Christmas wreaths
The festive season is underway. In the studio we have been busy making this year’s wreaths using all the flowers, branches, seedpods and grasses we began harvesting back in early July at the farm. Bound into bunches and hung from wooden beams in the attic in long lines of copper, pistachio green, ochre and apricot; it’s a thrill to rediscover all the treasures squirrelled away months ago - roses, delphinium, forget-me-nots, strawflowers, fennel and so many more…
IN THE STUDIO
The festive season is underway. In the studio we have been busy making this year’s wreaths using all the flowers, branches, seedpods and grasses we began harvesting back in early July at the farm. Bound into bunches and hung from wooden beams in the attic in long lines of copper, pistachio green, ochre and apricot; it’s a thrill to rediscover all the treasures squirrelled away months ago - roses, delphinium, forget-me-nots, strawflowers, fennel and so many more…
This year we set ourselves a challenge to create the most seasonal, sustainable wreath designs we could. Avoiding using copious amounts of moss, metal frames and wire, Yukiko wove foraged branches from the farm hedgerows into beautiful natural circles of spindly twigs. And instead of sourcing from further afield this time, every element (bar ribbons and some beautiful hydrangea paniculata from The Real Flower Company farm, also in Hampshire) was grown, cut and dried by us. The pine cones were gathered on the edge of a windswept beach in Norfolk.
One of the things I love about this year’s wreaths is that they are still making use of the abundance and colour of our garden at its peak productivity in the height of the summer. Little botanical artworks, other than being wreath-shaped, they aren’t too Christmassy and the subtle colours and soft materials lend themselves to hanging on a wall year-round, in place of a picture or other ornament. Previous clients have told us that they have kept their wreaths up for months, even years - one rehoused from the front door to a guest bedroom, one hung over the clock in a kitchen and added to every time there are sprigs of herbs leftover from cooking - bay and rosemary and oregano - a dried circle of scratchy thyme fading into the silver shadows of an old oak porch. After-all, why should Christmas be disposable and wasteful when we make concerted efforts to recycle the rest of the year? Some of my favourite decorations have been passed down and adapted and I love the idea that with these woven wreath bases you can do the same - keep adding to them, saving and drying future flowers, collecting treasures, creating something new from something old. Building the story.
Our wreaths and other goodies can be found in our Christmas shop here.
In late November we decorated a beautiful wintry wedding in London. The church in Chelsea was dressed with Narnia-like arrangements of dried materials that had been harvested and stored months earlier - golden teasels, wild grasses and necklaces of wild clematis vine with fluffy puffs of ‘old man’s beard’ - layered with delicate nerines and anemones. The church interior was pale and simple without being austere, beautiful modern chandeliers hanging above the aisle - the effect magical and otherworldly, sunlight from side windows catching the glass bulbs with pearlescent seedpods of lunaria below.
At the Savile Club in Mayfair an afternoon reception of canapes and cocktails melted into a glamorous evening of candlelight, black tie, dinner and dancing. The bride switched from a satin Grace Kelly gown to sashaying Ginger Rogers-style ostrich feathers. We dressed the main staircase leading from the Club’s drawing room up to the ballroom, beautifully carpeted in grey-lavender, with banks of fresh and dried flowers and feathery drifts of miscanthus grasses, a huge garden urn above spilling with Virginia creeper and jasmine nightshade. For the Ballroom mantelpiece - ornately carved and gilded marble - I cut silvery artichoke leaves, tiny, delicate-leaved pittosporum ‘green elf’, ferns and globes of dried allium heads to lend a sense of the garden, winding down from autumn towards winter.
Photo credit - Emilie White
Photo credit - Emilie White
It was such a pleasure to bring this dream to life for the most wonderful clients. Thank you as always to Yukiko, Timi, Zephirine, Katharine, Olivia and PollenCrew, our fantastic team, for your calm, care and collaborative teamwork.
IN THE GARDEN
In Hampshire the landscape is citrine, green and brown. Mud and puddles, sticky, claggy soil. Occasionally the last of the yellow leaves fizzle into the damp undergrowth like flames landing in water. This month we’ve moved on in leaps and bounds and the garden is looking satisfyingly organised. We have planted up half of the next plot with beds of roses, shrubs and perennials, leaving the latter section for the annuals to be sown in the spring. There has been a lot of digging, shovelling and mulching in the pouring, unrelenting rain… but it’s amazing the wonders this does for the skin! We’re optimistically calling it “Gardener’s glow”.
Knee-deep in green waste from our last wedding of the year it occurred to me how much I love the polarities of farming flowers deep in the countryside while living in the city. It’s a curious, slightly schizophrenic mixture but it has become so obvious to me this year how much we need both ways of life now and how much it informs our work at Aesme. The best of both worlds, perhaps. To work in silence except for the trees blowing in the wind, and pheasants calling to one another through the mists in the fields, to witness owls hooting when you’re packing up your tools at night. And then driving back into this vast city of twinkling windows, its spilling stations and restaurants and theatres and the juxtaposition of then sitting in a candlelit wine bar in a dusty boilersuit, watching people walking home from the tube, jogging towards the river, carrying shopping, flowers, briefcases. No-one bats an eyelid at our mess of crazed hair and mud-caked boots - one of the best thing about London is the anonymity of it, being a grain of sand among millions. I’ve never thought that lonely. On the contrary, the sheer number of interactions you can have in a single day, just getting from A to B… and yet how small and village-y it is too - really just a sprawling interconnected network of villages and lights seeping out into the dark patchwork of fields and farmland beyond. Flitting between both places, and both states of mind, is home to us now. There’s no-where we’d rather be.
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - ‘WEEDS : The Story of Outlaw Plants’ by Richard Mabey
L I S T E N I N G T O - Divna Ljubojevic | The Puppini Sisters
F O L L O W I N G - @ottolinedevries | @cannellevanille
E A T I N G - Sunday roast at The Angelsea Arms (one of the best in town)
V I S I T I N G - our friends at Flint, Lewes for scented candles and beautiful Christmas decs
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
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.
IN THE STUDIO
From our foam-free installation workshop; beech, elder & viburnum foliage with dahlias, Japanese anemones, garden roses, grasses & hops on the vine
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.
In the early mornings before work I walk the dog across Bushy Park, between copses of ancient oak trees, sunbeams slanting through the mist, deer making their strange, prehistoric mating calls across the mown paths and windswept grasses. The landscape is shifting, prairie-coloured, the air smells of smoke and warm hay. As the month goes on, leaves begin to fall and the wind picks up, swirling them around the tussocks, peppering the river with ochre and copper. We stand on the bridge watching them float by. I feed Mavis blackberries from the brambles; she wrinkles her nose if they are too sour and spits them out into the grass. But she likes the sweet ones. Sometimes in the studio we find her salvaging blackberries from the green waste.
Snippets from the perennial beds for an autumn masterclass in London; ferns, pansies, chocolate cosmos, pennycress & gaura
Ceramic Urn | Borage, roses, zinnia, cosmos, dahlia, nicotiana & grasses
Urn of dahlias, miscanthus, lisianthus, centaurea & autumn leaves
Every year I think this moment is pure and utter magic, when the colours turn, even though I know that it is simply that the leaves, their veins closing up, are slowly starving of water and minerals, the chorophyll fading. I know this and yet every year I feel there is something so painfully romantic about it. Perhaps we just look for metaphors in the natural world to make sense of our own beginnings and endings.
It is my favourite time of the year to live in London; the city is so beautiful now. The street-lamps, red brick buildings, bridges. The melancholy parks, all skittering leaves and waning roses, tangles of dusty colours and fluff, acid hits of lime and dark berries. Mackerel skies reflected in the river.
In the studio we’re taking time to savour the last month of the growing season. Our rhythm is dictated by the garden, the business orbiting around it. We go up and down with the weather, harnessing and responding to the different energies each season brings, working hand in hand with them. Every project in these last few weeks is a product of this exquisite, stormy period between summer and winter, a cocktail of turning leaves and fruit, the feathers of grasses, the last flushes of flowers from plants that have given their all. For a wedding in Hampshire there are blackberries and sloes, elder and pale roses. For a class in London we harvest peony leaves that have turned a coveted nude-pink and pair them with limelight hydrangea and metallic fronds of Panicum squaw. One afternoon Yukiko shows us pictures of her favourite garden in Kyoto, thickly carpeted with red maple leaves. I come home to my flat and anxiously peer out of the hall window - my acer is still green, only the tips beginning to darken. When they finally fall it will be the beginning of winter.
Autumn wedding arrangements for Claire & Greg on their wedding day in Ovington, Hampshire
Armfuls of amazing Hydrangea Paniculata from The Real Flower Company
IN THE GARDEN
Becky, Jess & Yukiko tackling Tunnel Two!
Delphinium, cosmos & centaurea still going strong
In a gardener’s world it is the start of a new year.
This month we’ve all been hard at work turning the garden around for a fresh start, thinking ahead to spring. Taking out old crops, turning beds over, tilling the soil, planting seeds and hundreds of ranunculus and anemone corms for spring 2020 weddings and workshops. Early in the month we ordered large quantities of organic compost packed with sheep’s wool and bracken - a real treat for our hard-working beds.
Outside the perennial and annual beds are still going strong, giving us weekly bucket-loads of zinnias, dahlias, cosmos, borage, rudbeckia and centaurea and we’ve planted up several new varieties of frothy, feathery grasses. Exciting plans are being drawn up for a garden extension over the winter… more on this soon…
IN SUSSEX
A couple of weeks ago a creative autumn shoot took us happily back to the garden in East Sussex where we held our annual retreat in June. How much it has changed in three months! - the colours and textures so different to the lightness of early summer. We teamed up once more with friends and collaborators Heidi, Kristin, Sarah and Annie. It is always such a pleasure to create beauty with these girls! And not forgetting Josh who gamely assisted, carrying camera equipment and heroically wafting bonfire smoke…
Credit Kristin Perers
It was a perfect September day, smoky and mellow, the paths down to the dell carpeted with lilac cyclamen. It made me think of this poem, ‘Song of Autumn’, by Mary Oliver…
In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
Head-piece of berries, seedheads & grasses. Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Heavenly snippets from Sarah’s garden.
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Lunch at the Woodshed.
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Credit Kristin Perers
Autumn Shoot at the Woodshed - thanks and credits go to:
Photography: @kristinperers
Setting: @secret_garden_at_the_woodshed
Vessels: @_viv_lee
Fashion Styling: @flint_lewes
Floral Styling: @aesmeflowers
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms by Naoko Abe
L I S T E N I N G T O - Counting Crows: This Desert Life
F O L L O W I N G - @anjadunk | @brunettewinebar | @james.mc.grath
E A T I N G - Tomatoes from the garden. Mum’s elderflower cake
V I S I T I N G - Polesden Lacey, Surrey
Late August
Late August, and the seasonal barometer prevaricates daily between high summer and early-onset autumn. It has been a month of workshops at Aesme, with three wonderful groups of florists visiting from Seoul, each for a three-day intensive class on garden-inspired floral design
IN THE STUDIO
Late August, and the seasonal barometer prevaricates daily between high summer and early-onset autumn. It has been a month of workshops at Aesme, with three wonderful groups of florists visiting from Seoul with Flower Workshop Korea, each for a three-day intensive class on garden-inspired floral design for weddings. These workshops are a luxurious and immersive deep-dive into arranging flowers in the most naturalistic and seasonal way possible - lots of dahlias, rudbeckia, scabiosa, tobacco flower, garden roses and phlox this month - with textural shrub-foliage, foraged clematis vines and grasses, and plenty of scented herbs, fruits and vegetables - apples, tomatoes on the vine, artichokes and beans. It is such a treat to really revel in these materials and experiment with them, coming up with a different colour palette for each class, pushing the boundaries of what we feel is familiar or safe. It’s a fantastic time of the year for this - the leaves beginning to turn and some of the rusty tones appearing - mouthwatering mingled in with the softer shades of summer - bronze with lime and peach, caramel with lilac, blush with gold.
Sharing our flowers, watching other people discovering and enjoying them, has to be the most enjoyable aspect of the job, particularly when we have grown the majority of them from seed, bulb or tuber, and nurtured the plants towards a fruitful harvest. Especially when many of the students are working with particular varieties for the first time. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation in the studio, which we love and find infectious, and it makes us want to push the boundaries with what we grow the following year.
I’m always struck by how much people love using weeds, vines, grasses, vegetables and fruit just as much as they enjoy the flowers themselves - its those textural elements that bring an arrangement alive and fill the studio with fluffy, frothy works of art - each one an architectural sculpture, and so detailed, so colourful. It definitely isn’t the easy option, growing and gleaning your own materials, especially alongside design work for events and running regular classes. I’d go so far as to say that it may be the hardest form of product sourcing. But that direct connection with the source itself - the soil, the plants that give us these treasures every week, the weather, is integral to what we do here at Aesme, and the special experiences we want to provide for our students and clients.
IN THE GARDEN
At the farm our cutting garden is in peak production mode. This is the time of plenty, of harvests and corn dolls and receiving, after all the months of tending and nurturing and encouragement. The time of the year when people are gifting and trading the fruits of their labours - tomatoes for courgettes and rosemary, a bowlful of butterhead lettuce, just cut. A friend gives me a precious bagful of macadamia nuts picked from the tree on the ranch where she grew up in California. This is the most pleasurable way of living and eating - practical, frugal and generous at the same time.
The roses have eased a little now between flushes but our main ‘cut and come again’ crops, which include dahlias, phlox, scabious, rudbeckia, cosmos, nicotiana, daucus carota, calendula, borage, amaranthus, zinnia, Californian poppies and everlastings, are flowering prolifically along with successional plantings of hardy annuals like agrostemma and sweet peas. The herb beds have been full and luscious, the perennial beds yielding achillea, echinacea, chocolate cosmos, gaura, fennel, verbascum, campanula and spires of dainty thalictrum flowers.
Around the garden the hedgerows are beginning to glimmer with blackberries, hawthorn and rosehips and the scratchy outlines of drying umbels. We pick raspberries and whitecurrants from their canes to eat while we are cutting and fill little pots with ripe tomatoes, their sharp scent filling the tunnel. The garden is full of butterflies and drunken bees and the occasional sound of seeds showering from brittle pods, a sure sign that summer will soon be drawing to a close. Waiting just around the corner are days of morning fog and mellow afternoons filled with drifting bonfire smoke, when the leaves spin from chartreuse to titian red as if licked by flames, and finally to a dry cinnamon brown, crisp underfoot. For now we hover on the bittersweet bridge between two seasons, looking ahead, and looking back.
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree | Modern Nature: Journals, 1989 – 1990 by Derek Jarman
L I S T E N I N G T O - Miles Davis : Kind of Blue | Madeleine Peyroux : Dreamland
F O L L O W I N G - @coyotewillow | @lagrottaices | @hortusvarius
C O O K I N G - Pear salad with gorgonzola & walnuts by Deliciously Ella | Roast tomatoes on toast with tarragon & thyme by Gill Meller | Cromer crab in Norfolk
V I S I T I N G - Wiveton Hall Garden, Norfolk & Colby Woodland Garden, Pembrokeshire
Villa Balbianello, Italy
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio. In this photographic journal series we share the gardens that we visit throughout the year, both in England and abroad. We hope you enjoy the journey!
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio. In this photographic journal series we share the gardens that we visit throughout the year, both in England and abroad. We hope you enjoy the journey!
VILLA BALBIANELLO, LAKE COMO
A London heatwave
It is currently 37 degrees in London, stifling and still, pollen drifting slowly in mid air. Landing back at Heathrow last night, it was barely cooler than Italy, the same humid blanket of heat and haze spreading across Western Europe.
IN THE STUDIO
It is currently 37 degrees in London, stifling and still, pollen drifting slowly in mid air. Landing back at Heathrow last night, it was barely cooler than Italy, the same humid blanket of heat and haze spreading across Western Europe. Too hot to work - almost too hot to write - it has taken most of my energy today just to unpack, water the garden and occasionally pad barefoot to the kitchen for more elderflower.
July has been another wonderfully full and floral month in the studio with private and group classes and as always we have loved welcoming guests to our leafy haven in the city, sharing ideas, great flowers and cafetieres of strong coffee in between lulls of companionable non-conversation and concentration. Flower arranging never ceases to be meditative, even when there is a lot of it to be done in a little time (as is often the case for us in the run-up to weddings or events); it quietens and calms and focuses in a way that I think is quite addictive to those who really embrace and enjoy it.
Recently I’ve tried to build in time for more creative experimentation whenever I get the chance; working with flowers and plants there is always so much more to learn and to try, different combinations of materials, different techniques. It is easy to fall into the trap of replicating, particularly when it is your job, and sometimes it is nice to make something that isn’t for sale, isn’t ‘appropriate’ or proportionate or even finished. In our classes we always say that the goal is to experiment, to try something new, not to worry about getting it exactly ‘right’, to take it apart if you’re not happy with it, to start over, mostly just to enjoy it; flowers are, after-all, the greatest luxury. When you are arranging for a client the over-riding priority is the End Result. When you’re arranging for yourself it is the process that takes precedence, that peculiarly ecstatic state of mind when you are coasting, not thinking about anything, finally. And then, after some time, and all of a sudden, you are flooded with new ideas.
To quote from the book I recommended in the last post (still so much at the the forefront of my mind that I am re-reading earlier chunks of it) To The River by Olivia Laing -
‘I was getting anyway into one of those trances that come from walking far, when the feet and the blood seem to collide and harmonise. Funnily enough, Kenneth Grahame and Virginia Woolf both wrote in praise of these uncanny states, which they thought closely allied to the inspiration writing requires. ‘Nature’s particular gift to the walker,’ Grahame explained in a late essay, ‘through the semi-mechanical act of walking - a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same degree - is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe - certainly creative and supra-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it.’ As for Woolf, she wrote dreamily of chattering her books on the crest of the Downs, the words pouring from her as she strode, half-delirious, in the noon-day sun. She compared it to swimming, or ‘flying through the air, the current of sensations & ideas; & the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour: all this is churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. It is true I often painted the brightest pictures on this sheet: & often talked out loud’.
I feel like this when I am arranging flowers.
Next week the studio will be closed. We are all taking a break after the summer rush to go offline, stretch our horizons and re-energise with some coastal walks, fresh fish and early nights ahead of a busy August. More from the studio then!
IN THE GARDEN
It is that point in the season when there begin to be momentary glimpses of the next; the sorrel in the hedgerows turning rusty pink and burnt amber, the summer-weary earth is parched, little cracks appearing in the dust like miniature fault-lines. At the farm we’ve been making steady progress; it’s been a month of maintenance and weed control - so difficult to keep on top of in the height of the summer but made far easier with extra help. With the first flush over there is a brief lull before the next crops really get going - perhaps a little later this year because of the long, cold spring - the flowers of high to late summer - dahlias, zinnias, rudbeckia, scabiosa, daucus carota and everlastings. And vegetables too - lettuce and cabbages, french beans, radish and tomatoes. We harvest buckets of poppy seed-heads, so useful for the autumn, and already turning from that misty blue-green to tobacco brown and gold.
IN ITALY | GIARDINO ESTIVO WORKSHOP
Late last week Jess and I flew to Milan and drove north, spending the weekend on Lake Como. It was beautiful: terracotta, primrose and ochre villas with tiered gardens and shutters painted dusky blue, turquoise and emerald, hills brushed with mist, frangipani blossoming and trailing in the lake water that turned gold at dusk. Striped awnings, stone terraces of vines, water slapping the underbellies of boats and above the hills - pine, ferns, wild strawberries and hydrangea - the peaks not jagged but soft and undulating, blanketed with forests.
Not missing the chance to visit an Italian garden while we had a few hours spare we visited Villa Balbianello at Lenno. Built in the late 1780s by a wealthy cardinal, and most recently owned by handsome explorer Count Guido Monzino before passing to the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano (the National Trust of Italy) upon his death in 1988, the villa and its gardens are deceptively small and rather formal. But worth travelling a way to see was the snake-shaped Ficus which entwines the loggia, and the evergreen oak pruned into the shape of an umbrella, with a view across the Lake to Bellagio. We’ll share photographs in a later post, because there are many. I’d like to go back there, probably in autumn when the camphor laurels turn red; it must be a breathtaking sight.
On Sunday we moved east into the mountains to a little village near Erba, halfway between the two ‘legs’ of Lake Como and Lecco to host a two-day workshop at Olga’s Flower Farm. On the site of a nursery run by her mother Cecilia, Olga grows beautiful annuals - rudbeckia, cosmos, zinnia, dahlias, phlox, celosia and many more which she sells to florists in Como and Milan. We were spoilt for choice, and for foliage too - most exquisite varieties of ninebark, abelia, porcelain vine and viburnum as well as apples and pomegranates. It was a treat to be thrown into what I think of as the next season almost - late summer/pre autumn, the ‘serotinal’ period according to the ecologists calendar - a couple of weeks before we begin harvesting our own. The colour palette for the workshop was dominated by these dusty reds, corals, gold, rust and toffee.
It was extremely hot, as can be expected of Italy in July, and I think heat renders a lovely, if slightly sleepy atmosphere because those two days seemed to slip by in a slow, hazy, drifting sort of way. Everything just took the time it took - cutting, arranging, tweaking, drinking espresso, moving around from shadow to shadow, from the shade of one tree to another. And all day long, the unceasing soundtrack of cicadas.
We had the most wonderful group of students - a gaggle of kind, talented, imaginative and intelligent women, many from Italy but also from Barcelona, Vienna, New York, London and Scotland. It is the greatest privilege, not only to teach and to share our passion for plants and flowers with other like-minded enthusiasts, but to travel and see other gardens, other farms, in landscapes and climates different to our own. There is as much of a thrill recognising a shared love of the same flower as there is to discovering new ones.
We stayed in an old stone farmhouse at the foot of a small, bone-shaped lake and at the overlap of two mountains rising steeply towards the cloudless sky. At night a gossamer veil of heat slithered across the forest, causing the visual illusion that distinctly individual pine trees were now merging into one another, a soft black ashy slope so close you could almost reach out from across the valley and brush it with your fingertips. The owners, an attractive and glamorous proprietress named Roberta and her husband (whose name we never caught but we instead privately named ‘Mr Fawlty’) spent the hottest part of the afternoons in their cavernous cool room off the terrace watching the flat-screen television, oddly surrounded by the family silver which was laid out on every available surface as though it had been got down for a spring clean, many springs ago, and inexplicably abandoned. After the extreme heat of the day we would tiptoe past and slip into the shockingly cold (for a minute at least) pool, which was a green as old glass, and look out at the Lombardy hills, the rows of lavender fizzing with bees, the tier of terraces bordered by rough stone walls stepping down towards the shore of the lake where a wooden cabin was stacked neatly with logs. Occasionally the resident Great Dane - a great black shire-horse of a dog, would sidle over and lean her weight against you, bizarrely accompanied by a tiny black rabbit that had an unnerving habit of popping up next to you just when you least expected it after dusk. It was a strange and beautiful place and in many ways, despite it being really only a half-day of travel away, we couldn’t have felt further from home.
Of course being Italy we had delicious food, and it would be remiss of me not to share a few tasters… a risotto with melon. Ravioli with ricotta and orange zest in Como, a divine saffron risotto in Canzo, and on the farm coffee-soaked pastries and tiny espressos to make the heart flutter, orecchiette with shrimp, iced berries and elderflower shortbread.
We would like to thank… First and foremost, our students, for being such a joy and for making it all possible. Olga, for inviting us, sharing your beautiful flowers, allowing us to snip from your shrubs and exquisite pomegranate tree! Giulia for helping us with all the hard graft, you were a wonderwoman, and also for the beautiful blackberries, flowers and grasses from your farm. Cristina and Chiara for the food, coffee and general assistance. Fati Amor for the linen and silk ribbons; Agnes Duerrschnabel Atelier for the bowls and vases and Madlen Ceramics for the candle-holders.
A June masterclass
June flew by. We are at our most productive now, in these summer months, moving from one project to the next but poring our hearts and minds into each one, always searching out the most beautiful plants, the perfect shade of this to go with that, how to bring the freshest…
IN THE STUDIO
June flew by. We are at our most productive now, in these summer months, moving from one project to the next but poring our hearts and minds into each one, always searching out the most beautiful plants, the perfect shade of this to go with that, how to bring the freshest, most ethereal produce to the table. Bringing the garden to the party, which is pretty much our company motto these days.
The studio is very much the home of the business now, bedded in, comfortably accommodating our workload and somehow expanding and contracting with the size of each project and the team we have in working on it. Yukiko has taken responsibility for the daily running of the space and keeps it spotlessly clean and organised, efficiently turning it around between each event so we’re ready for the next. The place has an uncanny way of being just what you need at any given time; a workshop of whirling activity but also a leafy, cool and calm haven in the noise of the city. My favourite time there is in the early morning, drawing back the shutter door and the sun streaming through the back window, drinking a coffee and answering emails under the silver birch in the garden with a long day ahead. Or later, once the flower work is done and the shadows are lengthening across the floor, rows of arrangements lined up to go out the next day, and a couple of bees buzzing happily between them gorging on nectar.
Twice a week a full van of flowers brings the latest freshly cut produce up from the farm and we gather round the workshop tables, going through the buckets, passing around new varieties that have come into flower - this week stems of raspberries and whitecurrants, the first velvety chocolate cosmos, sprays of Violette roses and maroon Verbascum.
Our June Masterclass proved to be another magic three days of creativity and floral collaboration, with students from Australia, the US, Korea, Hong Kong and the UK. During these workshops we place great emphasis on seasonality and using locally-grown materials, thoughtful sourcing and foraging but also design, careful editing and pushing the boundaries of working with ‘colour palettes’. It is so interesting to discuss and compare the differences in the industry in different parts of the world and hear people’s experiences in starting their own small businesses. No matter the distance travelled everyone seems to come together with the same goal and the same questions; how to design and supply flowers for events in a sustainable, mindful way, how to break into and then make a living in an industry still largely dominated by wasteful methods, rigid expectations and unnatural or stiff design templates, how to grow or source flowers that are softer, more beautiful, unusual and difficult to find from large scale wholesalers. In group discussions each morning we cover everything from honing a philosophy to live and work by, colour pairings, pricing, green waste management and wedding logistics - it amazes me how much we can cover in three days with our heads together, and at each Masterclass someone always brings a new topic to the table to think about.
Image by Wendy Charlotte
Image by Wendy Charlotte
This month the studio was continuously heaving buckets from the farm – the first flush of garden roses, sweet peas cut long on the vine, bearded iris, alliums, foxgloves, calendula, nigella, delphiniums, Californian poppies to name a few – and treats including beautiful lime-leaved mock orange and pale peonies grown by Babylon Flowers and Bosley Patch in Oxfordshire.
We have just scheduled our autumn studio workshops where we hope there is something for everyone - a day’s flower arranging class, a 3-day Masterclass in September and again in October and a foam-free installation workshop. These are the last floral workshops we will be running in 2019 (aside from Christmas workshops and wreath-making). Further info here can be found here.
We worked on some lovely weddings at one of our favourite London restaurants this month, St John in Clerkenwell. Specialising in seasonal British produce and with a staunch ethos of no-waste cooking, it is such an appropriate setting for our farm-grown flowers, and its all-white-painted/stainless steel interior makes is a real pleasure to dress with kitchen-garden botanicals. To tie in with the culinary setting, we incorporate lots of fruits, vegetables and herbs into the designs - artichokes and their giant, leathery silver leaves, chocolate mint, lemon balm, edible flowers and summer fruits. It is a simple and yet highly effective celebratory offering for the guests; exceptional food and wine, flowers and potted plants, a little candlelight.
ON RETREAT
Images mostly Kristin Perers, a few by us!
The week that ended with midsummer we escaped the city and headed for East Sussex for our annual retreat, this year hosting Flower Workshop Korea for four days in an idyllic private garden in the Weald. Arriving from London by train, our guests were whisked off to tour Sissinghurst Castle and Great Dixter where we drew inspiration from the gardens for the designs we would make over the coming days.
The floral design workshops were held in the beautiful glass ‘Woodshed’ and throughout the grounds including an all white installation in an ancient wooded dell of gigantic oak trees and shadowy ferns, inspired by Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden at Sissinghurst, and a tablescape of grasses and sorrel referencing the meadow in the Orchard at Dixter, using incredible ‘rock’ vases made by Noe Kuremoto Ceramics.
The final afternoon was spent on a photoshoot with our friend and talented photographer Kristin Perers with styling by Heidi Francis and the balletic Annie modelling clothes by ethical labels Elena Dawson, Sula and Still and flower designs by all the guests.
My abiding memories of the week are of birdsong, laughter, delicious healthy food, woodsmoke and classical music floating through the garden at Great Dixter in the hazy late afternoon light, roses scrambling up through lichen-laden apple trees in our host’s orchard, a candle-lit lantern at the gate at night, lighting the way to the guests’ farm cottages across the field, the hooting of owls in the valley, thunderstorms, dewy, sun-dappled mornings. It was an incredibly special week, and a great privilege to share one of our favourite parts of the English countryside with our Korean guests.
IN THE GARDEN
Down at the farm we are at full tilt in June, the rose garden and sweet peas now in prolific flower. In the tunnels we’ve been cutting from a statuesque crop of candy pink and lavender delphinium, many varieties of calendula, Californian poppies in shades of buttercream, streaky pink, orange and red, nigella, clarkia, forget-me-nots and agrostemma. Outside the perennial beds have yielded geums, wallflowers, heuchera, geraniums, campanula, achillea and ferns. In the large raised bed, rows of phlox are flowering and behind them, zinnias, cosmos and rudbeckia are fast on their heels, with the dahlia beds getting bushier by the day.
We cut and harvest bi-weekly for our weddings, workshops and orders, and at this time of the year all our materials are cut from the farm with the occasional top-ups from local growers or plant nurseries. As amateur gardeners it has taken a few years to trial how and what we grow, the right quantities and varieties etc to fully supply the schedule of the studio during the busy summer period. We’re now really starting to see the fruits of our labours, and nothing makes us prouder than delivering an event where every vase, bowl or bottle contains the stems we have nurtured from seed, shrub, bare root, tuber or bulb.
Year by year we have maximised the productivity of our farm plot, growing it gradually and organically in line with the growing of the business. This has felt the sensible way to supply the requirements of our studio (we use everything we grow in-house and don’t sell wholesale) and in keeping with the demands of an increasingly busy workload in London, without it being too much to keep a grip on or incurring much wastage. Having a gardener and extra help this season has moved us on leaps and bounds.
We’ve had the immense joy this year of harvesting particular colours of varieties chosen for specific clients’ events – something we’re keen to do more of as we continue to expand the growing side. Because much of our work is so colour and design-focussed, and the lead-time for events (particularly weddings) often reasonably long, we can tailor the bed-space we have to accommodate special elements in particular tones and shades - it’s a holistic process that is beginning to come into its own, and is deeply rewarding. Just last week we cut dusty-mauve delphiniums and burgundy centred phlox to fulfil a rich colour pairing one of our brides had hoped for when we first starting discussing her wedding last September. Working in this way keeps the palette of the garden constantly shifting and interesting, rather than being dominated by any one preference, and for clients who love colour there are so many possibilities. We love taking a brief and incorporating it into the garden - it’s no coincidence that this is when our studio produces its best work.
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’re loving at the moment…
R E A D I N G - Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, Hard Water by Jean Sprackland
L I S T E N I N G T O - Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa - Don’t Explain (very loud, on repeat)
F O L L O W I N G - @elenasplate | @ernst.berlin | @scribewinery | @lucianogiubbileigardens
C O O K I N G - New potatoes and garden-grown mint. Roasted Romaine lettuce with pancetta, toasted breadcrumbs and lemon. So good!
V I S I T I N G - Sissinghurst & Great Dixter, Sussex, Grey’s Court, Oxfordshire, the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival
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.
Tokyo & Kyoto, Japan
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio.
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio.
ON THE STREET | TOKYO
Late March in Japan. It seems a long time ago now but this week - being the week of Chelsea Flower Show -seemed a fitting time to finally share a few of the garden photographs Jess took on our trip earlier in the spring. We had wanted to visit Japan for a long time having developed a recent interest in Ikebana, a love of Japanese ceramics and an interior designer mother who has always been inspired by Japanese aesthetics and minimalism. We particularly wanted to visit some temple gardens while we were there (we stayed first in Tokyo, then Kyoto) but what we hadn’t expected were all the millions of beautifully curated mini-gardens outside every home, apartment building and shop - acers and bamboo and bonsai, of course, but also lots of photinia and nandina, ferns, pine and camellia. And so this collection of photographs holds many ‘roadside’ moments as well as Zen temples. In a week we barely scratched the surface but we completely fell in love with Japan and will be going back as soon as we can (perhaps to witness the leaves turning in autumn which must be a magical sight). At home in London I’ve grown even fonder of the Japanese maple in my little courtyard garden, which is branching out at an alarming rate, casting its leafy shadow-shade over the Acanthus and grey pebbles below. Every time I wake up and look out of the window I am back in Japan, wandering this strange and beautiful land.
KYU ASAKURA house | TOKYO
NEZU MUSEUM | TOKYO
Ryoan-ji ZEN TEMPLE | KYOTO
KYOTO
Chenies Manor
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio. In this photographic journal series we share the gardens that we visit throughout the year, both in England and abroad. We hope you enjoy the journey!
CHENIES MANOR | BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
Jeju Island, South Korea
What a way to start the season, hosting a destination workshop on a little volcanic island off the coast of South Korea covered in pine trees and mandarin groves! Starting in Japan (we’ll be sharing a couple of the gardens we visited in Tokyo & Kyoto here soon) we flew to Seoul to spend a few days getting adjusted and preparing for the workshop before heading south to Jeju Island. The workshop was held at a wonderful cafe with views out over the blue waters of the Korea Strait. It was the perfect spot - modern, tastefully designed and with atmospheric music, delicious lunches and some of the best coffee we found on our trip.
All the flowers, foliage and plants were part-shipped, part-flown from Seoul where we had chosen them at the flower market early the preceding mornings. The choice of materials (from Korea, Japan and Holland) was exceptional - I’ve never seen so many flowers and branches in one place, the Seoul market is labyrinthine and just goes on and on… Our palette for the workshop was soft and feminine, with pops of yellow to reference the canola flowers that can be seen everywhere around the island, and mandarins, since Jeju is a tapestry of unending groves of these sweet, fragrant fruits. While travelling I was deep into reading all about citrus via Jess’ recommendation in our last post - it was surreal to be preoccupied with lemons in Italy while speeding through an Eastern landscape dominated by orange fruits.
For three days the sun shone and the sea sparkled and lapped against the dark, craggy rocks. We foraged dried grasses and silverberry from the coast-path and strange pitted black rock formations (they say there are three-hundred and sixty-five volcanoes on the island; one for every day of the year) for a setting-specific installation on the final afternoon. It was such a privilege to be working somewhere entirely new and unfamiliar and yet be made to feel so at home.
JEJU ISLAND | SOUTH KOREA
What a way to start the season, hosting a destination workshop on a little volcanic island off the coast of South Korea covered in pine trees and mandarin groves! Starting in Japan (we’ll be sharing a couple of the gardens we visited in Tokyo & Kyoto here soon) we flew to Seoul to spend a few days getting adjusted and preparing for the workshop before heading south to Jeju Island. The workshop was held at a wonderful cafe with views out over the blue waters of the Korea Strait. It was the perfect spot - modern, tastefully designed and with atmospheric music, delicious lunches and some of the best coffee we found on our trip.
All the flowers, foliage and plants were part-shipped, part-flown from Seoul where we had chosen them at the flower market early the preceding mornings. The choice of materials (from Korea, Japan and Holland) was exceptional - I’ve never seen so many flowers and branches in one place, the Seoul market is labyrinthine and just goes on and on… Our palette for the workshop was soft and feminine, with pops of yellow to reference the canola flowers that can be seen everywhere around the island, and mandarins, since Jeju is a tapestry of unending groves of these sweet, fragrant fruits. While travelling I was deep into reading all about citrus via Jess’ recommendation in our last post - it was surreal to be preoccupied with lemons in Italy while speeding through an Eastern landscape dominated by orange fruits.
For three days the sun shone and the sea sparkled and lapped against the dark, craggy rocks. We foraged dried grasses and silverberry from the coast-path and strange pitted black rock formations (they say there are three-hundred and sixty-five volcanoes on the island; one for every day of the year) for a setting-specific installation on the final afternoon. It was such a privilege to be working somewhere entirely new and unfamiliar and yet be made to feel so at home.
Flower School | A selection of materials lined up for our bouquet class including ranunculus, sweet peas, flannel flower and mandarin branches
Left: a spring centrepiece of ranunculus, tulips & fritillaria
Above: Urn of willow, ranunculus, tulips and mandarin branches
Flower School | our wonderful group of students with their ruffly garden-inspired bouquets
Flower School | table styling & props: beach pebbles, shells, intricate vines and ochre linen
Flower School | spring wreaths of moss and alpine plants
Left: a bouquet of spring flowers and locally foraged silverberry foliage
Above: a student’s sketches of the bouquet demonstration
Above: pale pink urchins and creamy shells to reference the coastal setting
Left:: Jess’ demo bouquet with spiraea and ranunculus
Flower School | Installations: a site-specific design using the local dark rocks with willow, spiraea, tulips, dried orchid leaves and rockery plants
Flower School | Colour: our palette for the workshop was soft pink with accents of orange and yellow, as a nod to the cherry blossom, mandarin groves and canola flowering all over the island in spring
Flower School | a friendly mandarin farmer who gave us permission to roam his greenhouses and gorge on the sweet ripe fruit as we picked
Thank you to Flower Workshop Korea for inviting us, arranging everything so beautifully and being the most generous and welcoming hosts, and to all the suppliers and assistants who helped make this workshop the magical few days it was. And to our students, for travelling the distance and being the most enthusiastic, giggly and talented band of flower-lovers we could ever hope to meet.
In the STUDIO
Back in the studio we unpacked our cases laden with Japanese kenzans, bamboo sticks, scissors and secateurs, as well as a new collection of beautiful Japanese and Korean tea bowls and ceramics in beautiful uneven, earthy glazes.
The rest of the April has been spent gearing up for the start of wedding season and holding the first of our spring classes. The evenings are lighter and longer now, the temperature rising almost imperceptibly but enough for the doors and windows to be open in the afternoons. The workbenches have been strewn with narcissus and tulips up from the garden - primrose yellow and rust and milky-white.
Flower Studio | Table styling 1:1 class: clustered small bowls with garden-grown flowers & beeswax candles
Flower Studio | Left: Narcissus ‘Moonlight Sensation’ & ‘Segovia’
Flower Studio | ‘Belle Epoque’ tulips, at their most beautiful as they fade and crumple
Flower School | Table styling group workshop: antique Indian brass vessels and florals in a palette of red, gold and lime
Flower School | Left: a section of the inspiration board for our Spring Masterclass, referenced during a discussion on colour theory
Last week we held our Spring Masterclass - a three day intensive course in flower arranging with a focus on seasonal, naturalistic and sustainable botanical design for weddings and events (with a difference - i.e. no flower foam, no traditional wiring, rule breaking encouraged etc). In these seasonal courses we focus on using the finest ‘produce’ or ingredients we can grow, source and forage, designing in a nature-led, garden-inspired style and taking inspiration from place, art, fashion and garden design.
Flower School | 1:1 class hanging installation: a suspended trough layered with tulips, geranium, narcissus and fritillaria
The intention on our Flower School courses is to create at atmosphere of open-mindedness, collaboration and creativity; we are always inspired by our students’ enthusiasm and curiosity, and their willingness to think outside the box. Last week the group was made up of students from the UK, Hong Kong and Portugal; everyone was fairly new to flowers, one ran a dried flower business, one wanted to enjoy flower-arranging as a pastime, others were considering career changes. By Friday afternoon we were having such a lovely time we didn’t want it to end - we’d shared a wonderful few days of creation and brainstorming, made lots of beautiful arrangements together, discussed business and social media and colour theory, shared some lovely food and listened to a lot of French jazz. There is an alchemy to what happens in the studio on weeks like this and that evening as we were blowing out the last of the candles, I think we all felt very grateful that we are able to live and work in this way, and to meet other like-minded people who share in the things we love.
Flower School | Table styling 1:1 class: bronze, blue, plum and accents of peach in ceramic vessels
Above: Akebia quinata (chocolate vine) with runner and French climbing beans for planting
Flower School | Spring Masterclass table styling: linear trough vases in a brown, mauve and pale yellow palette
Flower School | Urn design 1:1 class: an ornate French urn with fresh spring greens, leggy tulips and butterfly ranunculus
Flower School | Spring Masterclass demo: Jess’ loosely layered and romantic demo bouquet
Flower Studio | Actinidia kolomikta (variegated-leaf hardy kiwi) with tulip Clusiana ‘peppermint stick’
With a new workbench installed to give us a little more space in the studio, we have decided to open up two additional places on our Summer Masterclass | 5th - 7th June. These spots are first come first served and full details can be found on the website.
In the GARDEN
Cutting Garden | Scabiosa potted on and waiting to be planted in the outside beds
‘Naught you can do about the weather’ one of the landscapers said as we surveyed the rows of ageing tulips in one of the tunnels after our trip overseas. An unseasonably warm spell late March (while we wrapped up and drank hot chocolate in chilly Tokyo) saw many of our tunnel-grown bulbs flowering a few weeks earlier than expected this year. You win some, you lose some. The outdoor planted beds made up for it however, where we were trialling small quantities of a number of different varieties of tulips and narcissus. The ranunculus are flowering prolifically; hundreds of white, pink, plum and bronze, with excellent stem length and ruffly petals opening to those seductive opaque centres. Fritillaria - persica, uva vulpis and imperialis, have been filling the studio with their ‘cannabis’ scent, along with peonies, aquilegia and the last of the anemones, which are very leggy now, with tiny little faces.
So begins the summer - or what I think of as the summer, anyway - the half segment of the year that is measured by bi-weekly deliveries from the garden to the studio and the constantly evolving stock of new, delicious colours and textures that we take from their unprepossessing buckets and that result in branchy urns and beautiful spilly bowls.
Cutting Garden | Tulips in the early evening sun in one of the outdoor beds
Cutting Garden | Ranunculus ‘Aviv white’
In the Ether
A few things we’re loving at the moment…
R E A D I N G - Food for Free (the complete guide to help you safely identify edible species that grow around us, together with detailed artwork, photographs, field identification notes and recipes) by Richard Mabey
L I S T E N I N G T O - Piano & A Microphone, 1983 by Prince. The Table Manners podcast with Jessie Ware
F O L L O W I N G - Samuji, Somewhere Magazine, Arne Maynard Garden Design
C O O K I N G - Steamed kale with capers, thyme, chilli flakes, garlic and creme fraiche and toasted breadcrumbs (inspired by Gill Meller). Melon, buffalo mozzarella and Parma ham salad (via The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater)
V I S I T I N G - Anthracite Coffee Roasters (a beautiful disused warehouse / overgrown ruin / coffee shop in Jeju Island). Chenies Manor in Buckinghamshire (for the displays of tulips and gorgeous walled vegetable and herb gardens)
Hyacinth, magnolia, hellebores
It’s been a month of strange timing and judgements calls. The balmy days of late February were followed by the tail end of a storm, whipping through the treetops and rippling the tunnel roofs. Capricious spring weather.
In the GARDEN
It’s been a month of strange timing and judgements calls. The balmy days of late February were followed by the tail end of a storm, whipping through the treetops and rippling the tunnel roofs. Capricious spring weather.
Tulip ‘Concerto’ flowering in one of the tunnels, and dahlia tubers going into their pots.
In the outside beds the hellebores are still flowering happily along with scilla, snowdrops and the beautiful wood anemone nemerosa, an incredibly delicate and soft variety. To hedge our bets (last year having had late snow) in the autumn we split our bulbs, planting half in the tunnels and half outside, including replanting many of last year’s tulips and narcissus bulbs (which we stored over winter in the shed) in the smaller tunnel for an early crop. As luck would have it, encouraged by the warmer weather many of these are already flowering and we will no doubt be missing a number of our early flowering varieties while we are overseas - such is the heartbreak of leaving a garden you so lovingly tend! So far we’ve cut ‘Concerto’ - a creamy yellow tulip with a black centre like a bumblebee’s bottom, narcissus ‘Actea’, ‘Elka’, ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘Jenny’ and pleasingly long-stemmed anemones, along with masses of heavily scented apricot, pink and white hyacinths.
We trialled ‘Multiflora White Pearl’, ‘Gypsy Queen’, ‘Aiolos’, ‘Pink Festival’ and ‘White Festival’ hyacinths this year; after a disconcertingly quiet winter they suddenly popped up in the new year and grew very happily in the tunnel.
A final push last week saw the final (for now at least) section of the cutting garden transformed from an ill-planned and weedy area to four new long beds. Into one of these have already been planted new shrubs including Nandina, Pittosporum and Spiraea and the others will be filled with a mass of colourful dahlias come early summer.
Seeds sown this month - Nicotiana, including our favourite ‘Apple Blossom’ from last year and a new variety we’re excited about called ‘Tinker Bell’. Also tomatoes, stocks - lots of whites, apricots and pale pinks - and Malope.
We’re looking forward to welcoming Becky to the team in May who has spent the last few years as a chef on sailing yachts (so a seasoned early riser and used to being out in the weather!) She will be working on regular maintenance and helping to cut flowers ahead of our weddings and workshops. The garden, which has gradually grown from an allotment-sized plot (and before that a large bramble patch) to just over a quarter of an acre, is intensively planted and we are hoping it will be an extremely productive operation this season. While we’ll still be very involved we’re excited to see what a difference an extra pair of hands makes - to the garden and to us!
In the STUDIO
This month we’ve been preparing the studio ahead of another busy year. The ‘season’, by which I mean the hustle that begins in April and goes on until late October, kicks off again as soon as we get back from the Far East so we’ve been working day and night to make everything ready. Finishing the studio garden, painting and polishing, restocking sundries and props. It’s going to feel so good to open our doors again and we can’t wait to welcome all our visitors this year.
Pops of colour for a spring drinks party in Soho; one and a half metres of tulips, Cornish narcissi,and alliums, with butterfly ranunculus and Fritillaria Uva Vulpis & Meleagris dancing above.
We’re also soon to be joined by Yukiko, a florist from Japan, who is coming on board our team and will be working with us in the studio from next month as well as some talented new freelancers assisting on our events and a few lovely volunteers lending a hand in exchange for learning the ropes and having some creative time with the flowers. The studio will be a productive and industrious place this season! Looking forward to long, light days fuelled by iced coffee and good music and flowers everywhere you turn - the best kind of days.
Magnolia in bloom at Kew Gardens. On the right: Magnolia heptapeta ‘Yulan’.
It has been a knock-out year for the London magnolias. We were lucky enough to catch them fully blown at Kew Gardens recently, some blooms the size of large dinner plates and almost frighteningly perfect - like leaves of velvet, streaky pink or as white as snow. Many had been battered by the buffeting winds, the grass strewn with a carpet of jettisoned petals.
Light spring arrangements to dress an apartment in Kensington for an interiors shoot earlier in the month designed by Olivia Outred. Featuring tulip ‘Verona’, velvety brown Iris tuberosa (widow iris) from Cornwall and Primula ‘gold lace’.
With the warmer weather and weeds beginning to encroach again down at the garden we’ve been experimenting with using foraged stems in bouquets and arrangements. Rosettes of Cardamine hirsuta (hairy bittercress, which is edible as a bitter herb and apparently very good in small doses in salads) or Prunella vulgaris (self heal) look beautiful in low bowls as an alternative to moss and Sinapis arvensis (charlock) as fillers for hand-tieds. We’re so drawn to the ‘waste-not-want-not’ approach and ridding ourselves of a hierarchical attitude when it comes to the materials we use. At our core we are celebrating the fleeting beauty of nature and one of our founding principles at Aesme was (excuse the pun) ‘digging deeper’. This is why we established our cutting garden in the first place, because we want a direct relationship with our produce that goes beyond just buying and selling. The ingredients we use tells the story of the season, the weather, they are deeply evocative and we are nurturing them or finding them and using them carefully and with consideration for the other elements they are put with. Like a chef taste-testing recipes - it’s all about the combination of one ingredient with another, the preparation and then the execution. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Adding in extra colour or texture is like adding seasoning - the bright, sour flowers of the charlock in the bouquet above and below are like a hit of citrus in a creamy dessert when added sparingly to the paler tulips, but they would be too much with other more dominating colours. Weeds are too often overlooked and an untapped resource for new and interesting ingredients. We’re going to be researching them, harvesting them and arranging with them a lot more this year.
Left: a small bowl arrangement of yellowing anemone leaves, rosettes of hairy bittercress and Narcissus ‘Elka’.
Right: a bouquet of tulips, Narcissus ‘Wedding Bell’, Anemone ‘Coronaria The Bride’ and charlock.
Some of you may have seen on ‘Instagram Stories’ that Jess and I are currently in Japan. I am writing this update from Kyoto where it is 6.00am. We have been longing to visit Japan for many, many years so it is a dream come true to finally be here, to see some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, and draw inspiration from Japanese design and aesthetics at the source - the attention paid to every minute detail here is astounding and touching in equal measure. We already feel an affinity to certain aspects of the Japanese art of flower arrangement, Ikebana - the emphasis on seasonality and the artful treasuring of a restrained selection of ingredients. It will be fascinating to take a class and begin to explore the history of this ancient art form and spiritual practice further.
We’re back to Tokyo at the end of the week and from there fly to Seoul to spend a couple of days visiting the flower market and then on to Jeju Island to teach a 3 day workshop. We knew that there would be so much to share from this trip that it would warrant its own blog post so stay tuned for this next month!
In the Ether
A few things we’re loving at the moment…
R E A D I N G - The Photographer in the Garden by Jamie M. Allen & Sarah Anne McNear, In Praise of Shadows by Junchiro Tanizaki and the Monocle travel guides on Tokyo, Kyoto and Seoul
L I S T E N I N G T O - Billie Eilish, Yo Yo Ma
E A T I N G - Delicious seasonal meals at Savory, Kyoto and Bistro Rojiura, Tokyo
V I S I T I N G - The Camellia Show at Chiswick House & Garden (on until 31st March 10am - 3pm), the Magnolia at Kew Gardens
Rajasthan, India
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio.
Gardens are the greatest source of inspiration to us in our work as flower arrangers and growers. Seeing how natural materials converge, how plants are grown together, witnessing their shapes, colours and textures - these are fuel for so many creative ideas and revelations in our studio.
RAAS HOTEL | JODPHUR
In my notebook:
Kachnar tree, the “orchid” or “camel’s foot” tree has bright purple pink flowers that drop their petals into the water channels and ornate squares of gravel below. The garden is neatly organised into symmetrical sections. An avenue of green, rustling trees leads towards the spa in the old haveli building, behind which looms the Mehrangarh Fort - a cascade of water in front. Pennisetum lines the pool. Gardeners with brushes made from gathered grasses painstakingly sweep the squares of grass beneath the trees clear of fallen leaves, which they gather in wicker baskets. The aromatic beds are full of kumquat trees and frangipani, and dried agastache seed heads. White and cream bougainvillea cascades over our private garden wall. They have placed shallow terracotta bowls for the ring-neck doves and pigeons to drink from.
At night the gardens are lit with small lanterns at ground level and hundreds of flickering tea lights in the crevices of the stone walls. The air is thickly scented with burning incense and charcoal.
chokelao bagh | mehrangarh fort
mOSAICS GUESTHOUSE | AMER
ANOKHI MUSEUM OF BLOCK PRINTING
Amer Fort
out & about | JAIPUR
Milky skies & netted iris
It’s a colourless February day - a milky sky and everything is just stone and silt, bare branches, low cloud.
But the birds are singing. Maybe I’m imagining it but it doesn’t feel as though the birds have been this vocal in a while. A few days lately it has been sunny, light, a glimmer to the air - you could have been lured into thinking it was spring. Not yet - we learned that lesson last year when all emerging shoots disappeared under a blanket of snow mid-March.
In the garden so much is happening now, even if it is just out of view, just beneath the surface. It makes me think of the metaphor of the swan gliding over a flat pond. All seems calm and serene, though below the water-line there is a wild mayhem of peddling and effort and churned bubbles.
In the GARDEN
It’s a colourless February day - a milky sky and everything is just stone and silt, bare branches, low cloud.
But the birds are singing. Maybe I’m imagining it but it doesn’t feel as though the birds have been this vocal in a while. A few days lately it has been sunny, light, a glimmer to the air - you could have been lured into thinking it was spring. Not yet - we learned that lesson last year when all emerging shoots disappeared under a blanket of snow mid-March.
In the garden so much is happening now, even if it is just out of view, just beneath the surface. It makes me think of the metaphor of the swan gliding over a flat pond. All seems calm and serene, though below the water-line there is a wild mayhem of peddling and effort and churned bubbles.
We harvest the first sparse offerings of the season. In tunnel one the Iris reticulata are flowering - ‘Painted Lady’, ‘Alida’ and ‘Clairette’, planted by Jess back when I was sheltering from autumn storms in Greece. The last two are sweetly perfumed and the darkest blue reminds us of our grandmother; it was her favourite colour.
The first few anemones are blooming too, so frail their petals are almost translucent. Lots of hellebores in muddy taupes, plum and black. Galanthus (snowdrops) including ‘Sam Arnott’ which we collected from the Chelsea Physic Garden last year after the annual talk by Joe Sharman. Also ‘Flore Pleno’ - very perfumed and with a rosette centre - and ‘Nivalis’; the name comes from the Greek words gála or "milk", and ánthos "flower" and the Latin nivalis "resembling snow". They are just heavenly - pure poetry. We dream of a bride one day ordering a tiny, intricate bouquet of snowdrops tied with silk; hard to imagine anything more beautiful, seasonal or meaningful than that.
Elsewhere the narcissus, tulips and alliums are shooting up, the ranunculus looking happy and healthy for the most part. We prune the roses back. Scores of new plants arrive weekly, seeds are sown - calendula, scabious, rudbeckia, phlox and Californian poppies. Successional sowings of sweet pea seedlings shoot up in their root trainers, flaming reds specially sown for a late May bride (whispered to, cajoled). Everywhere things are budding - the lilacs, honeysuckle, raspberry canes. Signs of hope and promise.
In the STUDIO
It feels good to be back at work after a few weeks away. For us January is a carefully guarded month of hibernation and recuperation. Time for catching up with friends, cooking and road-trips, reading the piles of books we collect throughout the year and that stack up beside the bed unfinished, long walks, drinking whisky by the fire in the evening. Jess returned from her travels in India, browner and somehow lighter too; the break did her good. This time away has become completely necessary to us to get the distance we need from the day-to-day running of the business, to re-set and re-energise, come up with new ideas. I used to loathe it, now I love this time of the year - the drawbridge up, the gentle pace.
Sometime around the 1st of February, every year, there is a surge on the wind that speaks of change. New beginnings; time to get back in the saddle. There’s always a lot to do before the season begins - staffing, logistics and design planning for spring and summer events, a backlog of quotes and proposals to work through, maintenance work at the studio, setting up systems to make things easier for us all in the heady months ahead. The studio remains closed but although it isn’t visible yet we’re gaining momentum behind closed doors. As always the pattern and pace of our work exactly mirrors what is going on in the garden
In the studio we dust off snips and press the first cuttings; preserving them to use later in the year for stationery and table settings. We open the doors wide and let the fresh air sluice through. Sit in the sunny little garden out the back, surrounded by pots of emerging tulips, muscari and narcissus. Throughout the month we’ll be ticking off jobs: sweeping and de-cobwebbing, plastering and painting a new wall, dropping off any unused props at the charity shop. It’s like getting into an old car and letting the engine warm up slowly. We’re looking forward to firing up and being off again - so many new and exciting avenues to explore this year.
Next month we are heading to Japan and then on to South Korea to teach our first workshop of the year on Jeju Island. If you have any tips of gardens to visit, or great places to eat in Tokyo, Kyoto or Seoul we’d love to hear your recommendations!
We’ll be posting a monthly journal from the garden and studio here on the blog this year, along with a photographic series of the gardens we visit and are inspired by (stayed tuned for some glorious Rajasthani gardens next week that are sure to warm the cockles).
We’ll also be sending out a quarterly seasonal newsletter with updates, upcoming events, pop-up shops, workshop dates and more. If you’d like to be kept in the loop please sign up at the bottom of this page. We promise we won’t send you any junk.
In the Ether
A few things we’re loving at the moment…
R E A D I N G - Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, The Land Where Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee and Natural Selection: A Year in the Garden by Dan Pearson
L I S T E N I N G T O - Goldfrapp (Supernature) and Moloko (Things to Make and Do) and the Pardon My French Podcast with Garance Doré
C O O K I N G - Anna Jones’ Smoky Corn Chowder from The Modern Cook’s Year, and Dahl Makhani
B U R N I N G - cedar-scented incense sticks from Flint, Lewes and Cire Trudon’s Ernesto candle
A V I S I T T O - Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams at the V&A (on now until 14 July)
St John Bread + Wine
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.
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.