A Summer of Weddings and a Masterclass or two
We have spent the summer flowering some truly favourite weddings for the loveliest couples and their families at venues new and old and in between delighted to be asked to do Masterclasses at the RHS Hampton Court Flower show in the Flowers from the Farm Flower School tent, Strawberry Hill Sustainable Flower Festival and more locally with the Midhurst Buds and Blooms society.
We always only use English stems, mostly grown by us and where not, are supported by other local growers. Our bridal clients love this story of local provenance and on their second consultation with us a few weeks before their wedding, are able to see growing in situ in the rolling Hampshire downs, the fields and cutting gardens from which we will choose their flowers. Many say this is their favourite part of their adventure with us.
We are incredibly lucky to have access to wonderful plant and foraged materials from our own woods and hedgerows and to grow specifically the dreamiest most romantic flowers to create magical settings in all manner of venues. We pick long lax canes of rambling roses for arches and urns, old fashioned roses for their incredible scent and historic beauty, trailing vines of wisteria and jasmine, spires of foxgloves, luscious foliage and peonies in summer. Spring gives us boughs of blossom, armfuls of the most exquisite tulips and myriad of the most delicious small bulbs. What ever the season the last stems of our highly considered creative picks are always the dancers, the light whimsical gestural flowers that add tenderness and intimacy to the bridal bouquet and table flowers. Not hard to understand why we absolutely adore what we do.
At each Masterclass we have demonstrated how to create pretty detailed potager tablescapes using flowers and baby vegetables and then how to let go by designing at scale with a large urn or party statement piece. We have said how liberating it is to move up and down the scale and how drama, just as intimacy, creates different moods and moments. Well worth trying at home as a large scale arrangement, however simple, will change your relationship with the space in which you place it. We talked of vessels and methods, always sustainable and never ever any floral foam, and how it becomes a slightly addictive mental challenge always to be able to come up with a sustainable solution to provide solid mechanics for the dreamiest, most romantic of settings and designs.
We were very proud to be asked to follow Shane Connolly and his Masterclass last year at the Strawberry Hill Flower Festival with Polly Nicholson, he the sustainability king of the flower world, and floral architect of two royal weddings, a funeral and a coronation and Polly a renown grower and collector of wonderful historic tulips. We took up a flower bench of our late September goodies and as we created we talked through our favourites, why and how we use them and what and how we grow, always looking for colour, character, charm and form and that undefinable something that flowers grown this way bring to the party and to our lives. We talked of flowers for all our special occasions and our even more vital everydays. Most of all we just talked flowers, flowers, flowers.
Shane has always said that it is not about the designer or their ego, but should ever only be all about the flowers and who they are created for.
We agree; for us they are quite simply our alpha and our omega and everything in between.
Images: @kirstymackenziephotography at the Grange near Northington, all others are our own.
