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!]

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!

500 Days of Summer: Day 1

So, what if I'd gone to the movies? What if I had gone somewhere else for lunch? What if I'd gotten there 10 minutes later? It was...it was meant to be.

500 Days of Summer is one of those films that became an instant modern classic in my mind when I first saw it. I remember going to the Odeon West End after work one day in 2009, and I really hoped that it would live up to the hype that I'd read about in film columns. It did. I was smitten with it and counted down the days until its DVD release so I could watch it relentlessly. I'm not that bad in reality though; I've only seen it about 17 or 18 times. That's not relentless, is it? Just mildly obsessive!

Anyway, since my mind runs around making strange links between flowers and films and books and art, it didn't take long for me to imagine a 500 Days of Summer inspired, flower-filled photoshoot. As Summer's outfits and apartment and the way Tom sees her are so important to how the film looks and feels, I wanted to see if I could channel that into a photoshoot, without being too obvious and just replicating scenes. Her style is quite vintage, so Tobi Hannah's modern vintage wedding dresses are perfect for a Summer bride. There were several dresses from the new collection which would have been very Summer-esque (Briggs, Carter, Fairy and Vanish), but in the end I went with Tobi's suggestion, Gold, which works really well.

So I had the dress, I had a model (my fabulous dancer friend, Helen), I had several locations in mind but opted for Mayfair Lavender. The lavender is going to be harvested in the next few days, so we were cutting it fine when we went there today! I knew I was going to use blue flowers and blue accessories (see the costume designer Hope Hanafin's interview to see why blue is so important in the film), but later I decided to get sunflowers, some delicate yellow dill and lots of seedheads and grasses, to represent summer and autumn. The English lavender had started to go grey, but it still looked beautiful. We took photos among the grey English and bluer French lavenders.

There are several references to the film, but I'll come back to them, with more photos, on another day. But on day one, you can see these. Oh - but I will tell you where the non-lavender flowers are from: the hydrangeas, sunflowers, rosemary and myrtle are from Tregothnan, the sweet peas are mine, and the scabious, dill and other flowers in the bouquet and Helen's hair are from Blooming Green. Yes, that's right - I used entirely British flowers and foliage for this!

A Lavender Field in London

I started writing a short story a month or so ago. It was just supposed to be an exercise in creative writing – I ask someone for three nouns and I put them into a story quickly and instinctively, without thinking too much or judging what I write.

Now, I don't recall ever seeing a film or gazing at a picture with a lavender field, and I'm sure I haven't read about them. I did see a photoshoot set in a lavender field, which I remember for the bohemian, 70s styling and the table flowers (which didn’t include lavender). But for some reason, as I started writing this story, the thought of a lavender field entered my mind, even though it wasn’t related to the three nouns I was given.

I visited Mayfield Lavender after I’d started this story. It’s a 25-acre lavender farm in Banstead in South East London/Surrey. I got the 166 bus from West Croydon, which is one of those lovely, quiet bus rides where you could happily fall asleep or look out of the window. What amazed me was the smell of the lavender – it hits you inside the bus, and that’s how you know you’ve reached your stop. The bus stops right outside – there’s a little wire-fenced path by the bus stop, so just follow it round to the main entrance. And if you’re getting the bus from Banstead town centre, the stop is just opposite.

I could see the field from the other side of the fence, but walking in through the entrance and into the field was just incredible. There was a group of young men and women on my bus who ran straight down the paths of the field and jumped and took photos straight away – that’s the sort of joy it evokes.

I walked along one path, jumped over to the next, sat down and looked at the blue and purple flowers above me and listened to their swishy rustle. I didn’t think about much, which is strange for me as I usually drive myself mad thinking about everything under the sun. So it’s not a cliché – being in a field of lavender is genuinely relaxing! The only thing that stuck in my mind was – this is just how I imagined the field in my story.

I had a cup of lavender and Earl Grey tea and a lavender fairy cake in the cute café and shop, where I had a perfect view of the field and the lavender-coloured bicycle. Then I went for another walk in the field and sat on one of the picnic benches under a tree, watching the people hard at work weeding the field row by row.

When I finally dragged myself away, I got the bus to Banstead town centre and walked the 15-minute walk to the train station. I still had the scent of lavender in my nose, another thing I imagined in my story, but I suspect it was from sitting in the field or from the perfume samples I was given in the shop! The effect of the field remained with me, and I found myself taking photos as I walked along, when beautiful-looking things caught my eye. By the way, I didn’t have a camera with me, so all of these were taken on my phone. In my Zone 4 arrogance, I assumed the trains from Banstead would be at least every half hour. But no; they were every hour and I’d just missed one. It was ok though – it was sunny and warm, and I worked on my screenplay while I waited on the pretty station platform. The station is unstaffed, incidentally, but there are ticket machines.

Lavender is a herb that reminds me of front gardens on hot days, where the scent fills the air and bees buzz around the plant. The herb is becoming more prevalent because of the rising popularity of lavender in baking and cooking. For me, it first became a flavour as well as a fragrance when I made Nigella Lawson’s Lavender Trust cupcakes from her book Forever Summer. (The Lavender Trust at Breast Cancer Care supports younger women with breast cancer).

This weekend, there will be a festival at Mayfield Lavender, so if you live nearby, what better way to spend the first hot weekend in weeks? You can buy ready-made cakes and biscuits with lavender, or you can buy flowers to make your own. There will be activities for children and adults, food and drink, and the calming blue sight of 25 acres of lavender.