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.
Flowers in the time of Covid
The next few months we plan to go back to basics. Growing flowers, learning how to arrange them, studying plants, photographing them, writing about them. It’s safe to say that until much later this year there will be no weddings, no parties, no workshops - this is going to be one long research trip! But while we have our health, we will be in the garden, slowly building on what we’ve started there for the future. We hope to share more with you here as we go.
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.
Autumn equinox
Autumn - nature’s sigh of relief. After the September equinox the summer race is abruptly over, change on the wind. As the season begins to darken, there is a lightness that comes with letting go; the final dance at the end of the night, the swan song. Energies swirl around through shapeshifting September days. There’s the ascendancy before the tipping point and then, when the crest of the wave breaks a sense of abatement, but also renewal.
Late August
A London heatwave
A June masterclass
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.
