Review of the year: Winter 2016

Only a few weeks to go before the days start getting longer again. I can't wait - apart from Christmas, I'm not a fan of dark mornings and evenings.

Winter flowers included 28 candelabras for an event at Middle Temple Hall celebrating Shakespeare (which chimed in nicely with the #floristfilms hashtag: 28 Candelabras Later). It's where the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place in 1602, so it was a real privilege to do the flowers for this event. The flowers were not so much flowers, as trailing ivy, which hopefully created an ethereal, Midsummer Night's Dream feel to the hall.

There were scented arrangements of pine, spruce (aka blue pine), eucalyptus, stocks, and lavender, along with pussy willow, alstromeria, silver brunia, silver kochia, and white hypericum for Neal's Yard Remedies in Sevenoaks.

The scent of the foliage, herbs, and flowers nicely complimented the Christmassy smells of cinnamon, clove and mandarin that filled the shop. Pussy willow has an irresistible, tactile quality, and it lasts for weeks and weeks, which is wonderful for a shop display.

Oh, and there was white, glittery skimmia. The glitter was barely noticeable in the arrangements, but it was all over my workspace and buckets and took weeks to finally clear!

There were satsumas for Father Christmas.

And on Boxing Day, after eating leftover Quorn roast (I used Nigella's ginger-glazed ham recipe), I used my leftover flowers to try to create some modern ikebana arrangements. Ikebana is not the most obvious style for Christmas flowers, but one of my lovely Canadian cousins sent me Keiko's Ikebana book to challenge my Western-wild floristry style, and I thought I'd give it a go. I failed my natural line arrangement practical at college, along with the rest of my class - this Japanese style of floristry did not come naturally to any of us (we scraped passes on our resits though!). A lovely tutor from my diploma course, Neil Bain, encouraged me to share my efforts on Twitter - and his generous response to my photos was reassuring.

The bowl arrangement is not-quite moribana (which means "piled on") and the vase arrangement is not-quite nageire (which means "thrown in"). It looks deceptively simple in the book, but it is such a challenge if it's not your natural style. But hey - it's good to be challenged sometimes.

Now there's just over a month until Easter, I can think about clearing out my Easter leftovers with some spring ikebana.

I'll finish with some gratuitous Christmas baking photos...even though it's completely the wrong weather and time of year for eggnog cupcakes and mince pies! It was the first time I'd made eggnog from scratch, and like many homemade things, it was time-consuming but worth the effort. You also get to drink the leftover eggnog, which is a nice bonus.

I can sing a rainbow

There is a TV programme tonight all about people giving up sugar. I gave up sugar (and a bunch of other things) once for a year and all I can say is: never again. Now I aim for five fruit and veg a day and fit in nice things like cake around them, no food-shaming and less body-shaming, and that seems to make me much happier than I was during the sugar-free year.

So if you are not a fan of sugar, you might want to stop reading now.

Everyone else: here is my first attempt at rainbow cake. I have wanted to make it ever since I tried the gorgeous one from Cloud 9 in Brighton a few years ago.

I made this for my friend at the weekend. The natural colours (purple and blue) came out more muted than the artificial ones, and I am too impatient to do a proper crumb coating of buttercream, wait for it to dry, and then ice properly - but apart from that, I think it worked. It was a basic 2oz of butter, sugar and self-raising flour to 1 egg, and I used 4 eggs. I added vanilla and orange blossom to the cake and the buttercream.

I'm also sharing photos of a polychromatic bouquet I made as a wedding gift for a couple last year, which I haven't got around to sharing here. It was late summer, and there was a mixture of British and imported flowers as well as stuff I'd grown. It smelled amazing.

I can sing a rainbow, too.

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.