I am writing this at the kitchen table on a wet and stormy afternoon - the last of July. The baby and dog are both asleep and all is quiet. As is now apparently customary (despite being July) the wind is blowing and rain drizzling and it’s chilly enough to light the fire.

It seems only a moment ago that it was spring, cold, damp, dark in the mornings. And yet we are already past midsummer, already a week beyond the solstice and accelerating fast into the second half of the summer. June, true to form, has been busy and beautiful.

May. This is the month when things have really got going for us, flower-wise. Later than usual after a cold and wet spring and, as opposed to previous years when we’ve been in the deep end from March onwards, it’s been a serene and gentle incline to the busy summer season.

At the cutting garden we take delivery of a whole host of new plants and give them a home in the moist, cool soil. Some to replace winter losses, others that are entirely new to us and we’ll have to wait a few weeks yet to see in flower. There are a lot of damp, drizzly days planting, weeding…

Spring. The verb ‘to spring’ from the Middle English sprygen - ‘to burst or flow forth, to sprout, to emerge, to happen, to become known’. As a noun, from Middle English spryng (“a wellspring, tide, branch, sunrise, kind of dance or blow, ulcer, snare, flock”), from Old English spring (“wellspring, ulcer”)

A simple, sophisticated bridal bouquet of massed ingredients - coffee roses, unripened blackberries, mauve-grey limonium, fluffy grasses and pops of red from three Tagetes ‘Burning Embers’. And another - this time ‘Imogen’ roses against a backdrop of palest blue clematis

Forty-five miles south-east of Rome in the province of Lazio, there is a garden called Ninfa. Iconic among gardeners and horticulturalists the world over, it is widely known to be one of the most romantic, atmospheric places in the world.

In the renovated barn at West Horsley Place we created textural tablescape designs down the long dining tables using a mix of clear glass vases and bottles, with ice blue and ginger tapered candles. We used lots of tendrils, seedheads and fruits to add interest on the tables…

Formerly used as a ‘garden ballroom’, the tall windows and white walls of the Orangery in Holland Park provide a brilliant backdrop for flower dressing. We decorated the space with tall, wiry branches and trailing vines to bring the outside in.

For this wedding at Spring restaurant in Somerset House we decorated the tables with a mix of our own design ceramics and small glass bottles. Footed bowls were filled with blowsy summer flowers in all shades of pink from pale blush to deep cerise.

For the ceremony we filled a pair of bronze ‘acanthus leaf’ urns with frothy arrangements of mixed perennials - daisies, valerian, delphiniums and golden giant oat grasses. On the mantelpiece a large bowl spilled over with June’s finest - intricately speckled martagon lilies…

Les Confines is a beautiful Provencal house with incredible gardens to get lost in. The temperature rocketed the week of the wedding and the surrounding landscape of orchards and olive groves was unusally dry for May, fields of pale swaying oats rimmed by swathes of bright field poppies.