Marching on
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”)
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”) and Old English spryng (“a jump”), from ablaut forms of the Proto-Germanic verb. Further senses derived from the verb and from clippings of day-spring, springtime, spring tide, etc. Its sense as the season, first attested in a work predating 1325, gradually replaced Old English lencten (“spring, Lent”) as that word became more specifically liturgical. Compare fall.
I’m into dictionary definitions the way some people are the shipping forecast. “Viking, North Utsire; southwesterly five to seven; occasionally gale eight; rain or showers; moderate or good, occasionally poor.” Something comforting and peaceful about them.
Spring the season, on the other hand, drags her feet. While winter finally dawdles off, spring makes us wait for her like an impatient lover. Predictably wistful, too eager, looking for signs. The usual thing - watching the clock, worrying if we dressed right. She comes closer inch by inch, painfully slowly, giving in by tiny increments.
When the camellias begin to flower you know you’re in with a chance.
March is first base. The beginning of something.
In any case, it’s a busy month. A month of preparation, planning ahead.
In the garden ‘the big chop’ ensues - cutting back the perennials and giving everything a good old haircut to allow the fresh green shoots to emerge.
It’s cathartic, and extremely satisfying, to strip away all the dead growth and take everything back to ground level.
The beds are given a lovely thick blanket of mulch to enrich the soil around the plants, suppress the weeds (to a certain extent) and to keep the soil damp and cool as the earth begins to warm up.
One Saturday a friend comes over to help for a few hours of (what he thinks will be) ‘therapeutic gardening’.
He brings sweet pastries and we drink coffee in the sun and it feels like spring.
Later, in torrential rain, we tackle the compost bays. Knee-deep, spades in hand, we apologise for the turn of events.
“Never happier than when shovelling shit”- his cheerful reply.
Me neither.
We compost all the perennial offcuts under last year’s food and flower waste. Excitingly we finally have our first big batch of lovely rich, crumbly compost.
It’s very satisfying to have finally cracked this and to be able to properly make use of our household and business green waste.
Certainly not glamorous but it might be one of our proudest moments so far.
I should have taken a photo to mark the occasion. Then again, perhaps not. We got home looking a tad feral.
The annual seeds are sown.
In trays there are Malope, Nicotiana, Helichrysum, Limonium, Tagetes, snapdragons and various perennial seeds.
Direct sown in our tunnels are scabious, cornflower, nigella, California poppies, Nasturtium, Omphalodes, Agrostemma, Phlox, Callistephus, Flax and Gypsophila.
The flowers are coming through now. Slowly. Another couple of varieties every week.
We’ve had a long spell of cold, dry weather and the season is slow to get going this year.
Narcissi, scilla, muscari, anemones. Some incredible hellebores.
We cut a little bunch of narcissi from the polytunnel and put them in a jam jar.
They drive around with us in the van back in London, through rainstorms and dazzling sun, the typical kaledioscope of weather on any given spring day.
They smell like vanilla.
In London the magnolia is in bloom.
After weeks of grey the streets are suddenly awash with these extraordinary blossoming trees.
It’s enough to make you fall in love with the city all over again.
At the studio we have a huge overhaul and spring clean in preparation for the new season.
All the doors are flung open, the windows polished, every cupboard and box is emptied, sorted, dusted and refilled.
An exciting delivery of beautifully aged reclaimed oak arrives all the way from Austria which we are using for cladding - a project we have wanted to do for a long time - and we spend an enjoyable couple of hours admiring each piece and deciding the order in which they’ll be fixed.
Arranging from the garden at this time of the year is very much an exercise in restraint. In making a little go a long way. Right at the beginning of the season still, you may only have one or two stems of each variety. It’s a bit like having nothing in the fridge and having to be inventive to make supper. Actually I love suppers like that. And flowers too.
x2 Forsythia branches
x5 hellebores (four different varieties)
x1 primula
x5 Vinca minor
x1 Fritillaria ‘Ivory Bells’
x 8-10 Scilla mischtschenkoana
The latter is white squill. A exquisite pale blue flower. We planted the bulbs beneath some rambling roses and they are naturalising beautifully, more and more every year.
Also at the studio, planning for our 2023 flower school begins in earnest. We like to start with a big brainstorm of ideas and then streamline from there.
‘Workshop flow’, Jess calls it.
We want each one to be different, to celebrate the materials of that particular moment in the year. We love working out how we can give our guests the best experience - what we’ll talk about, what we’ll make, where we’ll gather and sit and photograph, what we’ll eat, drink, listen to.
We have some great playlists this year. Classical. Jazz. Folk. Country.
See you next month! Excited for Easter and all the flowers to come.
Thank you for reading. A.
September weddings
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
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’.
Buttonholes for the boys - Nandina foliage tipped with red, textural berries from a flowering dogwood tree, blackberries (again!) and grasses.
And another - this time pale yellow ‘Imogen’ roses against a backdrop of the palest blue clematis, mustard fennel stars, creamy Hydrangea and tiny clusters of Thalictrum delavayi.
A delicate, textural flower crown of dried limonium, everlasting flowers and quaking grass tied with a silk ribbon.
Flowers in lockdown
April. We gardened mostly. Re-scheduled 2020 to next year. A paschal moon rose. Lightening-jagged faultlines appeared in the soil after weeks of sun. The rain finally came.
I lost myself on a cool damp night
I gave myself in that misty light
Was hypnotized by a strange delight
Under a lilac tree
I made wine from the lilac tree
Put my heart in its recipe
It makes me see what I want to see
And be what I want to be
lyrics from ‘Lilac Wine’ written by James Shelton
April. We gardened mostly. Re-scheduled 2020 to next year. A paschal moon rose. Lightening-jagged faultlines appeared in the soil after weeks of sun. The rain finally came.
Driving from London to the farm it seems that only weeks ago the roads were carving through meadows of iced umbels, casting the first golden-pink light of the day on the wool of sheep in the fields. Now the woods are a blur of bluebells, the verges indistinct, a billowing daze of cow parsley, the occasional daub of lilac.
The cutting garden has become the epicentre of our lives during the crisis. It gives us a rhythm to hold onto, the anchor holding us steady. There is always much to do, so much more to be done. Creating and maintaining anything is fulfilling but caring for plants and relying on them for harvest is a great leveller too. And gardening is really just the constant draining and re-filling of essential tasks ad infinitum. It keeps your head down, keeps you connected to the earth. For Jess and I a fairly dogged work ethic is coiled into our DNA - we don’t stop, ever. And right now that’s something I’m grateful for. It’s a slower place - there is more time for eating well, for reflection and all that. But too much introspection isn’t good for anyone. Some hard graft, however – that’s always good for the mind (if not the body!).
New routines and rituals begin to replace the old. Today we’d be entering the third week of a relentless schedule of weddings and teaching that in normal times would last through until mid to late October. Every few days we say ‘today we’d be teaching this’ or ‘tomorrow we’d be cutting for so and so’s wedding’ I guess as a way to keep abreast of a reality that is no longer in existence. And who knows whether it will be again soon – I suspect not. And when it is it will be another time, it will be different.
We had this private little thing that we used to do in the studio before a big workshop. We would select one of the cones of incense we brought back from Japan and light it, the smoke would drift through the studio and out into the back garden. Jess, Yukiko and I would be going about our tasks but it was this moment of calm and centeredness. And gratitude - for our beautiful studio, for the flowers, for eachother, and for the people we would be lucky enough to share them with. We miss Yukiko so much.
Sometimes we talk about what’s ahead and sometimes what’s been and gone – reminiscing has become a bittersweet pastime. This usually revolves around food. Going to restaurants. Hardly essential but it’s what we miss the most at the moment besides parents and friends. Most other things are superfluous but eating a meal in a roomful of strangers is the one luxury I’d keep if I could. The intimacy and theatre and excitement of a restaurant is like nothing else. I am relishing reading The Restaurant: A History of Eating Out by William Sitwell at the moment. He is a wonderful writer. “One of the main attributes that separates us from animals is that we consume things for more than thirst or hunger. We derive pleasure from what we eat and drink. There is satisfaction in flavour, texture and the wider experience. Indeed, much of the story of eating out is predicated on the fact that it is fundamentally unnecessary. Whatever anyone tells you, we do not need to visit restaurants to survive - but they make survival considerably more enjoyable.'“
With the time now to spend far more of it cooking we are eating better than ever – healthy, nourishing food that is prepared slowly, whilst working our way through a delicious bottle of something, and reading a book at the same time. But the meals out ‘before’ have taken on a mythic quality in memory. I can’t stop thinking about a bowl of pasta at Campania & Jones – whilst excitedly planning our autumn workshop in Paris with Clementine. An excellent steak at The Brackenbury Wine Rooms when the Icelandic family owners took over the next-door table, with a gradually increasing number of small children and emptying wine bottles. That was one of the last nights before the lockdown and they were certainly making the most of it. Yukiko’s first bowl of kedgeree at 202 – that was just before too. I read this great article recently by Ruthie Rogers, owner of the amazing River Cafe. Yes, I thought - that explains it. Food is all about people. Flowers are too.
April saw many beautiful flowers that didn’t have homes to go to and that was regrettable. Although we did enjoy working on a few creative projects of our own and luxuriated in arranging flowers for the sheer love of it again. There were tulips, anemones, hellebores, narcissi, spiraea. Brown, gold and lipstick-red ranunculus. But above all we were in thrall to the iris. Silvery blue, tall, architectural – we adore them. I brought a bucketload home with me last week and am hoarding them until the petals shrivel at the edges.
At this time of the year you can feel the shift in energy in the garden, the sudden surge of momentum. After the rain the plants puff out immediately and then its as though they double in size day by day. Everything begins to flower at once. It’s like an orchestra. The symphony begins!
May is all about the most exquisite of flowers - the bearded iris. There will be camassia too, aquilegia, geums, sweet peas, corncockle, the first roses of the season. But don’t let me get carried away! That’s a whole new chapter.
Bittersweet October
October is a bittersweet month for us. In these last few weeks of the season the seven-month growing period is winding down and we host our final Flower School classes of the year. There are still so many seasonal materials to arrange with - the studio luxuriously stocked with asters, jewel-coloured dahlias, berries and fruiting branches, zinnia, chocolate cosmos, giant centaurea, flowering shrubs, herbs and perennials, including one of my favourites - Japanese anemones. Acid-toned beech branches, garlands of drying hops and curling bracken like ornate fronds of rusting metal. But the weather is turning, winter coming on, and at a certain point we relinquish the warmth, light and garden bounty of the earlier parts of the year. The wheel turns again as we knuckle down to what will be a busy winter ahead in preparation for spring.
IN THE STUDIO
October is a bittersweet month for us. In these last few weeks of the season the seven-month growing period is winding down and we host our final Flower School classes of the year. There are still so many seasonal materials to arrange with - the studio luxuriously stocked with asters, jewel-coloured dahlias, berries and fruiting branches, zinnia, chocolate cosmos, giant centaurea, flowering shrubs, herbs and perennials, including one of my favourites - Japanese anemones. Acid-toned beech branches, garlands of drying hops and curling bracken like ornate fronds of rusting metal. But the weather is turning, winter coming on, and at a certain point we relinquish the warmth, light and garden bounty of the earlier parts of the year. The wheel turns again as we knuckle down to what will be a busy winter ahead in preparation for spring.
Our ‘Day of Flower Arranging’ workshop and 3-day ‘Intensive Floral Design Masterclass’ were a whirl of activity, flowers and laughter in the studio, with students from London and around the UK as well as Paris, Romania, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore and South Korea. We greedily mopped up the last of the dahlias, coppery rose-foliage and scabiosa from the garden. Bouquets and centrepieces were woven with fine-leaved ferns, pistachio-coloured hydrangea, snowberries and shimmering strands of miscanthus grasses.
One of my favourite installation pieces of the year was this arch of massed hops, ivy berries, ferns, asters and bracken created by the students during the final session of our last Masterclass. The combination of that luminous lilac with the reddish-brown of the bracken was so beautiful and otherworldly.
We are working on our Flower School 2020 programme as we speak and are so excited to share what we have in store for students next year. Dates will be released in November so keep your eyes peeled on Instagram where we’ll be announcing ticket availability, or sign up to our newsletter at the top of the page to be the first to know about spring/summer workshops.
In other news we have recently added a little film to our website. It was created earlier this summer, directed and edited by the lovely Luca Lamaro, to tell the story of our studio and garden. We hope you enjoy it! Click here to watch the full version.
Mid-month our team created the floral decorations for a glamorous and atmospheric autumn wedding in Saxmundham, Suffolk. The ceremony was held in a twelfth-century church and reception at Sibton Park on the Wilderness Estate. I’ll wait to share the professional images as Cinzia Bruschini is an absolute magician behind a camera but there are a couple of sneak-peeks below that we captured during set-up. One of the guests described this wedding as a ‘cross between an Erdem campaign shoot and Brideshead Revisited’; suffice to say an American girl married an Englishman and it was all very stylish and chic. We scoured our cutting garden, surrounding hedgerows and local flower farms for the most exquisite seasonal ingredients. The colours were divine - nudes, coffee, copper, peach and plum with autumnal branches and foliage.
Working away on a wedding, while logistically challenging, is also a lot of fun - there’s a great deal of laughter and camaraderie, especially in the rain, which seems to elicit a rallying of spirits. I’ll remember this wedding for the delicious colours, glorious English countryside threaded with fog and mizzle, large vans navigating narrow lanes and the sound of six sleepy voices calling goodnight to one another down a hotel corridor. If you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods seek out the church of St Mary’s, Huntingfield, the ceiling of which was intricately decorated during the 1860s by one woman, the rector’s wife, Mildred Holland. Reportedly she did so with no help, lying on her back on the scaffolding. Quite a feat and an extraordinarily beautiful sight, worth taking a detour for if you’re in the area.
We have a new account on Instagram where we are documenting our wedding work. Please join us for the journey @aesmeweddings
Looking ahead to Christmas, tickets to our festive wreath workshops are now available via our web-shop here if you would like to come along! We have a morning and an afternoon session on both Saturday 30th November and Saturday 7th December. Spend a lovely couple of hours in our flower studio making a wreath for your door or as a gift for a friend. There will be fragrant evergreens, textural and fruity decorative elements as well as an array of dried flowers specially grown, harvested and dried by us from our Hampshire cut flower garden. And of course, lots of steaming hot drinks and mince pies.
IN THE GARDEN
Rain, rain, rain - the song of this October. The darkest and wettest I can remember. Drizzle and fog, damp leaves, damp bonfires. In the shrub beds the leaves are turning - abelia green to bronze, nandina green to raspberry.
On the farm we began the laborious task of clearing and turning the cutting garden around for a new year. With the last wedding of the season under our belts we lifted the dahlias and annuals, and prepared the beds for spring bulbs. There is some satisfaction to getting ahead with this task and beating the first frost to it. That way you don’t have to witness the plants wilted, blackened and mangled - always a slightly gloomy sight when the temperature drops. What we like most about working on the land, farming and harvesting crops of flowers to supply the studio, is the absolute necessity of a ‘can-do’ attitude. Gardening and growing for harvest requires optimism and faith, there is no room for laziness or procrastination. There is always work to do, and plenty of it!
Becky dug some heroic trenches. In went the narcissus, alliums, fritillaria and iris and, in the tunnels, ranunculus and anemones. The first sowing of sweet peas have already germinated and are throwing up their tender green shoots. We’ll have three long beds solely for herbs next year - so many delicious and useful varieties of mint, thyme, hyssop, sage, lemon balm and rosemary, as well as echinacea, cardoon and lavender. It’s amazing how much four people can achieve in a single day, and how much the garden changes in the course of these few weeks. Although the vista of the garden is brown and green, with very few flowers left besides the perennial beds, everything soon becomes orderly and attractive in another way - neat rows of dark beds de-weeded, fed and mulched. I find the straight lines, raked soil and precise edging immensely satisfying, so different to the beautiful chaos and blurred edges of the summer.
Jess is planning out the next plot of land we intend to amalgamate with the existing garden next month, generating spreadsheets and reams of detailed drawings and diagrams. Very mathematical at this stage, but we can already envisage how glorious it is going to be once the phase of diggers and graft and fence-laying is past and the plants begin to establish themselves. It’s an ambitious project alongside our studio work, effectively doubling the size of our plot once again, but will enable us to supply a far greater volume of flowers to the studio next year to decorate weddings, events and workshops. Importantly, it will give us a greater variety of the different blowsy, vine-y and delicate materials we love and simply can’t get our hands on any other way.
We picked the last few buckets of everlastings and limonium for Christmas orders and parties. This year for the first time, we grew flowers especially for drying (for winter use). We began harvesting in early July and now have an overflowing room strung with hundreds of bunches of beautiful fragrant dried flowers, herbs, umbels and seedpods - a sea of apricot, pink, rust, grey and mauve. All ready for the festive season, just around the corner…
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - ‘Land of Plenty: A Journey through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain’ by Charlie Pye-Smith
L I S T E N I N G T O - Desert Island Discs
F O L L O W I N G - @wilderbotanics | @jackdavisonphoto | @alysf
E A T I N G - Ribollita, inspired by Darsham Nurseries
V I S I T I N G - Darsham Nurseries, Saxmundham, Suffolk & Hughenden Manor gardens, Buckinghamshire
Bearded iris, peonies and peas
It’s been a busy and productive month in the studio with weddings every weekend, a steady flow of beautiful flowers coming in and out and the constant to-ing and fro-ing of vessels and buckets and plants. May is perhaps our favourite month, fast-paced and flashing by so quickly, yet at the same time strangely long and drawn-out - the flowers of late spring - tulips, anemones, the last of the narcissus - giving way to peonies, clematis and bearded iris.
We’ve so enjoyed working from some very colourful and creative briefs this month. Autumnal rusts and berry tones for a wedding on the Kent/Surrey border with a beautiful blowsy blossom and hawthorn arch. A long aisle of Italian alpine meadow-inspired arrangements (to reference the groom’s heritage) in the Nash Conservatory at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. A Chinese-Jewish wedding at the extraordinary Sezincote House (a two-hundred year old Mogul Indian palace on an idyllic country estate in Gloucestershire, built by an English aristocrat for his homesick Indian bride), with a rambling clematis and wild rose briar chuppah, oodles of lush table arrangements and hundreds of metres of twisting, curving leafy vines across the clear marquee ceiling. Last weekend, a church wedding and reception at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds with abundant urns, table arrangements and a marble mantelpiece laden with peonies, bearded iris, spilling with tiny blue Lathyrus flowers on twirling vines.
In the STUDIO
Vessel | Korean ceramic tea bowl & kenzan Materials | Ranunculus, Saponaria, sweet peas & pennycress
It’s been a busy and productive month in the studio with weddings every weekend, a steady flow of beautiful flowers coming in and out and the constant to-ing and fro-ing of vessels and buckets and plants. May is perhaps our favourite month, fast-paced and flashing by so quickly, yet at the same time strangely long and drawn-out - the flowers of late spring - tulips, anemones, the last of the narcissus - giving way to peonies, clematis and bearded iris.
We’ve so enjoyed working from some very colourful and creative briefs this month. Autumnal rusts and berry tones for a wedding on the Kent/Surrey border with a beautiful blowsy blossom and hawthorn arch. A long aisle of Italian alpine meadow-inspired arrangements (to reference the groom’s heritage) in the Nash Conservatory at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. A Chinese-Jewish wedding at the extraordinary Sezincote House (a two-hundred year old Mogul Indian palace on an idyllic country estate in Gloucestershire, built by an English aristocrat for his homesick Indian bride), with a rambling clematis and wild rose briar chuppah, oodles of lush table arrangements and hundreds of metres of twisting, curving leafy vines across the clear marquee ceiling. Last weekend, a church wedding and reception at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds with abundant urns, table arrangements and a marble mantelpiece laden with peonies, bearded iris, spilling with tiny blue Lathyrus flowers on twirling vines.
Vessel | Low & wide Japanese ceramic bowl & kenzan
Materials | Grasses, nandina, ranunculus, ferns, the last of the tulips
Exquisite bearded iris cut from the garden
Vessel | Large & shallow resin bowl | Materials | Hawthorn, Fritillaria Imperialis, iris, tulips, corncockle & alliums
For the Baylight Foundation x Natoora supper club at Walmer Yard in Notting Hill during London Craft Week
Materials | Cabbage & variegated tulip leaves, clematis, Californian poppy, Ornithogalum nutans (milky bellflower)
Alpine-inspired aisle arrangements for Hannah & Gianluca in the Nash Conservatory at Kew Gardens
Antique cast iron urns full of spring flowers for Anna and Andras’ wedding at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds
Clematis & strawberries in stoneware bottles for Natoora x Baylight Foundation supper with Chef Dan Cox of Crocadon Farm
Hannah’s bouquet contained corncockle, Marguerite daisies, Californian poppies, Aquilegia & sweet peas
Materials | Faded ‘Coral Charm’ peonies with Saponaria, iris, elderflower, clematis and dog rose briars
Installation | The chuppah, dressed with clematis vines, hawthorn, spring blossom, sweet pea and potato vines, and garden roses, for David and Tash’s wedding ceremony, in the ornate curved Orangery at Sezincote House
Laying up the tables for D&T’s evening reception dinner at Sezincote House. The floral colour palette was creams, blush, coffee, rusty orange and pops of bright red to reference the bride’s Chinese heritage
In the GARDEN
Preparing the largest annual bed for cutting from high summer
The garden has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few weeks with the help of Becky who is a recent addition to our growing team, assisting with cutting for weddings and events, maintenance and turnaround between crops. Once over the tulips were whipped out and replaced with annual seedlings - stocks, runner beans and Nicotiana (tobacco flower), and lots of seeds direct-sown to cut from later in the summer. Two new long beds have been planted up with dahlias. In the tunnels the sweet peas, calendula, Californian poppies and corncockle have been flowering like mad, the ranunculus waning and soon to be replaced with sea lavender and straw flowers. Every week there are new varieties showing - this week the bearded iris and first flush of roses have been gently brought back and coo’ed over at the studio. And the nigella are just starting now too - African Bride, Sativa (black cumin) and Hispanica, which are the colour of dark blue denim.
One of the most exciting things for us this year is growing crops of different varieties specifically for our clients within a particular colour palette. The red sweet peas (Air Warden, Winston Churchill and Red Ace) that we grew for David and Tash’s wedding at Sezincote - sown from seed on Christmas Eve - started flowering just in time and we were able to cut long, whole vines for them with these hits of beautiful scented red flowers. For Anna and Andras, who had a white/buttercream and peach palette with accents of blue, we cut Lathyrus sativus azureus and Californian poppies like wrinkled silk rosettes.
Our first roses are fairly short-stemmed at the beginning of the season but we cut them into crates filled with jars of fresh water and bring them back to the studio regardless - so useful for low bowl arrangements and small clustered vessels for table styling. We use many of the weeds that we pull up in our designs too - speedwell, hairy bittercress, shepherd’s purse, forget-me-nots, jack-in-the-hedge. At the moment we have a real problem with invasive creeping buttercup but the upside is a profusion of glistening, sunny flowers just when you are searching for that hit of yellow. Herb Robert is an old favourite – it grows everywhere around the garden, and at the moment is a nude pink turning to flaming red. We pull it up by the root, soak it, store it in buckets of water and use it for filling the base of arrangements; a touch of vermilion when you want to spice things up a bit. We don’t discard the stunted, strange (sometimes slightly freaky) plants in our garden; it’s a bit like nose-to-tail eating in a restaurant; there’s a use for everything, weeds and weirdos alike.
If you’d like to join us for a day in the studio we have a A Day’s Flower Arranging Workshop coming up next month on Wednesday 17th July, 10am to 4pm. We’ll have an abundance of freshly cut flowers, foliage, fruits, vegetables, herbs (and decorative / edible weeds!) from the garden in an array of delicious colours to arrange with and we’ll be covering garden-inspired bouquets and table centrepieces (using the chicken-wire technique). Further details and tickets are available here.