Archive | Floristry

The Flower Book

 

It was about this time last year that I was invited by the publishers Dorling and Kindersley to work with them on a book all about flowers and natural-style floristry.

Their plan was to feature sixty cut flowers through the seasons using their signature portrait-style macrophotography. My brief was to provide all the flowers for these and choose thirty of my favourites to showcase in a series of floral designs.

The schedule was tight with just five months to photograph and write the book. I have always dreamed of writing my own book so I thought this experience would be a useful way of learning about the process. It certainly turned out to be a steep learning curve!

We began work on the book in April, just in time to catch the first wave of spring flowers in the tunnels. Each fortnight the Flower Book team would reconvene here at the farm to shoot what was in flower that week, slowly working our way through the seasons. In my naivety I had not realised there are so many people involved in producing a book – at each shoot there was at the bare minimum the editor, artistic director and two photographers, one of whom was Clare West.  She has been photographing our flowers for the past three years, and is responsible for many of the images on our website, she also teaches a Flower Photography workshop here.

Clare was responsible for the arrangement shots and Gary Ombler for the macrophotography which exposed every hair and grain of pollen in incredible detail. It was quite a job finding the perfect flower for these meticulous images and to see them in this new light was revelatory even after years of spending so much time with my flowers.

The writing was squeezed in during spare moments of a busy growing and wedding season – quite a challenge! It certainly takes discipline although I was writing about a subject I love and know well. The premise of the book is to encourage people to have a go themselves so each arrangement comes with a list of what you will need, my inspiration behind each design and a description of how it was achieved.

Each of the sixty flowers featured also come with advice on what to look for when buying from a florist or flower market, or for those who are able and willing, a few growing tips. There is also information on conditioning, the best way to display them and how to prolong vase life.

I have learnt so much from working on this book namely how to arrange for the camera and how to work with a publisher. It certainly stretched my abilities and patience at times but I am already keen to do another one, this time about growing cut flowers.

I think as a floristry book it is unique in one significant way, every flower bar the Leucospermum and Orchid were grown here on our flower farm, this makes me very proud and just goes to show what is possible.

The Flower Book is now available to buy on Amazon and I will be selling copies here on our courses and in our Saturday shop once the season starts.

Spring Florals Class with Jo Flowers

I met Jo Rodwell last summer when she came to the farm with a lovely group of linen-clad ladies on a floral foray with Sarah Winward. After bonding over peachy-coloured roses and poultry I asked if she would like to collaborate on a workshop the following season. She said she would love to, so eight months later here she is again rolling up with a van full of blossom and stone urns.

Credit: Erich McVey

Jo is the mistress of painterly, wild and romantic urn arrangements and enjoys working on large scale designs. ‘Going big’ is often something people lack confidence in tackling so that seemed the perfect topic for the day. We had some old flowery friends come along to join us and some new ones only admired on Instagram before now.,,

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We were able to spread out into a beautiful new teaching space for the day, a very old tithe barn soon filled with buckets of blossoming branches and wonderfully long-stemmed Ranunculus from Julie Clark at Hillcrest Nurseries.

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Of course I did not want to pick everything myself, because my contribution to the day was to let the attendees loose in the tunnels, field, hedgerow and orchard with a bucket and a pair of snips. I also kicked the day off with a tour of the farm and some tips on growing Spring cut flowers. After a chocolate chip cookie break (recipe courtesy of the fabulous Violet Bakery) we adjourned to the barn to watch Jo Flowers do her magic floral thing, bathed in a shaft of golden light. I love watching other people design with flowers, especially if they are really good, it is surprisingly therapeutic.

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Jo worked at a thoughtful, considered pace which gave everyone the opportunity to ask questions  about her philosophy and practice.

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Then it was time for one of Ashley’s superb home cooked lunches – Spinach tart followed by Rhubarb Upside Down Pudding were enjoyed whilst sitting in the sunshine.

Fully fuelled, everyone was itching to get start picking, tulips were pulled from the tunnels and the pole lance came out in earnest to grab some choice branches of blossom.

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Here are some of the impressive arrangements made by everyone, it always amazes me how different the results can be when visitors use our flowers on any given day.

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Huge thanks to Clare West for capturing a wonderful day and for everyone being such a fun group. You can find Jo Flowers’ blog here.

 

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Rachel Siegfried

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The Cultivated Palette Series – Hellebores

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I have been cutting back the old leaves on my Hellebores this week followed by a quick weed and mulch. My favorite tool of all time the Japanese Razor Hoe does a great job at getting all those pesky weeds out that like to colonize around the crown of the plant.

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I don’t think they have enjoyed this mild winter, there is a lot of black spot around so I think a good mulch will help keep the spores from being splashed up on to the emerging flowers.

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Hopefully in a months time they will be looking something like these which were photographed in March last year by photographer Clare West. We got together a few times last year and focused on just one flower on each occasion, so I thought it would be fun to share these beautiful images with you over the coming months in a series of blog posts called The Cultivated Palette. I will include lots of growing tips and recommendations for sourcing stock plants and seeds and I will share some thoughts on why I choose to include them in my ‘palette’ of plants for cutting.

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I am going to have another go at hand pollination next month. I will have to select a mother and father plant from each variety, based on stem length, good flower shape and general vigor. This Harvington double pink is a good example, the plant has formed a big clump relatively quickly with long stems and well you can see heart-breakingly beautiful flowers.

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So on a sunny day I will set aside ten minutes and go to my Hellebore bed armed with a pencil and some odds and ends of yarn. Firstly I rub the end of the pencil over the anthers of a fully open flower on the father plant, then I will select an almost open flower bud from the mother plant and tie a little bow of yarn around its neck.

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It is important that no others pollinators have been there first. I then transfer the pollen from the pencil to the stigma.

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That is all you have to do until the seed ripens around the end of May, the shiny black seeds should be collected and sown on a loam based, gritty compost whilst nice and fresh. They do take a few months to germinate, so keep the seed tray in a cold frame and hopefully by September you will start to see some signs of life.

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All my hellebores were bred by Hugh Harvington whose nursery Twelve Nunns, now run by his daughter Penny Dawson in Lincolnshire, has recently been featured in the January edition of RHS magazine The Garden. They do supply wholesale plug plants, as long as you order ten or more of a variety, they can be potted up and grown on for a season before planting out. Harvington hellebores have a purity of colour which I find very useful for my wedding work. This one below is Harvington single smokey.

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Hellebores are an investment but I cannot resist them, I think they add a subtlety to the more flamboyant and bold spring bulbs and have a good long harvesting period from February to April. Once you grow your own from seed you realize why they are expensive, it takes two years from pollination to the first flower.

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I have found the double forms hold better so I have just placed an order for some more including blush, apricot and double speckled cream…yum! I am establishing a new bed under a line of mature beech trees which should give them a bit of shade in the summer months.

Vase life can be rather fleeting especially before they start to set seeds. I don’t think searing the stems does make much difference, but scoring a line down either side of the stem and then plunging the stems in a deep bucket of water up to their necks overnight seems more successful. I have to confess most of mine are picked in April when my season is in full swing, they are very ripe by then and happily hold for up to two weeks.

The next instalment will be on Anemones which I have just started picking, the earliest harvest recorded here at G&G.