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.

What's your type?

Romantic? There were so many pink, blousy roses, they were perfect for a romantic, fluffy bouquet, with white scented phlox, pink and white cleome, floaty white ammi, and fairy dust-like panicum.

Old-fashioned? Peach and pink roses, mixed with lavender, borage and orange thyme, made for a old-fashioned, scented posy.

Opposites attract? I love the combination of cerise and lime green. Nicotiana 'Lime Green' has proved to be a brilliant cut flower, and the plants do well indoors too, releasing their gorgeous scent at night. These were leftovers which were used to brighten up the bathroom - a room that I never would have considered decorating with flowers until I read Jane Packer's wonderful book, At Home with Flowers! The other flowers are Cosmos 'Sensation', Zinnia 'Purple Prince', cornflowers and sweet-smelling sweet peas.

Scatty Scarlett? The late Charlotte Coleman played Scarlett in Four Weddings and a Funeral, wearing an outfit that Gareth (Simon Callow) described as "ecclesiastical purple and the pagan orange symbolizing the mystical symbiosis in marriage between the heathen and Christian traditions." Nothing so philosophical was going on here; I just wanted to show Ben "Higgledy Garden" (who provided my borage and nicotiana seeds) that girls like purple and orange flowers too! These were verbena bonariensis and an orange zinnia.

Neighbourly? Pink, purple and blue sit next to each other on the colour wheel, and are one of my favourite colour combinations. Here are pink zinnias from the mixture of 'Early Wonder' colours, purple verbena, and blue borage.

As you've probably gathered, I don't really have a type. Although if I had to choose, I'd go for scented and old-fashioned. I like lots of different combinations of flowers - sometimes I don't know what works and what doesn't until I put them together. 

Pick flowers from the garden, or get bunches from the florist, and try putting them together in different ways. If you don't think you have a good eye for colour, this lopsided colour wheel might help. I had to create it for a floristry assignment when I did my diploma...I'm shuddering at the memory! The true colour or hue is on the outside ring, followed by the tint (hue+white), the shade (hue+black), and the tone (hue+grey).

Parent plants

The last few years, whenever I've been to gardens with my dad and we've seen lupins, he's always asked me, "Aren't you going to grow lupins?" I wasn't keen on them at first, but eventually I was won over by them and tried to grow them. Sadly, my 'Sunrise' lupins didn't want to grow, so in the end I bought some seedlings from Shannon's Garden Centre (which is celebrating its silver anniversary this month). They have grown up a treat, but I am not cutting them - they seem so big and beautiful, it wouldn't feel right. Maybe I'll buy more next year and then I can happily cut away.

Last year, I tried to grow zinnias from seed, but outdoor sowing doesn't have a high success rate here. None of them germinated. But this year I started them off in the greenhouse, and now they are flourishing! They were another 'parent plant' - I grew them because I liked the look of them but also because my mum used to have them in her family's garden in Sri Lanka. I thought I could give her a posy or two to remind her of her childhood home.

So here are a few zinnia posies. I love the boldness and bright colours of the flowers. The second one is mixed with a 'Genova' dahlia from Shannon's Garden Centre and Nicotiana 'Lime Green' from Higgledy, and the last posy is mixed with sweet peas, lemon balm (melissa) and flowering thyme.

Carers Week 2014 and the story of Genova

This week, in between last week's Volunteers' Week and next week's British Flowers Week, is Carers Week. It is an awareness campaign to draw attention to carers in the UK and the unpaid, vital work they do, which is estimated to save the economy £119 billion each year. Several organisations have worked together for this year's Carers Week: Age UK, Carers UK, Carers Trust, Independent Age, Macmillan, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Multiple Sclerosis Society, Parkinson's UK, Skills for Care, and Stroke Association.

I volunteer as a counsellor at two organisations - one is a local carers association, and the other (pending the results of my role play assessment last week) will be at a local hospice. I will be taking flowers and seedlings to the carers association next week as a belated gift for Carers Week and in celebration of British Flowers Week.

Today I took some posies to the hospice. The receptionist, who did her volunteer training with me, was delighted with them. She could smell the roses (which won't last long in this heat, but hey - I'd rather these than unscented supermarket flowers) and I could smell the mint as I took them out of their packaging for her. Hopefully they brought a smile to some people at the hospice - carers, patients, workers and volunteers.

I used lots of wonderfully-scented herbs: pineapple, lavender, orange and Moroccan mints, white and lavender-pink flowering lemon thyme, and lemon balm (aka Melissa). I also used the first of the jasmine flowers, as well as sweet peas, nigella flowers and seedpods, cornflowers, roses, hot pink escallonia, and my first dahlia - a pale rose flower which I bought from Shannon's Garden Centre partly for its name 'Genova'. Genova is a film by Michael Winterbottom about a widower (played by Colin Firth; it's my second-favourite Colin Firth role after his portrayal of a grieving partner in A Single Man) dealing with his bereavement and his daughters'. It wasn't planned, but it seems fitting that my first 'Genova' dahlia has gone to a hospice.

The first nigella and roses of the year

After nine months of nurturing, my Nigella 'Moody Blues', which I grew from Sarah Raven's seeds, began to flower this month. Nigella are a beautiful, fairy-like flower that I never came across when I did my floristry course or when I worked for other florists. I think they deserve to be used more often - they are such a delicate-looking flowers, but last well in water. Here is my first one, along with a couple of early sweet peas.

The first roses began to flower too, and the scent hits you as soon as you step outside.

I was longing to make my first garden rose and nigella posy of the year! I added lots of sweet-smelling herbs - both lemon thyme and flowering orange thyme, and last year's apple mint (which is doing even better this year) and lavender mint. Combined with the scent of the roses, this is a posy that fills a room.

The odd bits of thyme, rosebud and nigella were used in a tiny Tiptree jar. I don't like wasting flowers! The rest of the flower waste gets thrown on the compost heap.

Since I don't like flower waste, I got these from my lovely local florist, Julie at the Grove Park florist shop. She was going to throw them out, and didn't want to take money for them, but I did manage to pay her a little for them. I've talked about how difficult it is to manage a flower shop before - one day you sell out of everything, but another day you end up throwing half of your stock out.

As ever, my message is: please buy flowers and plants from your florist or garden centre when possible, and not from a big supermarket. Or grow your own!

RHS Great London Plant Fair

I filled in a survey for the RHS a few months ago. Some of the questions asked whether RHS membership was good value for money or not. I realised it is very good value for money, provided you make use of it, which I haven't really in the three years I've been a member.  So I vowed to make more of an effort and visit its gardens and partner gardens more often, and go to the London shows held in the RHS Horticultural Halls (which are free for members).

So after a heavy day of co-facilitating group counselling, followed by supervision, I got a train to Victoria and walked over to the halls, passing several people with narcissi-filled bags on the way!

The displays and the plants for sale in the Lawrence and Lindley Halls were a wonderful taste of spring, while the Early Daffodil Competition filled a wall with daffodils large and small. The RHS also ran tours of the Lindley Library in keeping with the theme of the show - gardening in a changing climate. We were shown huge, painstakingly written and preserved books and artworks from different eras, starting with the 1580s, and going all the way up to this century. It is amazing that botanical drawings were copied by hand, losing details and accuracy along the way. Some images, such as a drawing we saw of a banana plant, were not drawn accurately in the first place, and subsequent books featured hand-drawn copies of the same image - all with the bananas growing upside down!

I bought some cowslips (Primula veris) from Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants. I love Hardy's - they always put on a beautiful display at shows, like this display at Hampton Court in 2013. The poppies in the second photo are Papaver commutatum and the stunning white flowers in the third photo are Campanula 'Jenny'.

I've yet to visit their nursery in Hampshire, but it is on my to-visit list, not least because it is near the real Watership Down. Richard Adams' fantastic, epic novel was set in the surrounding countryside, and I long to visit the area one day, as the book and the 1978 film have been favourites of mine since childhood. Cowslip features in the book as a coveted source of food at the beginning, and as a bizarre rabbit in the middle.

I was advised to plant the cowslips in a grassy but unmowed area, and hopefully they will spread. Fingers crossed - I would love to have more of these beauties!

I got some lemon thyme and Moroccan mint from Pennards Plants - another showstopper. These photos are also from Hampton Court last year.

The lemon thyme smells incredible. I bumped into a friend on the train home and got him to smell these amazing herbs.

Finally, I was there for the plant sale before the show finished, when you can buy some of the plants that have been used in displays. I got a Primula auricula from the Silver Gilt medal-winning display by Cath's Garden Plants. I think this is Gold Lace.