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.

Sunflowers in time for Pollinator Awareness Week

I know there seems to be a special day, week or month for everything these days, but here is another one: Pollinator Awareness Week.

Bees are not my favourite things when I am faced with them. I've only been stung once, but that was quite enough for me, thank you. I was on a romantic date, watching Romeo and Juliet in Stratford-upon-Avon, looking very glamorous with an ice pack clamped to my arm all evening!

So even though I shy away from bees, I also grow flowers to attract them because I know how vital pollinators are. As luck would have it, the first sunflowers I've ever grown (from seed) showed their pretty faces this week. And the bees are all over them already!

I never used to like sunflowers much - they were too bright and impactful for me. But then my lovely ex bought me these once, and I came around to them. This is a terrible photo that I took of them, but the sunflowers were wonderful and made me smile.

Now I like to combine the yellow, happy flowers with equally impactful blue hydrangeas. I got these from Tregothnan - I don't think I'll ever grow hydrangeas as big as these and certainly not as blue.

Or more brights, such as the pink snapdragons, orange celosia, and lime green Thlasbi 'Green Bell' that I used here. And yes, bees did follow me as I carried these to the photoshoot!

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.

500 Days of Summer: Day 2

Summer:  You don’t believe in that, do you?

Tom: What? It’s love. It’s not Santa Claus.

Why am I so in love with the film 500 Days of Summer? Oh, there are many reasons! It felt like an instant classic when I saw it. The phrase “rom com” makes me shudder usually, even though I know it encompasses gems like When Harry Met Sally, Roman Holiday and The Seven Year Itch (I especially love the unformulaic endings of the last two). I hear the words “rom com” and I imagine a film with a sad woman, desperately seeking a relationship, who acts chirpy and bubbly to hide how lonely she feels. There are some recent ones which I have watched and guiltily enjoyed for their frothiness and escapism, but there are heaps more which have made me feel more miserable and irritated than I felt before I watched them!

So it was refreshing to see a romantic comedy where the central character is a man who is hopeful and romantic, and a female love interest who doesn't believe in love. Oh, and it has the best soundtrack.

Tom is incredibly likeable. Much more so, in my opinion, than any number of arrogant, commitment-phobic, and fairly boring men in recent romantic comedies. He reminds me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, one of my favourite characters in literature, for his unlucky-in-life character and his closeness to his little sister. There's a split-screen scene with Tom's expectations playing out on one side, while his reality plays on the other - it's beautifully written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber and brought to the screen by Marc Webb. I think it’s interesting that we see the people who care for Tom – his friends, his sister, even his boss who is sympathetic when Tom’s heartbroken and messing up his work. But we only really see Summer with her friends in a scene towards the end. Technically, two scenes (in the second, her friends might be there, but we can only see her and one other person).

I adore Tom because he’s a doer and a trier. He draws, he creates, he plans. Ok, he creates greetings cards that he’s disparaging about, but still – he’s creative. He picks up a pen soon after he meets Summer in the hope of sketching again (he trained to be an architect). Even though he listens to The Smiths, he’s an optimist and a romantic. Summer is more of a consumer (of course, Tom is a consumer too; I still envy him that giant chalkboard on his wall). She buys pretty things for her flat. She reads books and listens to records and watches films. Maybe I’m being unfair; she does create that cool bowler hat and apple still life in ode to Magritte.  I guess my problem is that by the end of the film, I really don’t understand her or feel that I know her as a person. She’s a mystery to me, and not in an enigmatic, Don Draper in Mad Men or Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation way, but in a frustrating, confused way. I don’t know what she wants from life.

Despite my reservations about Summer, I chose 500 Days of Summer as inspiration for a flower-filled photoshoot because I think the film is visually beautiful and so full of detail. There is so much colour, so many moments and places – the park with the view of L.A., the record shop (hello Before Sunrise!), the office where they work together, Summer’s flat and rooftop garden. There’s a dusky train scene where you see Tom and Summer’s sunlit faces as they talk. Visually, it reminded me again of Before Sunrise, but of course it’s different – Celine and Jesse had just met and the audience hears their long conversation, but Tom and Summer have known each other for a year and we don’t hear what they say to each other. I’m as intrigued by that unheard conversation as I am by Bill Murray’s inaudiable words to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation.

I'm not the only person who loves the film - it's inspired lots of people. There's even 500 Days of Summer nail art.

My favourite detail, which I picked up on for the photoshoot, is the colour blue. So blue hydrangeas, blue scabious and cornflowers, blue lavender field, blue ribbon, and Helen wore a blue butterfly necklace (a wonderful coincidence – I was telling her how I wished I could have found a blue butterfly brooch like the one Summer wears in the office, and Helen produced this necklace).

This blog post from the year the film was released (2009) is wonderful – it’s full of stills from the film and love for the story. Note the wallpaper in Summer’s apartment. The costume designer, Hope Hanafin, was given free rein over the costumes for the film, but with the proviso that Summer (and only Summer) wore blue in every scene, except for one scene when everyone apart from Tom would wear it. In that one scene, Tom is so deliriously in love that he sees everyone in the world as a reflection of her.

I hadn’t registered Summer’s wallpaper when I went to a local haberdashery to buy ribbons for bouquets, but I suppose it must have been at the back of my mind. Because as I was browsing through fabric remnants, I saw this and thought it might work with some blue ribbon for my Summer bouquet. It certainly did, and I think it also complemented the pretty lace of the dress.

Being a dancer, Helen managed to get hold of a bowler hat, and I brought along a green apple, so we could channel Magritte’s The Son of Man from Summer’s flat in Los Angeles to the lavender field in South London.

You may have noticed that the all-British flowers were not just blue, but also yellow. I love that combination – I think it looks so striking, but warm and friendly too.

I was planning to just use blue/purple flowers (pure blue sweet peas are hard to find!), but I decided to use yellow as well to show the sunshine of Summer’s name.

So there were gorgeous yellow sunflowers, baby blue hydrangeas and lush rosemary from Tregothnan, yellow dill and pale yellow scabious alongside the blue scabious and cornflowers and bunny tail grass from Blooming Green, French and English lavender from Mayfield Lavender, and sweet peas from the garden. And of course we had the blue-grey of the Mayfield Lavender field.

Early on in the day (which was cloudy but very bright), it drizzled on and off, and Helen's red umbrella and black boots turned out to be brilliant, unexpected props!

[You can find Day 1 here. Technically, this is Day 514, not Day 2. Which means it falls outside of 500 days! A lesson in not being a perfectionist, if ever there was one: this post was 50% finished in September 2013, but because this photoshoot was so important to me, it never seemed good enough to upload. Also, I couldn't decide which of the 300 or so photos to use. Updating my profile picture with the blue and yellow logo reminded me how I have to just post this now, even if it’s not quite right!]