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Must have Muscari

By on April 18, 2012 in Anemones, Cut flowers, Floristry, Muscari, Ranunculus, Tulips

It has been lovely to be back in my studio arranging flowers. I have spent a lot of time over the winter months at my laptop designing weddings and preparing quotes. I have been talking about flowers for months and finally I’ve been let loose.

The last two weddings have been a mixture of pinks and blues. I have mainly been working with anemones, ranunculus, narcissi, tulips and muscari.

The spring flowers are quite challenging to arrange due to their fleshy stems. They are often heavy headed and don’t like being in oasis. I think tulips have the most diva-like tendencies. They take a lot of careful handling and then once I’ve finished arranging after a few hours they’ve moved and pleased themselves anyway. Like true divas though, they know they are worth all the fuss! 

I’ve really enjoyed working with the muscari this year. The stems have been long and the graded blue heads have offered a delicacy to the palette. They are a fabulous bridal flower to use as they last well out of water, making them great for hair flowers and button holes. Here is a flower crown created with muscari and lily of the valley.

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Here it is again mixed with narcissi and viburnum for a corsage and used with lily of the valley to create a hair clip:

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The anemones have been amazing this year. The fully open heads have been so huge a couple of people have mistaken them for oriental poppies! The stems have been straight and long, perfect for constructing a hand tie bouquet.

 

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It’s always fun to do something big and bold. For last weeks wedding we created three flower balls. I used a base of choisia and viburnum then added ranunculus, anemones, solomons seal and scilla. We also used some magnolia from the family’s garden. They certainly made an impact!

 

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At the other end of the floristry scale, just a few stems in a bud vase can be heavenly too. Simple, natural and beautiful.

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Jo Wise

 

 

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Tulip Time

By on April 10, 2012 in conditioning, Cut flowers, Floristry, Tulips

I have mixed feelings about tulips, On the one hand they are essential to the spring palette and their range of shapes and colours offers such versatility to March and April bouquets. A quick peruse of a Parkers or Bloms bulb catalogue offers such an overwhelming choice that you will never be able to consider buying the rather small headed, boring tulip bunches in the shops again.

On the other hand, tulip time can be an anxious few weeks for the flower grower. I grow a lot of them in the polytunnel for an earlier 'forced' crop. Grown under cover also encourages much longer stems. However, it is always a gamble. If we have a cool wet spring than the tulips are sheltered from the rain and are ready in the correct early, mid and late order. If we get a hot spell, like a couple of weeks ago than they tend to all come at once. This is often difficult from a sales point of view but I have been fortunate this year with lots of early weddings.

 

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I treat my tulips like annuals, they are planted densely and shallowly so that they can just be tugged out of the ground and the bulb snipped off. This rather dramatic act always makes my customers squeal! If I do not harvest the flowers than the bulb is lifted and dried for replanting the following autumn. We put them in the field using the potato planter on the tractor, along with scented narcissi and dutch iris.

Some of my favourite varieties for cutting include the viridaflora type like Spring Green, Greenland and Dolls Minuet.

 

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I love all the voluptuous peony tulips we have used a lot of Montreaux in bridal bouquets this year. For a contrasting shape the lily-flowered China Pink is a wonderfully tall elegant tulip for large vases. 

 

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I enjoy tulips arranged with a bit of blossom from the orchard. I always tend to put them in the vase slightly short because I know they will carry on growing and look just right after a couple of days.

 

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Celebrating the Hellebore

By on March 19, 2012 in Cut flowers, Hellebores

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I decided to take a break from shovelling muck, lifting and dividing perennials, pruning roses and sowing annuals to play with hellebores. They took a hammering back in February with that cold snap but after trimming off the damaged leaves and stems they are looking better than ever. I have given them a feed with some of our chicken poo, turbo charged, home made compost and if I get round to it I really should do some hand pollinating and save some seed for the new woodland area we are creating. So many of my favourite flowers for cutting are shade lovers; in an open field shade is a rather precious commodity. We have a line of large beech trees underplanted with nettles, after four years I am ready for a change…

 

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Anyway, back to the hellebores! A couple of years ago I bought a job lot of these little lovelies from Hugh Nunn at Harvington Hellebores in Evesham. I had seen an article about his hellebores in Gardens Illustrated and was seduced by the beautiful pictures of them, he has been breeding them for twenty years to get some really bright distinctive colours. I am now the proud owner of single and double- flowered varieties in yellow, white, apricot, picotee, pink, red and black. For arranging they can be tricky, I usually wait until they are forming their seed heads. At this stage they hold very well and will be happy in a vase for at least a week. If you want to enjoy them before that they either need to be cut very short and seared or floated in a bowl of water. I could not resist displaying them on my rather weary whippet Violet, I think she is a bit fed up of being my flower model!

 

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Our polytunnel is now bursting with spring bulbs so the mail order and our Saturday shop are open for business again. We are offering more delivery days this year (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and a couple of new ways to enjoy our flowers: 'Best of the Bunch' and 'DIY Cut Flowers in a Box'.

'Best of the Bunch' will be a pure and simple bunch of one of our favourites, starting with our anemones and followed by sweet peas, peonies, dahlias and whatever else is in abundance and looking gorgeous.

 

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The 'DIY Cut Flowers in a Box' will be a box full of foliage, filler and focal flowers for people to arrange themselves to have a few arrangements around the house or perhaps for an event.

 

This week sees the start of the wedding season and my first growing course. We are fully booked for March but still have a few places on the April dates.

 

 

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