Happy 2015!

Happy new year! Hope your year is full of happiness, health and peace.

Here are eight flower-filled milk bottles in lieu of eight maids a-milking for the eighth day of Christmas.

Chocolates for Juliet

I did some pink and chocolate brown bouquets a few weeks ago. It's one of my favourite autumn colour combinations (see this post a few years ago), but I added the peachy tones of Juliet David Austin roses this time.

I used dark cotinus foliage, pink snowberries (my autumn favourite!), astilbe, and sedum, cosmos, cleome, panicum and euonymus from the garden.

I love the mixture of textures here. (The first photo was taken in the evening and the second photo was taken in the morning - it makes a big difference to peachy Juliet!)

Speaking of Juliet - here's a leftover rose, opened up.

And more leftovers here.

Autumn isn't just about Chinese lanterns and falling leaves, you know!

Love in the London Outback

I did some flowers for a lovely couple who got married today in a fabulous venue. Guess where? The outback...in London Zoo! There's a beautiful light-filled pavilion by the emus and kangaroos (rather fitting as there was an election in Australia on the same day), and the couple wanted a mixture of white flowers and some pink.

I enjoyed doing these flowers so much! I will write more later...a bit sleep-deprived at the moment! But for now, I'll leave you with some photos.

A tale of two symbols

The day my cousin and her family visited, I cut a few bluebells and Yellow Cheerfulness narcissi and put them in my little bottle set. My cousin also has a baby boy, and there is something about the gentle blue and yellow colours and the sweet, small flowers that makes me think that a bunch of these would be lovely to welcome a new baby.

Bluebells represent constancy, which is a great sentiment for a baby starting out in life. To me, narcissi represent new beginnings, although when I first looked them up I could see that there were different meanings. There’s an interesting article specifically about the different meanings for narcissi by The Daffodil Society.

I avoid using flowers or herbs in floristry that only seem to have a negative meaning, such as basil which means hate. Having said that, if someone especially wanted basil in their flowers, then I would use it. I remember using this ethereal-looking photoshoot in lavender fields on the Ruffled blog as inspiration when I was doing my floristry diploma; lavender symbolises mistrust, but it's hard to care when it creates such a dreamy blue backdrop. Scabious doesn't exactly have a pleasant flower meaning, but I find the flower far too pretty for me to care. I enjoyed picking them at Blooming Green near Maidstone and they added to the cottage garden feel of the wedding flowers I was doing, and I saw rows of them when I visited Green and Gorgeous near Oxford. I'm growing some pink and red scabious now and I can't wait to mix them up with other flowers that I'm growing. These are my 'Pink Mist' scabious.

Generally, when there are contradictory flower meanings (e.g. hydrangea, which can mean heartfelt emotion and gratitude at being understood, or heartlessness), I choose the positive sentiment, which is the sentiment that I wish to convey. And I think that personal sentiment, ultimately, decides what flowers symbolise when they are given or used for an occasion. This is especially the case when it comes to using seasonal flowers – I think it’s great if people decide to use peonies for early summer weddings or cherry blossom for spring ones, rather than relying solely on air-freighted flowers.

This is a big bouquet I did for my friend Jo's grandparents, who were celebrating their anniversary on the same autumn day that Jo got married. Hydrangea symbolised heartfelt emotion, the snowberries fate, and the lilac 'Memory Lane' roses, apart from their appropriate name, stood for enchantment and love at first sight. Definitely no heartlessness here!

I've mentioned this before, but Mandy Kirkby's book, The Language of Flowers, is a wonderful introduction to the symbolism of flowers. She has a lovely writing style and the cover and illustrations by Katie Tooke are beautiful. This book, along with the RHS Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants, has been my dusk and dawn reading for a few years.

Sweet charity

I recently did wedding flowers for a lovely couple who sourced their containers for their ceremony and reception flowers from charity shops. I was so thrilled to do their wedding and the containers they chose were fantastic - they had so much character and really fitted in well with the style of the wedding.

Here's a sneak peak of the arrangements before they were delivered and set up at the venue, which was a barge on the Thames.

I'm collecting tea caddies for my own flowers, so I was certainly glad to arrange flowers in this vintage tin. I like the pops of colour from the roses, pale blue ageratum and white snowberries (which you may remember means 'fate' from the wedding I did for my friends a year ago), the trails of jasmine, and the mysterious-looking pink scabious.

This beautiful glass vase was filled with Sorbet Avalanche and pink spray roses and later topped up with freesias, which were the main flowers for the bridal party. The vase was for the ceremony table, so I thought I would do an arrangement that was less rustic-looking and more romantic and pretty-pretty, with fairy-like ammi/dill (I'm not sure which - it looked like bishop's flower and the stems were tiny) and panicum 'Frosted Explosion' (which looks like a kind of fountain grass). As well as plenty of jasmine, meaning 'attachment' in flower language, and a pretty foliage to use in wedding flowers.

This cute cake vase ended up being used on the sweetie table, and it fitted right in with the pastel sweets! I love the scattering of delicate white cosmos, panicum, and nigella - it looks like a vase of pick 'n' mix!

You can barely see it in this photo, but I like this ivory and gold vase - to me it looks both simple and opulent. As it's taller, I included some bright cosmos on their long, wiry stems, curvy snapdragons, and trails of foliage.

I have to admit, I am a little bit envious of this birdcage. Look how beautiful and dramatic it is...and that's before it's in situ (on an amazing cake table). It's an incredible find, and one that was just asking to be filled with flowers! As it's a bit of a fiddly job and it uses floral foam, I mainly used stronger-stemmed pink Michaelmas daisies, pink and white snowberries, spray roses, pittosporum and senecio.

If I can find beauties like these, I think I'll spend my spare days touring charity shops!

Now, about the flowers. The bridal flowers, which I've not shown here, are mostly Sorbet Avalanche roses, pink spray roses, and white freesias. The jasmine and pittosporum is from the garden. But the rest of the flowers and foliage - nigella, ammi/dill (not sure which!), scabious, snowberries, ageratum, verbena, clary, cosmos, achillea, flowering mint, Michaelmas daisy, veronica, snapdragons, panicum, senacio and eucalyptus - were from Blooming Green Flowers near Maidstone in Kent. It's a flower farm run by two friendly and very hard-working women, Bek and Jen, who I met a few months ago when I was looking for growers. They grow all sorts of wonderful flowers and foliage for cutting, which you can either ask them to arrange, or you can pick yourself. If you have any aspirations to do flower arranging and you love seasonal, British flowers, it's well worth experiencing the pick-your-own bucket. It felt like the first time I went to a charity booksale at my old place of work, where there were tables and tables of fantastic new books being sold for 50p each, and I was like a kid in a sweet shop. I know I cut flowers from my family's garden (and that is awesome), but being in a field full of different flowers is something else!
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Yorkshire Pudding: The Wedding

L-R: Best man Andy, bridesmaid Melanie, groom Mike, bride Jo, bridesmaid (and cake-maker) Helen, and bridesmaid Laura. Photo by Pete.

The best Yorkshire pudding I’ve ever eaten was with my friends in York, about sixteen years ago. It was massive. I was about to leave the table once I’d finished it, when I was told, ‘That was your starter. Your dinner’s nearly ready.’

Ok, now that I’ve got the tenuous link between an American teen-flick and an English delicacy out of the way, I can talk about the wedding.

Jo and her family are my oldest friends. They moved next door to my family when Jo, her brother Pete and I were very young, and we’ve stayed good friends, even after they moved back to York. I remember running outside to say hello when I saw their van pulling up – they barely had time to get out before I was getting under everyone’s feet, asking them nosy questions and telling them gossip about our neighbours! One vivid memory I have of that day is sitting in their front garden with Jo, silently making a ‘bird’s nest’ out of leaves, rose petals and snapdragons. It was funny, because I’m a few years older than her, but we had the universal language of flowers to unite us.

Jo, Pete and I outside the Sidings, dressed a little better than we were in the 80s.

Fast forward twenty-five years, and I am standing in her grandparents’ kitchen in York, arranging flowers for her wedding. I still cannot believe how much fun my first experience of doing wedding flowers was, and just how lucky I was to have done them for Jo, who I now describe as the anti-Bridezilla (or the perfect bride). It was lovely to spend the wedding eve and morning with Jo’s family and friends in York, many of whom I’ve known since childhood, and create arrangements for someone I really care about. Jo and her bridesmaids Melanie, Laura and Helen provided some much needed company and lots of tea, and Jo and Laura helped me out by getting buckets of water and giving me feedback on my work as I went along. Jo’s grandparents let me use two big tables in their kitchen as my workbench, and Jo’s grandfather cut some gorgeous ivy from their garden for me to use as table decorations.

The wedding colour scheme was pink and green, although Jo and her groom Mike wanted mostly white for the bridal bouquet and the buttonholes. After bouncing some ideas around, we decided on white Blizzard roses, white bouvardia, a few pink Heaven roses and some green ivy for the bridal bouquet; a Blizzard rose, bouvardia and ivy leaves for the groom’s buttonhole; a Blizzard rose and an ivy leaf for the buttonholes for the best man and Jo’s father and brother; and Heaven roses, pink and white Mimi Eden spray roses and ivy for the bridesmaids. I used dark green satin ribbon and white lace for the bridal bouquet and pink satin ribbon and white lace for the bridesmaids.

I used huge, fluffy, pink Lolly Pop hydrangeas, variegated ivy trails and a few pink snowberry stems for the tall vase arrangements either side of the wedding cake; and green ivy from Jo’s grandfather with pink beads and snowberries for the table decorations.

As the wedding reception was held in a beautiful hotel and restaurant that comprised a central ‘station’ room surrounded by old railway carriages, right next to a working train line, I attached wedding ‘luggage tags’ with the names of the flowers used on the day and their traditional meanings to the arrangements.

The Sidings was a beautiful venue, with ample opportunities for train-spotting.

'Can I have that big cake on the top?'

And if the sight of those lush lemon cupcakes and chocolate top tier cake is making your mouth water, then have a look at Helen York’s other cakes. I can assure you that they taste as good as they look – I was one of several guests who went for up seconds!

If you are curious about the traditional meanings of the flowers used in Jo and Mike’s wedding, here they are:

White roses: Purity, new beginnings

Pink roses: Joy, gratitude, admiration

Bouvardia: Enthusiasm

Ivy: Marriage, fidelity, friendship

Hydrangea: Heartfelt emotion, gratitude at being understood

Snowberry: Fate

The girl next door is all grown up! Photo by Pete.