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”)
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.
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.
