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.

Snowed in, lion around

I'm sure Arctic countries find the British response to snow bemusing. In Scotland, drivers were stuck on a motorway for fifteen hours, while my commute into London Bridge yesterday took four times longer than usual because of cancelled trains and - this was new to me - trains that couldn't move because their doors had frozen.

Today is World Book Day, and some parents might have felt their effort spent on costumes was wasted after the schools closed because of the weather. But I hope the children still enjoyed wearing their costumes at home. I had a day off work and I stayed indoors and started rereading Gone Girl. Although a lot of it is set in warm weather, there's a key scene in a snow storm.

But the books that I think of the most when I think of the snow are The Snowman (which also reminds me of Christmas), Love Story (which I've mentioned on a previous World Book Day), and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 

My wonderful primary school teacher, Helen Baxter, read the C. S. Lewis novel to us over I don't know how many weeks. I probably had books read to me as a toddler, but once I could read to myself I rarely had stories read to me at home. So story time at school was incredibly special to me. And whatever I now think about the message of the book about the four children and their trips to Narnia, I have a strong affection for the novel because I remember the first time I heard those words spoken. 

If you're someone who reads children's books to children, I hope you know what a nourishing thing it is you're doing for them.

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. 

Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis

Review of the year: Winter 2016

Only a few weeks to go before the days start getting longer again. I can't wait - apart from Christmas, I'm not a fan of dark mornings and evenings.

Winter flowers included 28 candelabras for an event at Middle Temple Hall celebrating Shakespeare (which chimed in nicely with the #floristfilms hashtag: 28 Candelabras Later). It's where the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place in 1602, so it was a real privilege to do the flowers for this event. The flowers were not so much flowers, as trailing ivy, which hopefully created an ethereal, Midsummer Night's Dream feel to the hall.

There were scented arrangements of pine, spruce (aka blue pine), eucalyptus, stocks, and lavender, along with pussy willow, alstromeria, silver brunia, silver kochia, and white hypericum for Neal's Yard Remedies in Sevenoaks.

The scent of the foliage, herbs, and flowers nicely complimented the Christmassy smells of cinnamon, clove and mandarin that filled the shop. Pussy willow has an irresistible, tactile quality, and it lasts for weeks and weeks, which is wonderful for a shop display.

Oh, and there was white, glittery skimmia. The glitter was barely noticeable in the arrangements, but it was all over my workspace and buckets and took weeks to finally clear!

There were satsumas for Father Christmas.

And on Boxing Day, after eating leftover Quorn roast (I used Nigella's ginger-glazed ham recipe), I used my leftover flowers to try to create some modern ikebana arrangements. Ikebana is not the most obvious style for Christmas flowers, but one of my lovely Canadian cousins sent me Keiko's Ikebana book to challenge my Western-wild floristry style, and I thought I'd give it a go. I failed my natural line arrangement practical at college, along with the rest of my class - this Japanese style of floristry did not come naturally to any of us (we scraped passes on our resits though!). A lovely tutor from my diploma course, Neil Bain, encouraged me to share my efforts on Twitter - and his generous response to my photos was reassuring.

The bowl arrangement is not-quite moribana (which means "piled on") and the vase arrangement is not-quite nageire (which means "thrown in"). It looks deceptively simple in the book, but it is such a challenge if it's not your natural style. But hey - it's good to be challenged sometimes.

Now there's just over a month until Easter, I can think about clearing out my Easter leftovers with some spring ikebana.

I'll finish with some gratuitous Christmas baking photos...even though it's completely the wrong weather and time of year for eggnog cupcakes and mince pies! It was the first time I'd made eggnog from scratch, and like many homemade things, it was time-consuming but worth the effort. You also get to drink the leftover eggnog, which is a nice bonus.

Review of the year: Autumn 2016

Autumn was full of bright, late summer flowers, huge dahlias, sunflowers and other cheerful yellows. There were also gorgeous scents and classic colours, trips to David Austin Roses (another post is needed for that trip) and Blooming Green.

A trip to Blooming Green to pick a bucket or two of flowers deserves a separate post...but given my track record of late, it's probably best to include a few photos here in case the other post doesn't materialise. I also bought dahlias from a local allotment that had an open day. If you're curious about the wellies, they were a celebratory purchase from Joules the day before - I'd gone shopping with another bereavement counsellor after we had both passed our counselling courses, and he persuades me to buy the bright floral wellies I obviously preferred (rather than the more subdued print that I thought I *ought* to buy).

I had a few new, second-hand containers that I'd bought from Eliza Wade (a local florist shop), and this was a perfect excuse to trial them. Along with milk bottles, a milk churn from Mayfield Lavender, and my chicken vase!

As it was the end of the summer flowering season, I wanted to get more Rosebie Morton scented, British roses while I still could.

The antique pink roses were set off by sedum from the garden, flowering mint, British pinks in white and raspberry pink, and stunning blue oxypetalum.

I am so lucky to live near New Covent Garden Market - I get to buy beautiful and scented flowers like these. Rosebie Morton in Hampshire sells a range of scented roses to Zest in the late spring to early autumn. When I take them back on the train, the scent fills the carriage. The pinks have that wonderful clove scent that supermarket carnations are sadly lacking. The flowering mint and oxypetalum (aka tweedia) are imported - the mint smells incredible and the oxypetalum is such a beautiful and delicate flower. But if you've sensitive skin like me, wear gloves when using it, as the beautiful blue flower releases a horrible sap when stems and leaves are cut. When I asked Luke at Zest what the blue flower was called, at first I thought he said, "Ozymandias", the character out of Watchmen. He didn't.

I also did flowers for a pure white wedding - not my usual style, but Laura's idea of fluffy clouds made of hydrangeas and gypsophila was so beautiful and made for a striking monochomatic theme at her wedding reception. She also wanted white, blue and yellow bouquets for the mothers of the bride and groom.

As an aside, I have been in serious denial about the flower market's upcoming move, but as the date draws closer, I am going to have to say a little goodbye soon. (When I was buying scented roses at Dennis Edwards yesterday, I bumped into Lauren, one of the lovely students from my floristry diploma. It's funny that it's taken so many years for me to bump into another ex-student there...and soon "there" will be someone else.) Followed by a hello, of course, as the market is just moving further up the road. You can read about the new market here.