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’.

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.

The Savile Club

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 in cream, apricot and ruby red, roses in shades of honeyed peach and coffee, foxgloves and pale pink carnations.

The bride’s bouquet was made with roses ‘Queen of Sweden’ and ‘Iceberg’, with honeysuckle and dainty whispers of larkspur, heuchera and flowering wood sage around the edges.

The tables at the Club were dressed with brass vases in varying shapes and heights holding little arrangements of lilac campanula, cornflowers, sweet peas and dancing spires of Veronicastrum.

Les Confines, Provence

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.

A long banqueting table was set up in front of the house and we decorated the full length with ceramic bottles, vases and fruit - the tiny strawberries and cherries were intricately depicted in the beautifully illustrated table stationery.

In amongst the meadow-soft palette of washed out pinks, mauves and creamy yellows we added pops of bright blue irises and scarlet red geraniums. We were fortunate to find incredible local growers and were able to source all the materials from France.

The bride’s bouquet reflected the dry, textural landscape and we use lots of foraged elements from the surrounding olive groves - grasses, pale blue field scabious, alliums and wild clematis - along with luscious garden roses and eucalyptus.

Farnham Castle

The brief for this wedding at Farnham Castle was ‘whimsical garden style’ with lots of autumnal foliage.

For the ceremony, two large urns with tall leafy branches and creamy dahlias were arranged at the end of an aisle of asters and perennial grasses.

At the centre of the reception tables stood a footed centrepiece with garden flowers and foliage in caramel, rusty orange and white.

The bride’s bouquet included rudbeckia, zinnias, dahlias and garden roses with tiny aster and hydrangea flowers for added texture.

June's finest

Stipa gigantea or ‘golden oats’ has been flowering now for a fortnight or so. The seedheads rise above the other plants, shimmering and swaying. Despite their great height they are still overshadowed by patches of towering Thalictrum ‘Elin’ and Cephalaria gigantea nearby.

Our first year of growing Eremurus himalaicus the ‘foxtail lily’. After such a relentlessly cold winter and given their shallow planting depth, we were unconvinced we would see these this year, but they have shot up and flowered beautifully.

The plan for the perennial beds has been to make the most of every bit of space, growing something for each season. Here the alliums and Eremurus rise up out of the clumps of grass and Aster foliage, which will be harvested later in the summer.

We’ve sadly lost several peonies this year, but the Itoh varieties seem happy and full of life. This lemon yellow ‘Canary Brilliants’ variety has a bright red eye in the centre - we arranged it with buttery Sisyrinchium spires for a photoshoot.

St John Bread + Wine

In June there was a wedding at St John Bread & Wine in Spitalfields. St John is a dining room, wine shop and bakery on Commercial Street and pretty much my dream space to decorate - stylish yet unpretentious, sophisticated yet informal, it is all about the food, and the wine (and the bread). 

Don't you miss June? Hot and stormy, mosquito-bitten, foxglove-filled June. The first flush of garden roses, the first suntan lines, punnets of English gooseberries; June days are full of natural abundance, when the washing on the line dries in less than an hour, and it is too hot to walk on the gravel barefoot. Every year June comes around and goes so fast, and every year when it has gone I miss it.

July has been gloomy, as it usually is. I love gloominess too, though. Real weather, thunder and scudding clouds, wind in the trees, leaves scuttling across the park. My new puppy has been enjoying those.

Anita and James had the best of everything for their June wedding; sunlight pouring into a white room, crisp linen, taper candles, just-gathered flowers. The cutting garden came up trumps with scented garden roses and Californian poppies and bearded iris; we filled a whole slew of antique vases, goblets and tankards in tarnished pewter and brass. There is a distinct alchemy to the gleam of old metal by candlelight. I like imagining the history of those vessels, I believe some of them are quite old. Who received that prize after an exhausting summer regatta many moons ago, the thirsts those dented flagons might have quenched in London ale-houses long demolished. 

For me, this wedding was an excellent example of how effective combined simplicity and seasonality can be. All English-grown, the majority from our own garden, flowers simply gathered in complimentary colours, diversely collected vessels, tall elegant candles, a smattering of ripe, seasonal fruit, sparkling glassware. And that's it. Nothing showy or themed or too contrived. Just an effortless celebratory feast, with delicious food and a lot of very good wine.

My heart was really in it, right from the get-go.

Everything was prepared at our studio in advance. Jess and Camille placed and tweaked the flowers and wove in a few clematis tendrils and I hung some wild dog-rose briars on the back wall from the shaker pegs. Install took three of us an hour. It was the swiftest set-up we have ever done.

Later, as our clients and their family & friends danced the night away down the street, a mile south three terrorists mounted what is now known as the London Bridge attack, killing eight and injuring forty-eight innocent civilians. We drove back the following morning to de-rig through shocked, deserted streets and wailing sirens. That afternoon, with the same familiar exhaustion that every wedding ends with, and from the sadness of that strange day, I crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep. 

But when I look back through the photographs, all I see is joy. Flowers are joyful, they make people happy, they are a reminder of happinesses past, they are fleeting, transient, and yet there will always be new growth, whatever you do you cannot stop that. New growth will come. When times are hard I sometimes wonder what we are doing this for, Jess and I, the shlepping backwards and forwards on the motorway with our hard-won flowers (which have survived winter's frost and drought and foraging predators and plenty more besides, each one just to be admired for those few hours), the gargantuan effort we go to to convert people to seasonality and English-grown flowers over imported ones during the seven to eight months of the year when this is possible, to encourage people to think outside the box of conventional wedding floristry (more on this some other time), the early mornings and late nights and constant hustling. And really this is the wedding that sticks in my mind when I ask myself why we do it. We do it for this, these flowers, these people. 

For me, the photographs here are testament to the endurance of love and friendship. I love that our work is a part of that.