There are so many incredible, beautiful, seasonal, native flowers around in the Spring.
Keeping it strictly seasonal in floristry is so easy in the Springtime and we're absolutely spoilt for choice.
Here are just a few of the fabulous home grown ingredients I've been using this week in my bunches at Cowdray Farm Shop.
Hellebores, forget me nots and muscari
Frittilaries, ranunculus, hellebores, paperwhite narcissi
Snowflake snowdrop
Green Iris
I'm spoilt for choice with tulips!
I'm so lucky to have lots of customers who appreciate the fringed, striped, parrot and French long stemmed varieties and appreciated that they cost more than the run of the mill varieties but are worth every penny.
These tulips were historically the highly prized varieties that sold for a lot more than their weight in gold during the tulipamania era and I understand that the stripes on these very special tulips were caused by a virus, hence their historical rarity.
Tulips, in my opinion, are at their very best when they are fully open and curving every which way. The inside of the tulip flower is often stunning and well worth studying!
February really flew by and now March is here, Spring, Mothering Sunday and soon it'll be Easter.
It was a really busy month for my flowers and plants at Cowdray Farm Shop and I've been super busy this year with weddings and events work, visiting some amazing venues with wonderful wedding planners and beautiful brides to be. I'm so lucky to have been booked for some wonderful, wild, whimsical weddings this year and look forward to sharing these with you as they happen.
Unusually, I've had many early requests for my Spring wreaths this year, I absolutely love making them so I'm very happy. Here's one I put into Cowdray Farm Shop last week, It's made with mimosa, paperwhite narcissi, broom and forget me nots and the scent is fabulous.
It's an exciting week when the fabulous fritillaries make an appearance.
They are one of my all time favourite flowers; sculptural, curving, nodding heads.
Wild, seasonal and sublime. I'll be tying them with dark red ranunculus and deep burgundy tulips for Valentines bunches. They tick all the boxes!
There usually comes a point at Christmas when the wreaths slow down and the bouquets, table decorations and bulb planters take over. Not this year though, we're still working on wreath orders through to Christmas Eve and we're busier than ever with the other flowers and bulb planters.
I'm not complaining though, it's such a joy to be a florist at Christmas and help people to decorate thir homes; I love the interactions and chats with clients, I love the true creativity of bespoke floristry and I love the challenges of working with real seasonal materials.
Happy Christmas to all my wonderful customers and thank you for helping me to live This Floral Life!
It's been another great week for our Autumn wreaths and flowers generally.
With half term happening this week and Halloween on Monday our customers seem to be entertaining at home and decorating their doors and homes to welcome in their visitors.
The wreath below is welcoming in visitors at The Cowdray Farm Shop Cafe in Midhurst this week and it's prompted people to ask us about wreath making workshops. We'll be organising wreath making workshops in early December at Cowdray Hall in Easebourne, Midhurst, West Sussex and if you're interested in joining us then please do get in touch.
Autumn Wreath at Cowdray Cafe
It was a glorious Autumn morning for Krisztina and Graeme's wedding at Cowdray House on 8th October 2016.
If you look through this journal you may have seen that I was the florist for the very first wedding held at Cowdray House, at the end of June this year. Well, this wedding included the first actual civil wedding ceremony at the house.
Autumn is a great time to get married and at Cowdray House the views from the ceremony room out to the garden are spectacular with all of the colours of Autumn represented in the landscape.
The flowers also included colours from the Autumn landscape mixed with pink and peaches and the last flush of the English roses.
The ceremony room at Cowdray House
The wedding reception in Buck Hall, Cowdray House, Midhurst, West Sussex
I really enjoy taking photos and I'm surrounded by so many fab photo opportunities all day long. With close up photography you get to see so much more detail and I find it fascinating.
Take leaves as an example. Just photograph one leaf selected at random and you get to really study how amazing nature is....
The first of the Autumn wreaths; simple, wild and rustic.
For the wreath below I used willow, rose hips, crocosmia berries and rubus, which is a softer and more pliable relative of the blackberry if you haven't come across it before.
They look equally good outside or inside the house, although my resident robin would no doubt feast on the rose hips if I left this one outside.
This wreath is destined for the Cowdray Farm Shop as part of the Autumn scheme for the shop.
Hips, berries and willow wreath
I've been looking forward to October as, apart from the amazing Autumn flowers, foliage, seedheads that appear, I've also got an action packed month of weddings, dinners and parties to arrange flowers for in addition to some lovely family celebrations to look forward to.
The weather has been incredible and although we've had some heavy rain in the last week we've also had many glorious days with bright blue skies, sunshine and sensational sunsets.
Shorter days, turning leaves, cooler evenings, a garden full of fabulous hips and berries and gorgeous grasses; Autumn has finally arrived.
Autumn flower urn
Some of the ingredients I'm using this week at Cowdray Farm Shop
Autumn Dahlia
Lanterns
My neighbour was tidying up her garden for Autumn and popped in with a bunch of these magnificent allium seedheads.
It's definitely worth planting some of the large headed allium just for the seedheads in September. They look superb in a vase and so beautiful when the Autumn light hits them.
It's been a really beautiful summer and I've been lucky enough to spend so much of it outside, arranging flowers, tending plants and watering (a lot for the potted plants that I sell at Cowdray Farm Shop) in the cool of the evening just before sunset; a magical time of day.
The summer season has been non stop this year and the event work, like the flowers, has been abundant.
For this event at Cowdray House I wanted to showcase the abundance of summer flowers and seasonal fruits and also to showcase a small selection of the huge variety of plants that I've been selling at Cowdray Farm Shop this summer; verbenas, abelias, pelargoniums, senecio, clematis, honeysuckle, crocosmia, dahlias.
A sprinkling of garden roses and a few unripe blackberries from my own woodland garden complete the look; the abundance of summer 2016.
The abundance of summer
Summer table centres
Garden flowers at Cowdray House
Freshly picked
It's Peony season!
They're incredibly beautiful, long lasting, full of surprises and everyone adores them.
I absolutely love them and have been working my way through all of the wonderful varieties recently.
I've got an excellent range of peonies in Cowdray Farm Shop at the moment so , if you live in Midhurst, it's definitely worth a peek.
