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.

 

The Friday Buzz – getting ready for a summer weekend

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During the season Fridays tend to be rather frenetic with weddings to arrange and flowers to be picked for our Saturday shop, last minute pick ups and arrangements to be made for all the Saturday goings on and of course there are still the plants themselves that need looking after.

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I am fortunate to have a more than capable team of both growers and florists to help me make all of this work possible in just one day.

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Back in September I had the pleasure of being visited by photographer Mark Lord who was keen to record all these activities and capture a few good animal shots at the same time.

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I first noticed Mark’s work whilst looking at Waterperry Garden’s website where he spent the last two years capturing some sublime images of their gardens, flowers and gardeners. Mark has both a garden photography blog in which we appear and a website for his wedding and portrait work.

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I have to confess I particularly like his animal portraits and I am always keen to get my whippets photographed as much as possible!

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Mark arrived bright and early which is always the perfect time lighting wise to photograph the garden but perhaps not my most attractive hour – oh well, as ever the flowers must come first!

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We always pick for a Saturday wedding on a Thursday apart from some of the key blooms, in this case dahlias and roses which I want to look as ‘vital’ as possible.

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So my first job is selecting specific flowers for the bouquet work. I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to picking roses and unless I am really up against it always cut those precious blooms myself, despite the thorns it is a job I savor.

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Everyone else is sent to the field to ‘walk the line’ as we affectionately call our 100 metre long dahlia row. Flowers are picked into our trusty dutch buckets which we buy in from Holland by the pallet load. Once back at the packing shed they are conditioned and stored in our walk in chiller.

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A coffee break….followed by lots and lots of floristry……

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Lucy and ‘Scratch’ are on buttonhole duty and I take up my usual spot at the bouquet table.

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I have quite a structured approach to making bouquets especially when there are multiple bridesmaids. Each bouquet has a bucket in which the prepared ingredients go into, that way I can ensure everyone has their fair share and all the arrangements are consistent.

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Once assembled I tie them off with raffia which will be replaced in the morning with tape and silk ribbon, this helps to loosen them up and achieve the wild, ‘grown in’ look I am after.

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Ash brings in the Saturday shop haul from the field in our back-saving harvesting buggy – it’s saved us a lot of walking this year. Looking like it originates from a pre-atomic era, it is a lot of fun to drive and there’s space for a lucky passenger. The one wheel at the front results in a nifty turning circle and it makes quick work of harvesting, essential on hot days.

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Everything Ash and I do is centered around my mantra ‘minimum effort maximum results’ with six acres to cultivate and seventy weddings to supply and arrange it is the only way to make it work.

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I am working on a new series of full day floristry workshops at the moment, some I hope will be collaborative and all will focus on capturing the essence of each season. I plan to release the dates in the New Year with my next blog post.

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Talking of seasons I have always claimed to be a Spring girl, I love the freshness of everything and I guess I feel pretty good at the beginning of the season too. But I am becoming increasingly fond of the end of the season when there is a lot more to play with in both our cutting fields and beyond on my regular dog walks.

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Blogging Backwards

After falling somewhat behind with the blog this year I have decided to catch up over these quieter winter months starting with the latest news and working backwards.

The reason for this retrospective is that it has been another incredibly productive and creative year in which I have experienced new flower varieties, projects and flowery people. All of this has been well documented with more breathtaking pictures by Clare West and I had pleasure of two other photographers capturing the farm with Eric McVey visiting for the Creative Process Workshop in August and Mark Lord in September.

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So starting with Autumn which is usually my ‘burnt out’ season when I am not as productive and inspired as I would like to be. Always a shame as it is probably the best time to create the really wild and ‘grown in’ arrangements that I love. So, this year I decided to prolong the marathon of growing and arranging all the way through October and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt like I had a whole new palette of plants to play with.

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Our bountiful orchard and the native hedgerows surrounding the plot provided plenty of fruiting branches of sloe, hawthorn, damson, crap apple and pear to give scale to the larger arrangements. Dahlias in colour-coordinated patches made any bride’s preference possible although everyone seemed to be drawn to the coppers, creams and peach varieties.

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Texture and variety is easily achieved by the end of season with a good selection of berries in every colour provided by a large purchase chez Kolster a couple of years ago and lots of half hardy annuals looking pristine undercover in our tunnels.

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There will be more on what we were growing, picking and arranging in my next post which will include a beautiful early morning shoot of the G&G team on a busy Friday in September, photographed by Mark Lord.

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The end of the season was rounded off by a trip to Japan to enjoy the ‘fall’ colour in the strolling, tea and dry gardens of Kyoto, Kanazawa and Okayama and whilst hiking a bit along the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage route.

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I would love to add Japanese maple to my long wish list of things to grow but my alkaline soil and exposed site would not be to their liking.

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We saw a wholly different world of Chrysanthemum varieties carefully pruned and trained, in some cases even bonsaied. I have had a couple of years off from growing them but I will definitely be back on board in 2016.

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Of course a lot of our time was spent exploring gardens and seeking out flowers but we did still find plenty of time to enjoy discovering the food, textiles, pottery, hot springs and overall otherness of Japan.

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The warm weather and refreshingly polite and friendly people was an added bonus. I am now smitten and am already thinking about returning next year to learn more about this fascinating country and it’s appreciation of natural beauty.

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I have had Japan on my wish list for a long time after researching Japanese garden design whilst working on a hospital courtyard garden. The principles of design I learned then are reflected in their approach to floristry. The Japanese aesthetic of asymmetry and ’empty’ space are essential to composition, creating a ‘wildness of nature’. The sense of harmony between the plant materials, container and setting and the emphasis on greens are all principles I would like to incorporate into my work.

So I signed up to a class at the Ohara School of Ikebana in Tokyo. It was an amazing coincidence to find myself sitting next to Chickae of Okishima and Simmonds! Her Japanese heritage coupled with a few classes already under her belt got me thinking about an Ikebana themed collaboration next year….

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The lesson was based on Basic Hana-isho, which is a beginners form of Ikebana. We worked with an impressively large pinholder, called a kenzan in a shallow container and just five stems of shooting hydrangea and bouvardia which we used to create two compositions – the rising and inclining form. Stems are always positioned in a line as I think it is intended to be viewed from one angle.

So Japan has left me with a yearning to return, a lot of large Kenzan, a long plant list and a strong desire to make my own vases….looks like I am going to be busy.

 

 

 

On 27/11/2015 07:39, Rachel Siegfried wrote:

Blogging Backwards