Flowers; putting Prozac in the shade!

I had a birthday recently and got some lovely presents. This two-tier cake stand was a surprise from my friend in Jersey, who I’ve been out with for afternoon tea a few times. I love it! It didn’t take me long to test it out – cucumber sandwiches, mini scones, Welsh cakes, and birthday cake on the stand, and Ceylon tea in my Alice in Wonderland cup and saucer. I can’t wait to do a vintage wedding with flowers on cake stands and teapots – I know it’s a popular theme right now, but it’s so pretty and charming, who cares how many other people are doing the same theme?

Speaking of vintage weddings, here are a couple of table arrangements I did during my work experience. The background isn’t all that attractive (the floor of the warehouse), but I’m pretty pleased with the flowers.

I also got some lovely flower books and rose and ‘gardener’ hand cream for my birthday! Flower Shop Messages has some beautiful photos, and is full of messages which people have enclosed with the flowers they’ve sent. Some are touching, some are funny, and some are just curious. I particularly like this one: ‘Dear Granny, we’re glad to hear you are feeling better. Please don’t go up any more ladders.’ The friend who gave me the book is a dancer, and as we looked through it together while we waited in the queue for the Degas dancers exhibition, we were both amused by this message: ‘When we said ‘break a leg’, we didn’t really mean it!’ The title of this post is also a message from the book – I do agree that flowers are a wonderful mood-lifter.

And Mandy Kirkby's The Language of Flowers is a gorgeous book – I love the design of it as well as the fascinating text. It has entries on fifty flowers, from cherry blossom to wallflower. The entry for daisy starts off with this quote by John Clare: ‘Daisies, ye flowers of lowly birth/ Embroiderers of the carpet earth.’

Before I hid the books away on my shelf, I wanted to sit them next to flowers...seeing as they're all about flowers and they have such pretty covers. This is a little posy I made from worse-for-wear waxflowers and germini while I was clearing out my flower bucket at college.

The remains of the day

I only had two arrangements left over from the weekend – a mass of chrysanthemum heads arranged in floral foam, and a bouquet with different roses, hypercium berries, and aspidistra leaves. I met a friend for lunch earlier this week and gave her the latter – hopefully the flowers will last a couple more days. The chrysanthemums are with me, and they still look brand new.

With the few flowers remaining, I did three little arrangements for me. I re-arranged the teapot using new roses from the garden (spot the Jude the Obscure), I tried to match the colours of the spray roses and hypercium berries with the bright vase from Clermont-Ferrand, and I was delighted to have an excuse to use the Elizabeth Blackadder ‘Poppies’ jug that I’d got in the sale from the Royal Academy of Arts (my favourite gallery in London).