlings to the carers association next week as a belated gift for Carers Week and in celebration of British Flowers Week.

Today I took some posies to the hospice. The receptionist, who did her volunteer training with me, was delighted with them. She could smell the roses (which won't last long in this heat, but hey - I'd rather these than unscented supermarket flowers) and I could smell the mint as I took them out of their packaging for her. Hopefully they brought a smile to some people at the hospice - carers, patients, workers and volunteers.

I used lots of wonderfully-scented herbs: pineapple, lavender, orange and Moroccan mints, white and lavender-pink flowering lemon thyme, and lemon balm (aka Melissa). I also used the first of the jasmine flowers, as well as sweet peas, nigella flowers and seedpods, cornflowers, roses, hot pink escallonia, and my first dahlia - a pale rose flower which I bought from Shannon's Garden Centre partly for its name 'Genova'. Genova is a film by Michael Winterbottom about a widower (played by Colin Firth; it's my second-favourite Colin Firth role after his portrayal of a grieving partner in A Single Man) dealing with his bereavement and his daughters'. It wasn't planned, but it seems fitting that my first 'Genova' dahlia has gone to a hospice.

Great British Flowers

I want to wax lyrical about the fantastic British flowers I got for two events that I did at the start of autumn. I bang on about using local, seasonal flowers, at least in the warmer months, and hopefully these photos demonstrate why.

Firstly, there was the pick-your-own bucket of flowers at a local flower farm. We picked a stunning collection of white and pink flowers for the London Zoo wedding, with some blues for the 500 Days of Summer photoshoot, and some foliage, grasses and seedpods. The delightful Jen at Blooming Green, near Maidstone in Kent, gave me the metal bucket that is their ‘measure’, and we filled it with as much as we could gently cram in. Cutting the flowers from the acre plot is a joy in itself, although it was a scorcher of a day so we had to work fast so that the flowers in the bucket wouldn’t wilt before we’d even left the farm! I separated them out into different buckets when I got home – Blooming Green provide two plastic buckets to take the cut flowers home, but I’ll take a few of my own next time, as it’s a bit of a squeeze, and things like dill and sweet peas tend to get tangled up with everything else.

Secondly, there was the special delivery from Cornwall! Tregothnan, which is famous for being the first farm in Britain to grow tea, also grows cut flowers and foliage, and sells these along with ready-made garlands and bouquets. I bought some delicious-smelling rosemary and glossy myrtle, and some white dahlias, sunflowers and baby blue hydrangeas. The sunflowers and hydrangeas were stunning and they lasted so well.

Finally, there was the rest of the foliage, which I mainly used for the garlands and the registrar’s table arrangement, and it all came from the garden: eucalyptus, laurel, jasmine, Japanese quince, and a few mystery trees and shrubs. There was still some pink hydrangea in the garden, so that was cut and used for some of the table centres.

For the wedding, I would say about 80% of the flowers and foliage were British. Just the white hydrangeas and matricaria were Dutch, and the snowberries…I’m not sure where the snowberries were from, but I assume they were Dutch, too. I did cut some snowberries from Blooming Green as well. But everything else – stunning hot pink cleomes (I’ll overlook their nasty, tiny thorns), snapdragons, cute zinnas, cosmos, dahlias, delicate ammi, clary, veronica, ageratum and agastache, and gorgeous foliage from eucalyptus to senecio – was all from the south-east (or south-west) of England.

But for the 500 Days of Summer photoshoot, I’m pleased to say that the flowers and foliage were 100% British! I used some Mayfield lavender in the bouquet, and of course the photos were shot in the beautiful Mayfield Lavender farm. There were sunny, Cornish hydrangeas and sunflowers, and romantic rosemary and myrtle from Tregothnan, and cornflowers, scabious, dill, grasses and seedpods from Blooming Green, as well as some purple sweet peas from the garden.

I hope this gives a taster of beautiful and varied British flowers, and encourages you to buy local when you can!