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!

Florist on tour: Part 2, My Flower Patch

The journey from York to My Flower Patch Sara's local train station in Wiltshire took six hours, but it went pretty quickly and the journey was mostly peaceful. I listened to the MiniDisc I'd compiled before I went away, forgetting how random it was (Bonnie Tyler followed by Elvis, anyone?), read my book, and fell asleep. I journalled and sketched as I waited to change trains in Reading (the York to Reading train was the slow one - it would have been quicker to go into London and then out again, but I was on a budget!).

Sara met me at the quiet train station, and we went to the local Indian restaurant to order a takeaway. There was a bit of a wait - since it was one of the few places open on a bank holiday Monday, everyone seemed to eating there - but it gave us time for a drink and catch up! We went to her house, gifts were distributed (Betty's tea for her and her husband, Sara's beautiful flowers for me), and the three of us ate dinner and chatted.

The next morning, I met their son again. He had, understandably, forgotten meeting me a few years ago in London. As I had breakfast with him while Sara got his things ready for us to go out later, he asked me if I wanted to take a photo of him to show my family. It was the sweetest question! I got my camera and returned to find Darth Vader. He asked me if I would like to have the rest of my breakfast with Darth Vader and there was only one answer to that!

We went to the flower patch with Sara and their dog, and I finally got to see the fruits of Sara's hard work! It has been lovely getting to know her through Twitter and her visits to London, but I really wanted to see her flowers in the flesh. It was a beautiful, sunny day, which made for a lovely day out, but rather overexposed photos. Here are a few pictures of the patch, but they don't do it justice - I was oohing and ahhing as soon as we walked over to it, and didn't know where to look first. At every turn there was something new, and the scent of mint as soon as we walked through the gate was amazing. I just can't imagine the amount of work that goes into creating and maintaining a flower farm like this - it's incredible.

The pollinators love her flowers, as you can see here. One minute I was trying to take a photo of a scabious, and the next minute I'd be distracted, chasing after a butterfly. I got very excited when I saw this green butterfly on a zinnia - I think it's a Brimstone. We don't see many of these in London!

There is grassy space next to the flower patch, where we played Frisbee and attempted archery. Here's an action shot of Sara channelling her inner Katniss Everdeen.

I can't explain why exactly, but strawflowers make me smile. Maybe because I've never grown them, rarely see them, and love the papery feel of them.

I adore pink scabious.

And lupins.

Astrantia are so delicate and pretty, they even look beautiful when they haven't opened up.

We went back for lunch and then for a drive to Avebury, with my hosts giving me a guided tour of Wiltshire and pointing out some of the white horses. We were able to see up close Avebury's stones that make up its stone circles. I like the one that looks like a horse.

Sara and I didn't really get the hang of hide and seek.

And did I mention the superhero who was with us? It was a scorching hot day, but Spiderman kept his outfit on, opening gates for pleasantly surprised visitors, and leading the way for us.

In the evening, Sara and I went to the flower patch, leaving Spiderman with his father. She asked me what flowers I wanted to cut for us to play with the next day, and I couldn't decide. The only thing that hurried me was the fading light, and the phone call from Sara's husband telling us it was time for tea! It was kind of like playing outdoors as a kid, when the kids on my road would have so much fun playing on our bikes or on the swings, that our parents would eventually have to come outside and call us indoors before it got too dark. There is something blissfully childlike about being in a flower field and knowing you can play with flowers. Less childlike, but much appreciated, were the gin cocktails that were waiting for us along with a delicious dinner when we got home!

In the morning, like a kid at Christmas, I went to Sara's workshop to see what was there - and saw the flowers that Sara had carefully taken back on a wheelbarrow and unloaded.

We played with flowers, grappling with the rain and a poor child who wanted us to play with him instead. I was a bit overwhelmed by the huge variety of things we'd picked, so I overthought and wasn't too pleased with my efforts. Oh well - it's good to practice for nothing in particular sometimes, and it was nice to use lime green physocarpus instead of the usual dark foliage I tend to use. Sara adores cleome, so I had to include some of hers!

Sara did a beautiful bowl arrangement using nasturtiums and berries.

She also made a gorgeous flower crown, which her son wore all the way to the train station where they saw me off. He told me to phone when I got home, so they knew I had arrived safely - more adorableness, which I could not refuse.

And I'll finish with more florist shoes. (I feel like Gretchen in Mean Girls, trying to make fetch happen.)

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.