Who wants to live forever?

Vicky's first anniversary was last weekend. The date she died is hard to forget anyway, but it's especially noticeable because it happened to be the same day as the London Bridge attack.

I was on a train back from Oxford, where I'd visited my friends and their two adorable young daughters. They had built a greenhouse from plastic bottles that they'd collected over time and I was amazed to see that it had withstood storms and snow and was being used to house vegetable plants. I noticed a missed call and a voicemail when my friends' eldest asked me to get my phone and take a photo of the afternoon tea that she had helped to make. I knew the voicemail was bad news and I didn't want to listen and suddenly be weird, tearful or panicked in front of the girls. I told my friend I needed to leave soon, so we all had tea and twenty minutes later I was in his car on the way to the train station. I listened to the message and phoned Vicky's sister and told her I would be there as soon as I could. But as I was on the train back to Paddington I got a call to say Vicky had just died.

I felt a bit lost. I walked to the sphinx by Cleopatra's Needle and sat between the paws of my favourite one. I phoned a bereavement counsellor friend from St Christopher's Hospice, and even though he was at a stag do, he took five minutes to sober up a bit and phoned me back. At one point he told me I was in shock. I find it very powerful to hear someone tell me when I'm in shock because, I suppose, I don't realise myself. I could see that as rubbish as things were, I was very fortunate to have a support group of friends who were conversant in the awful language of grief. I still am - and many of those friends have supported me again this year during Helen's illness and after her death.

I walked east along the river, wandered around the City and saw the roses outside St Paul's. I kept walking until I got tired, then got a train home. I didn't watch the news and I didn't look at social media, so I had no idea what had happened in Southwark.

A few days after Vicky's funeral, I walked around Southwark and suddenly came across the sea of wilting flowers and the wall of supportive messages written on candy-coloured Post-it notes.
This year, I cut some of the scented flowers and herbs that Vicky had liked - roses, mock orange, and sage. I made a posy in a Tiptree jam jar in memory of Vicky. It was Victoria Plum jam, the perfect jar for her. And for the last few days I've been listening to the Queen song that played out Vicky's funeral and reduced many people to an emotional wreck: Who Wants to Live Forever. 

Autumn equinox: flowers during chemotherapy

As it's the autumn equinox today, I thought I'd postpone the last instalment of the Florist on Tour to share autumnal flowers from last week.

It is now estimated that one in two of us born after 1960 will get cancer at some point in our lifetime. It's a sobering thought, which feels more real if you have loved ones with cancer. In the last few years, it seems like more people I know have had the disease, and it has hit young friends as well as older relatives. In my work at a hospice, I hear stories about the effect cancer has on people's lives - those bereaved as a result of it, and those currently dealing with their own or their loved ones'.

So when I was asked to do flowers for someone whose cancer treatment has affected their sense of taste and smell, leaving them unable to enjoy the sweet things they used to - simple pleasures such as cake, biscuits, and floral scents - I was only too willing. I did "roast dinner" flowers: a pumpkin from a local allotment, filled with my sage and rosemary, autumnal-hued peony leaves, and non-scented flowers. There were asters, sedum, and a single dahlia that have all flowered again this year, and hypericum from Blooming Green. I have to thank Simon Lycett for the tip about peony foliage - I have never thought to use it before.

I delivered them on a beautiful, hot day last week, and warned that they probably wouldn't last long - the combination of vegetables (fruit and veg give off ethylene, which speeds up the flower-wilting process) and hot weather wasn't helpful. But they were gladly received, and smelled without any horrible nausea. On one of the hottest days of the year, we all craved a roast dinner.

Simple pleasures. They don't cure cancer, unfortunately. But sometimes they are all we can turn to, to help to ease us through the rubbish that life throws at some of us.

If you have or care for someone with cancer, there is advice available here. And if things feel really difficult, the Samaritans are available 24 hours a day on the phone number 116 123 if you are in the UK.

No use crying...

I saved my first, perfectly-formed delphinium to use in my new, second-hand vase. I arranged it with some white scented hesperis (sweet rocket), white roses and 'Nora Barlow' aquilegia from the garden and greenhouse. But as I turned around so I could move back to quickly photograph it, I heard a crash.

Gutted. After much cursing (sorry neighbours for the morning wake up call) I chucked the flowers in this old, first-hand vase, and they don't look nearly as good.

Mind you, despite being broken in the middle, the delphinium lasted another six days.

On the same morning as Vase-gate, I made a small posy of my flowers for Sara, the Garden Museum's sustainability trainee, who has just left to go on maternity leave. No disasters with that, fortunately! There were calendula, tagetes, aquilegia, and gorgeous-smelling sage and thyme.

And on Saturday I made a posy with another delphinium and my first few nigella.

Floral cupcakes and toxic daffodils

I did some flowers for the Garden Museum's cart, which is part of the museum's stand at the Edible Garden Show at Alexandra Palace this weekend (you can still buy tickets for tomorrow!). I bought some edible (if they are grown organically) flowers from Alagar at New Covent Garden Market, to mix with the herbs and bulbs that are in the museum's cutting garden.

I learnt yesterday, during Jonathon Moseley's weekly #flowertalk hour, that tulips petals are edible. Unfortunately, the tulips in the cutting garden are not ready yet, but there are loads of daffodils. Daffodils are definitely not edible - apparently, some people have been getting them mixed up with spring onions as they are often sold in the same section in supermarkets. Don't mix them up! But as the flowers are so seasonal and there is an abundance right now, it didn't seem right to leave them out of the display.

I wanted to make some rosemary bowls to use as bases for a couple of arrangements. I reused two plastic plant bowls and reused floral foam (cutting out the horrible bits and turning it upside down), cutting the foam into a rounded shape and taping it in place. Then I covered the two bowls with rosemary. There is loads of it in the cutting garden, and it's certainly edible - the staff in the Garden Cafe use the herbs in their cooking. I stuck double-sided tape around each plant bowl, and then placed a large rubber band around the centre. I cut the rosemary into similar-sized lengths that just came higher than the bowl, and added them close together around the bowl, using the rubber band to keep them in place. Once the bowls were covered in rosemary, I tied raffia (again reused) around the centres to cover the elastic bands.

I left one looking quite green and natural, with lots of edible sage and lavender from the cutting garden, and a few inedible daffodils. For the other, I wanted to make a giant cupcake, so I used layers of pink and yellow carnations (which would be edible and scented if grown organically!) and more sage.

I had been saving carefully broken eggshells (using a knife along the very top, rather than tapping the egg on its side) with the intention of making a "bird's nest" planted arrangement as Isabelle Palmer does in her wonderful book The Balcony Gardener. But I didn't trust myself to a) plant up the eggshells without breaking them or b) plant plants that would actually survive the week! So lovely gardener Liz at the Garden Museum took them off my hands and returned them filled with wild strawberry plants.

Liz wasn't due to work on Thursday morning, when I was getting the flowers ready in the museum's knot garden, but she happened to walk past and see me, and decided to join me and help. She found me some violas (more edible flowers) and some mixed planted gifts that she had made up earlier. She also cleared out the flower cart so I could fill it with the new flower display. She also found me a flowering herb called cardamine that I had never heard of before, but whose delicate pink flowers grace the garden in front of the museum.

I crumpled some chicken wire into two metal buckets and threaded lilac, quince blossom, the stems of the poor beheaded carnations, and a few leftover carnations into the gaps.

And I made a few posies with daffodils (definitely toxic), snowflakes (also toxic, I suspect), and edible lavender, rosemary, sage, and cardamine (the leaves are edible, I think).

You can buy edible flowers from here and here - which is the safest bet if you aren't sure whether something is edible or how it was grown! Later in the year, there are lots of edible flowers, from roses to borage to lavender flowers. Another reason to look forward to the summer.

At last! A Christmas flower stall.

If you cast your mind back three years, you might remember I was trying in vain to get a flower stall for Christmas with a fellow student from my floristry diploma. Fast forward three years and I finally have one! The lovely people at the Garden Museum are running an eco-friendly Christmas fair called Diggin' Design for the third year running (I should have asked them three years ago!) and I will be sharing a stall with another lady who volunteers at the museum. I'll be doing all British flower posies and bouquets.

So this morning I was at Pratley in New Covent Garden Market nice and early (on the way there I saw two ice cream vans on the road...surreal in November). There was plenty of British flowers loveliness to choose from, including a box of 200 different-coloured tulips, which was very tempting but a bit too much for my needs! In the end, I bought powder blue scabious (I couldn't believe it was still flowering), brassicas, paperwhites, and freesias. The freesias and paperwhites smell beautiful.

I also went to GB Foliage and got viburnum, berried ivy (the berried ivy growing in the garden is not that great now - the ivy is fine, but the berries are not so pretty), and mistletoe. "Is it British?" I asked. "Yes," came the reply. "We don't like the French stuff."

I also had a delivery from Tregothnan - lots of pretty Sweet Williams from B J Richards, the last of the British chrysanthemums (well, it is still November), ranunculus, rosemary, sage, and pepperleaf. I got a bag of scented pine cones too, which I've wired to add to posies and other arrangements.

Here's it all cut and conditioned and ready to be arranged.

And here are the first of the posies in upcycled jars and tins...I had to quickly take these before the sun disappeared. There are big bouquets too...but you'll have to wait till tomorrow for photos. Or better still, come to the fair and see them for yourself! The fair is from 10.30am to 5pm tomorrow, at the Garden Museum (next to Lambeth Palace). Who would have thought you could get all this from Britain at the end of November?!

Oh my gourd! It's Halloween again.

I'm back into full swing at uni, and enjoying working at the Garden Museum and my counselling placement, so blogging has been neglected a bit. Sorry!

I couldn't let today go by without a post though. I've mentioned before that I never really cared for Halloween until I became a florist. Now I can't wait to fill pumpkins and gourds with flowers!

These are a couple from last year, when I used lots of foliage from the garden, and the odd rose, but also used lots of imported/unlikely to be British flowers. There's also gorgeous viburnum from the garden, which makes me feel a bit sad now, because this year it got some sort of disease in the roots (possibly from the wet weather, I'm told) and died.

This year I did a couple of gourds for the Garden Museum. The gourds were from a farm shop in Sidcup, Kent, called Kelsey's. They had such a stunning display of pumpkins and gourds of different shapes, sizes, and colours, and I could see people harvesting even more in their field.

I cut lots of beautiful brown and orange foliage from the garden (Physocarpus 'Diablo', maybe?), which doesn't last that long in water, but looks incredible. 

I snapped off some red foliage with berries that was hanging off a wall in an alleyway (you wouldn't want to meet a florist in an alleyway around here!), trailing ivy that seems to creep in everywhere in the garden, and some sedum which is now dark red. From the museum's cutting garden, I cut lots of euonymus, rosemary, sage, persicaria, and a beautiful foliage with berries that I don't know the name of. My local florist gave me some alstromeria that had opened, and I bought some solidago from her. I used the colourful bottom leaves of physocarpus as a bed for the gourd.

One of loveliest things about making these was the visitors to the museum who sometimes watch, ask questions, and comment on my work. It's a nice change from working alone as a freelancer in the garage!

And here are the gourdy flowers.

The last arrangement above was very pretty, but I made a mistake by leaving it on the counter of the cafe - all that warmth and ethylene from fruit and veg meant the design didn't last that long and had to be thrown out in less than a week.

But the big arrangement in the porch of the museum lasted well, and the following week I just took out a few of the going-over alstro, persicaria and foliage, and added a few stems of new foliage, chrysanthemums and limonium.

Happy Halloween!

A floral photography lesson from Amo La Fotografia

One thing I found difficult last year when I started learning how to use a photographer's camera and lenses (rather than my usual point-and-click or my mobile phone), was how to photograph white and pale flowers, especially when mixed with darker flowers. In this posy, the white roses lost their beautiful definition in my photos and just looked like big balls of white light!

So I was delighted when the lovely Kent-based photographer, Karen Louise of Amo La Fotografia, offered to give me an online lesson in photographing white flowers, along with other tips to improve flower photography indoors and outside. The ISO needs to be a low number (e.g. 100), the F-stop depends on whether you want detail in the background as well as the subject - a lower number for less detail in the background, and a faster shutter speed will result in a less exposed (light) photo. I am used to using the histogram as a guide, not the shutter speed, so this was all new to me. But...it works! It's quite hard to get out of old habits, and I can see that many of my photos could improve if I were a bit braver. As Karen Louise says in her tutorial, it's easier to 'correct' underexposed (darker) photos with an editing tool than it is to correct overexposed (lighter) photos. And incidentally, when you look at her tutorial you'll see her flower arrangements are as gorgeous as her photos!

Here are some photos I took of a couple of "all in the garden" arrangements, after reading the lesson. I'm a bit annoyed by the 'Penny Lane' dahlia sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of the big arrangement - I actually removed it at the last minute before it was delivered - but never mind. The huge heads of white phlox are what I was worried about photographing, but I love how the detail  is kept by using a faster shutter speed. The tiny white flowers of Moroccan mint (I used lavender, orange, and pineapple varieties too) also kept their detail, and the white and red flowers of the 'Hot Lips' salvia kept more detail than usual. And you can't photograph scent, unfortunately, but both arrangements were highly scented, thanks to the wonderful phlox, mints, lemon balm/Melissa, sage, nicotiana, and sweet peas.