This week I am busy organizing flowers for a wedding near Stirling on Friday. and no-one has been able to get near the bath.
First it was full blown peonies floating there to condition them for the bouquet
It lets the petals take up water and stops them wilting.
Now - and far less glamorously - it is full of artemesia which has a bit of a black fly infestation. A squirt of washing up liquid in the water and they all float off. Yumm.
Can't have a church full of aphids.
Yesterday at the workshop, Caroline had cut some beautiful old roses. They were too heavy headed to work in a bouquet without looking ill so we cut them short and made a table decoration instead. To set them off, I covered a glass with hosta leaves
It was such a serendipitous arrangement - that I thought I would recreate it as a step by step here. Most of my step by step tutorials are now part of my newsletter but next week's newsletter is already full of them (bunting and buttonholes) so i thought that I would post this here instead.
First pick some hosta leaves and condition them by floating them in water - here they are in my bathroom sink. This variety is called Francine I think - it seems to be one that slugs don't take to.
Then wrap 2 strips of oasis waterproof blutac round the glass, top and bottom. I cut the strips horizontally to save money. This is obviously one of those cheap Ikea water glasses, the ones I had at Caroline's were old nutella jars and were actually a better shape as they are curved.
Then lay down the glass and carefully press the leaves onto the blutac, all the way round.
Trim the leaves level with the bottom of the glass and stand up and fill with flowers. It will keep well in a saucer of water until you need it - I think that these would look fabulous down the centre of a table outside, perhaps in an orchard, with tealights hanging from the trees . . . You get the picture.
If anyone wants to know more about the bunting and buttonholes e-mail me and I shall add you to the newsletter list -
First of all apologies to anyone who is reading this all in capital letters - it seems to be some blip with typepad and is showing up weird on some people's machines and not on others. I am trying to sort it out - but as I don't know what has happened it is taking a while. Sorry.
This weekend I have been up in Glenshee arranging flowers for a wedding in a beautiful country house hotel up there - the weather was glorious and the drive up completely captivating.
Often when brides come to me to discuss their wedding flowers, it turns out that they want a particular flower to be at the centre of the day - they may be completely flexible about the rest of the flowers but they will have a bloom that has an emotional resonance that they want to carry through the day. Most commonly it is sweet peas, which are often associated with grandparents and childhood gardens. For Beth, the bride this weekend, it was bright red oriental poppies.
The photo shows her finished bouquet - the poppies are mixed with scented white sweet rocket. This is the most difficult bouquet I have ever made, not in its structure or scale but in the need to get the poppies so that they would be at a perfect stage for the ceremony. In the photo there was still a couple of hours to go - by the timeBeth walked into the library in her wedding dress the flowers should have been fully open. It has been a week of timing the opening rate of poppies, keeping buds in the fridge and a week of permanently crossed fingers. I love a challenge.
After a busy week, with weddings and gift orders and fairs, today is a down day.
I am sorting out my desk and doing some admin - sparked by needing to actually get my accounts in order before it all spirals out of control and leaves me sobbing over a mess of receipt filled shoe boxes in January.
Not my favourite job. I just make piles and piles of paper and then get fed up with it all and make a cup of coffee.
On a brighter note, Jane Robertson has just popped round with a CD of photos taken of the wedding flowers on Saturday - they are just as gorgeous as I thought they would be and I thought that I would share a couple.
The church is a lovely old building with a beautiful arched front door. This is a heart wreath of box and rosemary which I hung the front door of the church - the top is decorated with hellebores and scented narcissi.
I love heart wreaths, you think that they might turn out twee but they never seem to - I make ones with dogwood and willow in the winter with berries and paperwhites at the top and I've made up one with sweetpeas as well for a wedding in a tiny castle chapel.
And here is a much better photo of the bride's bouquet - taken by a proper photographer - not by my trying to hold it steady and press the shutter at the same time.
I find angelique -the peony tulip in the bouquet - quite difficult to grow, the blooms are a bit capricious and have a tendency to bloom small, they don't grow well in the tunnel as they are prone to rot.
But when I look at flowers like this they are obviously worth it. Stunning.
Back to the accounts . . .but then the sun has just come out . . .another day?
Beautiful weather, beautiful venue, beautiful bride - what more can you want?
Congratulations to Mary and Jim.
Jane Robertson took some photos of the flowers in the church so I'll post them later in the week - this is a snap of the angelique tulips and meadowsweet in Mary's bouquet.
Today we are putting the cover back on the polytunnel - strapping men are girding themselves for action - better get out there . . .
Thats the thing about tulips . . .yesterday was all sultry glamour . . .today is fresh, crisp and elegant.
This is a bouquet picked up by a bride whose brief was simple, light, fresh. She came this morning to select her flowers - went off with her girlfriends for a coffee at Tir-na-nOg and came back for the finished article.
Here are a couple of snapshots.
The tulips are spring green - ideal for a bouquet as the stems are sturdy and the flower opens out into a shallow bowlshape. They are mixed with white honesty and solomon's seal.
Tomorrow I shall begin picking and conditioning flowers for a wedding that is very special to me - all last year the groom bought flowers for his womanfriend from my van. I was so delighted when they got engaged and I was asked to arrange the flowers for them.
Sometimes I just love my job.
I think that the reason that I particularly love arranging flowers for weddings is that, as ideas develop over a few months, there is time to create something that is truly special - and very personal to the bride.
This week I am working on bouquets for a woman that I have never met, she doesn't live locally and our proposed meeting earlier in the year had to be put off when her schedule got too busy. We have corresponded by e-mail and I have talked at length to her mother who is arranging the flowers for the church.
It was during one of these phonecalls that her mother mentioned the wedding dress and how her daughter had designed it herself - this amazing embroidered work of art in pale greens and blues. In her modesty the bride had mentioned the colours and shape but not let on that it was her own design. It made me think about how we could tie the bouquets into that in some way. The colours and textures of the bouquets were already going to fit in well as we had discussed them at length, they will be sea holly and sedums with berries but I wanted to be able to do something that would lift them out of the ordinary, make them really special.
And then I remembered, in my box of special scraps I have a small length of C19th hand made Broderie Anglais, salvaged at some point from an underskirt. It is a beautiful piece of embroidery, you can see how much painstaking work has gone into the piece - I like to think that it was part of a trousseau, cared for and treasured through the years.
There is just enough to make into cuffs to wrap round the stems of the 3 bouquets so today I shall tack the old pieces onto some vintage linen, ready to be used on Saturday.
I have no qualms about this treasure being passed on, I know that it will be appreciated and incorporated into something new, a memory of a different wedding a century or so on.
Little girls seem to have an inbuilt pink gene. Despite being dressed as a baby in any colour but pink, my six year old covets all things pink and shiny. Her room is a homage to Barbie glitter.
At some point girls seem to grow out of this and my older daughter at 10 will not wear pink at all, favouring moss greens and soft turquoises. I expect by the time she is in her teens she will be head to toe in black.
But then women get engaged begin to plan their wedding - and somehow, even in women who dress in beige and black in their daily life, that long hidden pink gene suddenly appears . Of the brides that I meet, nine out of ten want to have pink flowers in their bouquet. Not a bright in your face cerise, rather a pale, subtle, rosy pink.
This is very easy in the spring and summer - tulips, roses, poppies - all of these are easy to get in pink, it is their natural shade. However I have struggled in the past with having suitable flowers after the garden slides into Autumn in September - somehow I have consistently forgotten to plant pink flowers, or at least the subtle pinks that go with creams.
This is the first year that I have got a lot of pink flowers in autumn - In my prejudice I had thought that it might look wrong, too young against the sophisticated russets, but in fact they go well with the rose hips and autumn foliage in the rest of the garden. I think that I had been underestimating their subtlety.
This is a dahlia Karma Pink and above is a gift bouquet delivered at the weekend of Dahlias Yin-yang; Acapulco, Karma White; and Lagoon with a bit of Eupatorium purpurea.
