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!
I had the pleasure of providing the flowers for this gorgeous 'pudding theatre' for Jacaranda Catering this month. They were showcasing their delicious desserts at a wedding fair at Ramster Hall.
The bike, and the most excellent idea, belong to the fabulous Minty Moore, one of the wonderful Senior Event Managers at Jacaranda Catering!
I thought January would be quieter with time to review and plan and update this website but its been quite the opposite with a really busy start to the year and I've got a considerable amount of catching up to do on my posts this month. I have been updating my Instagram account though, although I have let that slip in the last week!
So, what have we been up to?
With any event immediately after the Christmas break simple and mainly white schemes seem so appropriate and with heavenly hellebores in season and at the peak of perfection they make a wonderful addition to any tablescape. With new seasons ranunculus in white and green, a sprinkling of paperwhite narcissi, birch and a little pop of mimosa in bud the table was complete for this early January dinner at Cowdray House in Midhurst, West Sussex.
Clean and calming florals for January 2017 before the riot of colour starts to awaken our senses in Spring!
Happy New Year to you!
Thank you to everyone I worked with this year, it was a really brilliant floral year and I enjoyed every minute of it.
It was a great year for my flowers and plants at The Cowdray Farm Shop and a very successful year for events and weddings too. My clients have all been, without exception, an absolute pleasure to work with.
Thank you and H appy New Year X
Miranda and James married on June 25th 2016. The wedding ceremony was held at St Mary's church in Eastbourne on the Cowdray Estate and the reception was held at the beautiful Cowdray House in Midhurst, West Sussex.
We provided the flowers and Jacaranda catering provided the hospitality.
It was a huge pleasure to work with Miranda and her wonderful parents, Sue and Bob,
Miranda and James have kindly allowed me to share their gorgeous wedding video with you here.
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!
Well, it's a floral time of year and the last few weeks have been incredibly busy for us at This Floral Life.
We've been making lots of wreaths, table decorations, planters and flowers for the Cowdray Farm shop and decorating trees, houses and shops for Christmas. It's been really hard work but so lovely and beautifully festive. It's a great time of year to be a florist!
We've worked on some gorgeous events recently and this weekend we set up gorgeous Christmas tablescape for a private dinner at Cowdray House, Midhurst.
The dinner was in the fabulous Buck Hall and with the huge Christmas tree, balcony fireplace garlands that we installed last week, the room looked amazing. With the fire lit and hundreds of candles around the room, the stage was set for a magical Christmas event.
It's been a magical couple few weeks decorating some fabulous venues for Christmas including one of my absolute favourites; Cowdray House, Cowdray Park, Midhurst.
The Christmas tree was specially selected and cut from the Cowdray Estate and is a truly magnificent tree.
So, two fireplaces, five balconies and a huge tree later....
I was invited to design the flowers for a gorgeous event last Thursday and we created a wild and autumnal tablescape inspired by the views from the dining room window of Cowdray House, who hosted the event. Caper and Berry provided the fabulous food and hospitality.
The event was a party for many of the top wedding and event planners and, having installed the flowers, I rushed home to change and actually attended the event.
It was a great night with amazing food, a superb venue and great company.
Photos by the brilliant Kerry Jordan of Boo Face Photography
Bringing the outside in; Autumn Event Dinner at Cowdray House
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
I absolutely LOVE the changing seasons and I'm sure I'm not alone!
The shorter days have brought changes to the colours all around my house and gardens and my daily dog walking forays into the woodland behind my house results in more little finds for my nature table. If you haven't created a nature table since childhood then I recommend it. At the moment I have a small bowl of fresh green acorns that fell from the tree outside my studio, some cobnuts that I'm trying to work out a recipe for, some blackberry branches that are in the process of ripening and some sprigs of pink heather with little ferns. These are all sitting on one side if my kitchen table and are a great alternative to flowers or indeed a compliment to any seasonal flowers that you might have in a vase or jug.
My Cowdray farm shop bouquets are now taking on an autumnal feel with seed pods. dahlias, grasses, and berries all making an appearance. I'm really enjoying using the oranges, mustards, purples, deep reds and purples which look so fabulous at this time of year.
Wishing you a very happy Autumn season.
Autumn flowers of viburnum berries, mustard coloured roses, grasses, nigella seed pods and dahlias
Woodland bracken on the turn
Dahlias, clematis, grasses and blackberries
Teddy bear sunflowers