Pumpkins and brains

Happy Halloween! The chocolates and traybake have been polished off by the local children, and all there is to do is try to think of a decent recipe using pumpkin.

Today was the perfect excuse to make some pumpkin arrangements and to use bright pink 'brains' (celosia) and red, trailing amaranthus, which are both from the same family and have stunning stems.

I also got some peachy, pink-tinged roses, orange euphorbia, and cut some pink roses and viburnum flowers and berries from the garden. There was some pepperleaf left over from my Tregothnan DIY box, too. Do make sure you wear gloves if you use euphorbia - it releases a milky sap when you cut the stems or break off the leaves, and this irritates the skin.

I made a big pumpkin arrangement in foam, a little pumpkin posy (which my little sister helped with), and a hand-tied in a fishbowl with the leftover flowers.

Floristry has a lot to answer for - I was never this fussed about Halloween before!

DIY flowers

If you can’t travel to a pick-your-own flower farm like Blooming Green in Kent, Green and Gorgeous in Oxfordshire, or one of many flower farms in the West Country, then here is something to try: a DIY box of flowers from the Cornish farm Tregothnan. I think this is something new that the company has just introduced, but I hope it takes off.

There are three different sizes/prices of boxes of flowers and foliage – a posy box, a bouquet box and a deluxe bouquet box. I ordered the posy box, which was £19.95 when I ordered it last week, and I was very happy with what I got.

For starters, there was more than a posy’s worth of flowers. There was a big bouquet’s worth, with plenty of foliage left over. They are lasting very well, and still look as fresh today as they did when I made the posy on Monday, soon after receiving the delivery box. The box included some striking pepperleaf (drymis) foliage, which has red stems and glossy green leaves and a sort of cinnamon scent, and beautiful pink-red kaffir lilies, which look rather like mini gladioli until the flowers open – both of them are things that I am unfamiliar with and probably wouldn't have ordered on their own, but now, I’m enamoured by them! It was also wonderful to receive the first narcissi and anemones of the season, both stunning.

Tregothnan uses a combination of flowers and foliage that are growing in its farm, but tops up, if necessary, with extras from other Cornish farms.

I hope other farms will do similar boxes. It would be nice to order flowers from somewhere that is less than 300 miles away! In the meantime, I just hope Tregothnan continues to do these DIY boxes. They are a great idea for anyone who wants to make a bouquet as a gift or to arrange themselves, and they are a fantastic present for someone who loves to arrange flowers. And of course, they are an easy way to buy British, seasonal flowers.

Great British Flowers

I want to wax lyrical about the fantastic British flowers I got for two events that I did at the start of autumn. I bang on about using local, seasonal flowers, at least in the warmer months, and hopefully these photos demonstrate why.

Firstly, there was the pick-your-own bucket of flowers at a local flower farm. We picked a stunning collection of white and pink flowers for the London Zoo wedding, with some blues for the 500 Days of Summer photoshoot, and some foliage, grasses and seedpods. The delightful Jen at Blooming Green, near Maidstone in Kent, gave me the metal bucket that is their ‘measure’, and we filled it with as much as we could gently cram in. Cutting the flowers from the acre plot is a joy in itself, although it was a scorcher of a day so we had to work fast so that the flowers in the bucket wouldn’t wilt before we’d even left the farm! I separated them out into different buckets when I got home – Blooming Green provide two plastic buckets to take the cut flowers home, but I’ll take a few of my own next time, as it’s a bit of a squeeze, and things like dill and sweet peas tend to get tangled up with everything else.

Secondly, there was the special delivery from Cornwall! Tregothnan, which is famous for being the first farm in Britain to grow tea, also grows cut flowers and foliage, and sells these along with ready-made garlands and bouquets. I bought some delicious-smelling rosemary and glossy myrtle, and some white dahlias, sunflowers and baby blue hydrangeas. The sunflowers and hydrangeas were stunning and they lasted so well.

Finally, there was the rest of the foliage, which I mainly used for the garlands and the registrar’s table arrangement, and it all came from the garden: eucalyptus, laurel, jasmine, Japanese quince, and a few mystery trees and shrubs. There was still some pink hydrangea in the garden, so that was cut and used for some of the table centres.

For the wedding, I would say about 80% of the flowers and foliage were British. Just the white hydrangeas and matricaria were Dutch, and the snowberries…I’m not sure where the snowberries were from, but I assume they were Dutch, too. I did cut some snowberries from Blooming Green as well. But everything else – stunning hot pink cleomes (I’ll overlook their nasty, tiny thorns), snapdragons, cute zinnas, cosmos, dahlias, delicate ammi, clary, veronica, ageratum and agastache, and gorgeous foliage from eucalyptus to senecio – was all from the south-east (or south-west) of England.

But for the 500 Days of Summer photoshoot, I’m pleased to say that the flowers and foliage were 100% British! I used some Mayfield lavender in the bouquet, and of course the photos were shot in the beautiful Mayfield Lavender farm. There were sunny, Cornish hydrangeas and sunflowers, and romantic rosemary and myrtle from Tregothnan, and cornflowers, scabious, dill, grasses and seedpods from Blooming Green, as well as some purple sweet peas from the garden.

I hope this gives a taster of beautiful and varied British flowers, and encourages you to buy local when you can!

Going AWOL

I'm sorry I've neglected my blog over the last month. I have reasons (or excuses if you're feeling less generous), but they don't matter here; what matters is that I catch up! There are a few more 500 Days of Summer posts to come, but I want to do them justice as the photoshoot and the reasons for it are so important to me. So I might end up spreading them out a bit randomly, rather like the days in the film! And I may be short on words at the moment, but I have plenty of photos.

500 Days of Summer: Day 1

So, what if I'd gone to the movies? What if I had gone somewhere else for lunch? What if I'd gotten there 10 minutes later? It was...it was meant to be.

500 Days of Summer is one of those films that became an instant modern classic in my mind when I first saw it. I remember going to the Odeon West End after work one day in 2009, and I really hoped that it would live up to the hype that I'd read about in film columns. It did. I was smitten with it and counted down the days until its DVD release so I could watch it relentlessly. I'm not that bad in reality though; I've only seen it about 17 or 18 times. That's not relentless, is it? Just mildly obsessive!

Anyway, since my mind runs around making strange links between flowers and films and books and art, it didn't take long for me to imagine a 500 Days of Summer inspired, flower-filled photoshoot. As Summer's outfits and apartment and the way Tom sees her are so important to how the film looks and feels, I wanted to see if I could channel that into a photoshoot, without being too obvious and just replicating scenes. Her style is quite vintage, so Tobi Hannah's modern vintage wedding dresses are perfect for a Summer bride. There were several dresses from the new collection which would have been very Summer-esque (Briggs, Carter, Fairy and Vanish), but in the end I went with Tobi's suggestion, Gold, which works really well.

So I had the dress, I had a model (my fabulous dancer friend, Helen), I had several locations in mind but opted for Mayfair Lavender. The lavender is going to be harvested in the next few days, so we were cutting it fine when we went there today! I knew I was going to use blue flowers and blue accessories (see the costume designer Hope Hanafin's interview to see why blue is so important in the film), but later I decided to get sunflowers, some delicate yellow dill and lots of seedheads and grasses, to represent summer and autumn. The English lavender had started to go grey, but it still looked beautiful. We took photos among the grey English and bluer French lavenders.

There are several references to the film, but I'll come back to them, with more photos, on another day. But on day one, you can see these. Oh - but I will tell you where the non-lavender flowers are from: the hydrangeas, sunflowers, rosemary and myrtle are from Tregothnan, the sweet peas are mine, and the scabious, dill and other flowers in the bouquet and Helen's hair are from Blooming Green. Yes, that's right - I used entirely British flowers and foliage for this!

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.

Robed in snowy white

As I see it, there are two kinds of successful people: people who climb up a ladder and then ignore the ladder and the people who are still on it, and people who climb up a ladder but turn around and give other people a helping hand. Tobi Hannah is the second kind.

As an innovative wedding dress designer, she provides a haven for brides who want a wonderful and varied selection of shorter wedding dresses. Her latest collection was inspired by the Pink Floyd album, The Wall. I swooned at the lot of them, but I especially like the Hattie dress. There's something about a dress with a collar that makes it smart and pretty.

Her sister company, Lara Hannah, makes stunning and ethereal-looking long dresses, many inspired by Waterhouse paintings. Her latest campaign for her new Magic Circle Collection includes a dreamy photoshoot inspired by the painting of The Lady of Shalott. This is the Infinity dress.

All of Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott paintings are amazing, but the one on the boat is one of my favourite paintings...and after it came first in the Art Everywhere poll, it's clearly many people's favourite! I took this photo of the Art Everywhere poster at Regent's Park station.

And I have to include a photo of some David Austin Lady of Shalott roses, which grace the rose garden in Regent's Park.

Getting back to Tobi. She learns about up and coming people in the wedding industry and supports those whose paths have crossed with hers. I've had some fantastic chats with her over the last year about everything from Coco Chanel's impact on the fashion world (her wedding dress was short!) to the highly underrated film, Elizabethtown.

I dropped in to see her this week and left some flowers for her, her team, and her visiting brides to enjoy: cosmos, phlox, sweet peas, salvia and 'Blue Dress' flax in a pretty Tiptree jar. The sweet peas, salvia and phlox smelt gorgeous!