Becoming a control freak

I have always regarded myself as a laid back kind of person but this week I have found myself developing into a horrible control freak.

The first thing that happened was that the dahlias began to bloom and instead of this - Rip City
















There was this - Arabian Knight













As one customer said when I contacted her "Well at least it isn't yellow"




Then the lilies began to bloom and instead of this - Netty's Pride -



















There was this - Sorayo.


















I contacted my supplier - he contacted his and we have agreed that the bulbs and tubers be replaced with the correct varieties in the spring.

I have also contacted the customers that I know bought these but I can't remember everyone - if you bought either from me and it has bloomed as the wrong variety please let me know so that I can refund your money or replace in the Spring. Fortunately it isn't affecting all the lilies - because if there was ever a beauty this is it. I think that it is a case of rogue handfuls being added to make up weight on a popular line.

My supplier, who has to write to me in English as my Dutch is non-existent, sounds very menacing in a second language - he has "forced" his supplier to admit he sold Arabian Knight rather than Rip City; he has "confronted the lily supplier with photographic evidence" and will be "dealing with him severely". I have visions of the lily man being suspended mafia style above a tulip grading machine.

Actually it is not funny - we all depend for our reputation on others and if a supplier is not reliable it condemns us all along the chain. There is nothing I can do this year - and my mantra for the week is Caroline's "well at least they aren't yellow"

wedding photos

The sun shone, the flower arch stayed in place and everyone looked like they were having a wonderful time.

I really enjoyed arranging the flowers for this wedding - the venues were great, the caterers (Nairns) provided very classy table settings and were helpful and professional, and the families were open to suggestions.

That said - I now know why I only do one wedding a month, I don't tink I have ever worked as hard in my life.
These are a few photos of the flowers. Not brilliant shots I'm afraid but the photos are always the last thing to be done and tend to be taken in a rush.

First is a pew end bunch with sweet peas, apple mint and hetty's pin cushion.

Second is the pillars in Balfron High School draped in ivy with flowers in coloured glass bottles strung amongst them.

Thirds is the top table with glass cubes of flowers and glass vials wired along the front (I was very pleased with the way this worked - simple and pretty in the sunshine)

Forth is cones of petal confetti - purple sweet pea and delphinium petals and pink roses. This looked gorgeous as all the children took a cone and threw them over the bride and groom as they came out the church. Much much prettier than tissue paper.

Now I am away to do the much, much less fun job of clearing everything away.

I now get a lot of queries about eco-weddings from all over the country and am considering adding a bit to the website about how to do simple things to cut down the carbon footprint of wedding flowers. What do you think?

As requested .

Sweet peas on the vine and waiting for the wedding.

Back

Well its back to work after a few days spent beach combing on Kingsbarns Beach near to St Andrews. We borrowed a cottage from a friend which was ten minutes walk from the beach - these poppies and ragwort growing out of the top of a wall were one of the things we passed on the way.

Now I am busy working on the flowers for a wedding at the weekend - making moss garlands to put over the arch into the church, taping grids on glass vases and painting barrels to plant up with daisies.

But first I think that I shall make myself a cup of coffee and go and delight in the sight of thousands of blooming sweet peas before they all get cut tomorrow.

Yesterday was the beginning of our "holiday" - I am back working in the shop today but then away for a few days away from the computer, weeding and packing up wire baskets!

We went to Perthshire to fulfil promises made to the girls last year. Last June we all picked a touristy thing we would like to do but then the summer was so gloriously sunny we just played outside all the holidays and didn't venture out at all.

It isn't exactly like that this year so we got in the car and headed for Perthshire.

Zoe's choice was to go and see the ospreys at Loch of the Lowes - this has two great hides with telescopes trained on osprey nests so you can watch the birds flying over the loch, catching perch and then bringing them back to the nest for everyone to feast on. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has a couple of webcams sited at the nest so you can follow the ospreys' progress when back home

Katie's choice was to go to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay - a reconstruction of a crannog - a prehistoric house built on stilts over the loch. It was a very hands on place - we got to sit round a fire in the crannog discussing what would be eaten, who would have lived there, how many people would be in the house, where would they keep their animals. Then we had a chance to have a go at wood turning with a pole lathe, making fire, spinning and pecking holes in weight stones.


The photo shows Katie watching the very impressive demonstration of how to make fire (which has me worried).

Both places were examples of what tourist venues should be - authentic, enthusiastic, realistically priced and completely non-disneyfied.

I have found out that I share a certain garden aesthetic with the iron age - hurdle fences, rough hewn seats, stone weights - I took a lot of photos - I'm sure I could find a use for those weights.


I shall be away from computers until next Thursday.

Space and simplicity

I have just finished reading Margaret Forster's book Keeping the world away - a novel about the effect that Gwen John's painting of the corner of an attic bedroom has on the women who hang it on their walls.

It is, in part, a study of the yearning for simplicity and control symbolised by the spare, composed painting.

I enjoyed the book very much and was thinking of it today while I drove though the sublime landscape of deep cleft valleys and deep reflective lochs that is between here and Loch Fyne.

It is a beautiful, beautiful drive, I was on my own in the car and it is quite the most relaxing thing I have done this week. I was going up to The Tree Shop, run by the Ardkinglas tree nursery to pick up some beautiful white birch trees - Betula utilis "Jacquemontii snowqueen" which I am intending to use to make a small glade at this wedding in ten days time. The idea is that it will make the large space a bit more intimate and give a sense of enclosure for the guests who want to sit down after the meal away from the music.

At the moment the state of the house is getting to me. It is completely my own fault so I can't really complain - but I do. It isn't really a case of it not being clean - it is just that we have far too much stuff in a house with no storage and I try to run a business at the same time. Add into this mix we bought kitchen furniture before we have enlarged the kitchen and that we are all messy, messy creatures who can't seem to pick up anything off our seemingly magnetic floors.

The result is a feeling of camping in amidst piles of toppling stuff - it is driving me mad and I now want to move out into Gwen John's little attic with only a chair, a desk and a vase of primroses.

Sturdy but not so you would know.

I really dislike the waste that goes into event flowers - the discarded flowers, seen for only 20 minutes - so I am always keen to transport flowers from church to reception or to refashion church flowers as bouquets to be presented later in the day. It makes financial sense too, a flower budget can be stretched that bit further and a more flowery day had overall.

I am working on flowers for a wedding at the moment where the flowers on the church windowsills will transfer to become table centres at the reception. It will work well as it is a large generous wedding and this way the windowsills can be more lavishly decorated - with 5 cube vases full of flowers put together on each- than they would be if the flowers were simply for the service.

The trick is to make the arrangements sturdy enough to survive being packed up quickly as we race from church to reception while the photographs are taken. The extra trick is making them look light and airy and not at all sturdy.

So today I have been playing around with shapes and blooms - a large part of the styling of the wedding is that everything is in clear glass vases so I won't use oasis which would be the obvious solution. I think I shall use a tape grip and a mix of poppy seedheads, thistles and drumstick alliums surrounded by a fluff of parsley flowers as in the photo above.

Toning it down.

6 or 7 years ago I went to a demonstration given by Sarah Raven in her sister Jane's house in Edinburgh. I can't remember how I heard about it - it was before Raven was that well known in Scotland - and I stuck out a bit as I was oddly young and un-lunchy compared to the other atendees.

At lunch I was at a table of fifty-something "ladies who lunch and attand lectures", next to a very stylish, petite, brunette who did nothing but moan about the (very good) food, the stairs to the demonstration room, the lack of cushions on the chairs and so on. After she had exhausted complaining about that day's entertainment she moved onto the previous week's garden club trip to Great Dixter "And do you know Christopher Lloyd has bindweed in his borders, he has the cheek to open his garden to the public and it has bindweed in it".

I don't know what this obviously unhappy woman moved onto next as I got up, made my excuses and left.

I didn't post over the weekend because I had a very rude group of people visit me here on Saturday and it has taken me 2 days to tone down my response. I am not going to go into details as it is all done and dusted and I have received apologies from some people who were with the group. I know that at least one reads this blog and I hoipe that she will continue to do so as it was nice to meet her.

The result, however, is that we shall be following the lead of other working gardens and we shall no longer be opening up to groups. It was particularly galling as - had I not been waiting in for this pre-arranged visit - I would have been watching my daughter perform in George Square in Glasgow.

July's flower tutorial

I have finally got round to putting up July's tutorial on how to make a rose candle holder with oasis.

The containers I used are small zinc holders - I only sell these at Christmas for people to make their own arrangements but in the meantime they can be got from Caroline Zoob's online store after July 30th (she is closed till then). They are very useful things. As well as being lovely taper holders in their own right you can float flowers round them, fill them with small shells, sweets, beans or make them more elaborate with oasis and a flower arrangement round a bigger candle as here.

A cup and saucer also works well.

I use them all the time for weddings where they also make great place card holders with a bit of looped wire jammed with blutack into the candle hole.

The most stressful day

I am posting this image of a lovely calming hydrangea heart to compensate for having the MOST STRESSFUL DAY.

This morning was fine - not really my sort of thing but there you go. Katie wanted to spend her holiday money - £13.68 - so we went into Glasgow and she went into a frenzy in Claire's Accessories where they had a special deal where you could get10 sale items for £5.

We now have a very happy 6 year old with lots of glittery bits in her hair.

Then I got back here to find that the buttons on my website were not all working properly - aaaarggggh - lots of individual orders instead of nicely grouped ones. I emailed everyone to confirm their orders and refund their multiple postages and thought "Aha, it is a problem with the shopping baskets - I can fix that"

So I redid all the shopping basket buttons on the website, very tedious work, - loaded it all up and found that now NOTHING worked.

Hmmmm. I was not a happy bunny. I ate a lot of chocolate (73% cocoa - allowed), I stomped around, I phoned the Stirling Enterprise IT man (who was out). In the end it turned out that I had bookmarked paypal and they had subsequently changed their site so none of my buttons matched their baskets. Therefore nothing connected and you just got error messages.

Now I have redone it all again and it looks to be working. I think. Of course I have managed to b****r up all the spacing on the pages in my panic but that is for another day. I have put a note up about contacting me if anything doesn't work.

See pride comes before a fall. How professional I must look.

I am now off to pack up these baskets and calm down so that they can be sent off with love! After the postal strike that is.

Country Living

Hoooo! Woooo! as my youngest would say.
2 posts in one day.
The excuse is my Country Living magazine dropped through the door and there we are - one of our painted handle baskets in the Emporium section!

Irrelevant mice

Recently I have lost a few stone in weight and in attempting to adjust my steroid medication to fit with my new BMI I have knocked myself out of kilter and am really knackered.
Therefore - instead of spending the evenings pulling thistles and digging beds in advance of the garden club coming on Saturday, I have been making what Euan is terming "those highly irrelevant mice". This is as in "And are Connell Garden Club going to be impressed with these ranks of highly irrelevant mice?". I should point out that, while I am sitting on the deck embroidering dresses for mice, he is busy strimming a path to let the garden club members into the garden.

When I was small the magazine with the craft patterns in it was "Woman's Weekly" - my Gran got it, storing it under her sofa cushions to keep it in mint condition until our visits. Then my Mum would make things from it - mainly small soft furry toys. the main designer was a woman called Jean Greenhowe so when I saw a book of her patterns I snapped it up.




They are a contrast to today's toy patterns - whereas today's hand crafted toys scream out Japanese inspired individuality, these aim for the bland expressionless uniformity of mass production. The aim was to make something as good as you could get in the shops













I was feeling tired, I had some brown felted blanket scraps, I needed something fiddly and fairly brain free to do so I decided to make a dormouse. The photo is from the Jean Greenhowe book - a fleecy dormouse in a dormouse house.

And here is one of my irrelevant mice - oddly they look nothing like the Greenhouse version - it reminds me of being a teenager and desperately trying to fit in, buying the same clothes as everyone else and somehow still looking different.

The winner in the weather

These leopard lilies (lilium pardilinium) seem to revel in the cool, damp weather we have been getting this summer.

They have completely taken over one half of a long border - rising up through everything else with their glossy whorls of leaves topped by these recurving spotted flowers - like elaborate turbans.

Lilies are an interesting flower from a commercial point of view. They are the most expensive bulbs I buy and as you can't cut them the first year that adds to the cost both in money and space. They are, however, essential at this time of year - taking over from the alliums and filling in the "big bloom" gap until the dahlias, sunflowers and gladioli come on stream.

Lilies are also a standard florist (and supermarket) flower. Amy Stewart's book Flower Confidential documents the development of the Stargazer lily and how it was its upright facing buds and increased "packability" that led to its cornering the market. Certainly you would not want to try and pack these into florists boxes - the buds all hang down and the flowers are short and wide - they also go from bud to bloom in a few hours, though the blooms than have a good vase life.

My customers - and I am aware that they are a self selecting group - are also not that keen on lilies - particularly scented lilies and "no scented lilies" is the most common note on my subscription database. I, however, love these - they are elegant, rich and at the moment taking over the garden.

By the way - ages ago I paid a fortune for some "Bellingham hybrid" leopard lilies as recommended by Christopher Lloyd - these grow in my garden alongside the species variety and I can see no difference at all in looks of vigour (though there is a 4 fold difference in price).

Not knowing "how its always done"

I have always preferred working with people who are outside the field they were trained in. Perhaps it is natural, given that I changed careers from the very academic art gallery curator to the very muddy gardening florist.

It pre-dates that though - the best exhibition I worked on in terms of sheer outside the box excitement was at Kelvingrove museum with Ben Kelly - designer of the Manchester nightclub The Hacienda. He had no concept that things couldn't be done - the problems of listed buildings, crane access, getting porters to work late and so on meant nothing to him as he had never worked within a hierarchical institution like a council art gallery - so miraculously they got done.

To be honest I think it was a nightmare for the Kelvingrove curator in charge of working with him but for a lowly minion it was an eye-opener in how being trained in "how things are done" can be a real disadvantage.

I have been thinking about this this week as I have to work out how I deal with florists who want to buy flowers. Most florists come here because they have been steered in our direction by brides who want to curb their carbon footprint by having Scottish grown flowers at their wedding. It is not usually the florist's idea which is probably not a good start.

Then they visit and we have the problem of the flowers not being on show as it is the wrong season and my photographs all being of things growing in the garden, not laid out in boxes. We have a discussion that goes something like "well will you have any gerberas?", "no", "cream orchids?", "no", "Bacarrat roses?" "no" and as you can tell this is not a good conversation for either of us. I feel lousy, they feel frightened of not being familiar with the flowers that I say I will have and altogether it is a really bad thing. It is something I have to address as it is largely my fault that they go away without understanding what we are trying to do.

By and large these are conventionally trained florists - they wanted to become florists on leaving school, they did their City and Guilds and worked their way up the ranks in a florist shop before opening their own shop. They know exactly how things should be done, what flowers you should use for wedding pedestals and how many stems should be in a bunch. They don't know what to make of me at all.

And then, thank heavens, there is a different kind of florist - florists I love working with. They tend to have worked doing something else before floristry- teaching, pr, car design etc. - and their approach to visiting me is completely different. They show up - they want to see what is growing now because you never know when that will be useful for other events, they want to talk about how I use things, vase life, texture, flexibility of stems, how long will something last out of water, is the stem hollow, will the flower bend to the light. Questions, questions, questions and curiosity. They make a lot of notes, they take a lot of photos, they e-mail me a couple of days later to check out specific cultivars. It is a quite different experience and I feel happy sending my flowers off with them.

The difference is so great that I do wonder whether a compulsory career change should be brought in aged 28 for the benefit of the creativity and drive of the country.

This is an unfair generalisation of course - Jane Packer is a work up from the bottom career florist, Paula Pryke a career change teacher, as for Shane Conolly - my own favourite celebrity florist- I haven't a clue what his background is, I just know he obviously loves his flowers.

Perhaps I should have a questionnaire.

Jack and the giant plume poppies

Here we are with a rare overview of the garden - I pick so much that I am always aware that it is very green and doesn't really look like a cut flower garden. I am also aware that these photos demonstrate that the grass paths need cut pronto - the excuse is that it just hasn't been dry enough.

In the photos is one of 2 long borders - they divide the two parts of the cutting garden and are filled with all the tall clumpy plants I love but which would take over a raised cutting patch very quickly.

I wanted to put the photos in to show just how tall everything perennial is growing this year. The plume poppy is now 10 feet tall, the stipa gigantea isn't far behind and just look at the size of that yellow lily - far too big to cut! Here is Minou to give some sense of scale.

What a contrast to the annuals - particularly the not-too-hardy annuals like dill and larkspur. I have never had such pathetic looking plants!

Today I got a phonecall from a grower in Fife, desperate for flowers for a wedding that she is doing at the end of the month, so it is obviously not just me.

Unfortunately I couldn't help at all as I also have a wedding on that weekend and will need all my flowers for that. The other grower depends very much on annuals and is now looking at buying in flowers from Holland for the event. Thank goodness I now have plenty of (giant) perennials in the beds.

More about the pigs

We have been meaning to get pigs for ages - in fact there was a distinct possibility that we were turning into those irritating people who say they are going to do something and never ever get around to it. they just talk a lot.

I had begun to get worried that pig keeping was becoming trendy - Liz Hurley et al - and as I tend to run away from trends we decided that now is the time.

So we have 2 unnamed Oxford Sandy and Blacks - ideal outdoor pigs - who are living in our rough field alongside the chickens with an electric fence to stop them getting into the henhouse and eating the eggs.

They will be with us for only about 10 weeks at which point they will be the right size for slaughtering locally. we could keep them longer and feed them up but we would not be able to use the local abattoir.

I know that the idea of killing animals is a great problem for a lot of people and I think that, if you are a vegetarian then that is fair enough. But we eat meat and we want to know where our meat comes from, we want the animals to be treated well - and for a pig that means living outside with plenty of room to root and forage. We want the slaughter to be humane and not involve a lot of travelling. We want to be sure that every part of the animal is eaten - not just the chops and fillet. So yes - these will be destined for brawn - we respect them too much for anything else.

It will be interesting to see how the children cope - Zoe has said that she wants nothing to do with the pigs as she loves pork. My mother thinks she has bred a monster - my father wants some pork.

They seem to have settled in well but have spurned Euan's lovingly made pig house and are sleeping amongst the long grass under a broom tree.

For anyone local looking for organic outdoor reared pork I recommend Peter and Liz Candy at Easter Ballat Farm, Balfron Station - 01360 440 480.

Look who has arrived

2 14 week old pigs and an electric fence!

Jane in a sweetie shop

The bulb catalogues have now all arrived so I have that "sweetie shop" time of choosing what I want for next spring. The problem is avoiding buying everything - I need to get a good spread of colours and flowering times and a mix of established favourites and new varieties.

It is important that I get the order in in the next week or so as otherwise varieties are often out of stock in the quality of bulb I want.

The job is made even more interesting this year as I have offered to provide the flowers for the Think Pink Ball which is at Oran Mor in Glasgow's Byers Road on 25th April 2008.

My favourite amongst the paintings that Christine McArthur did of my flowers last year was of a large bunch of pink tulips - each one a different shape and colour. My aim for the Think Pink flowers is to have spiralled bunches of as many pink varieties of tulips that I can get to flower at that time. I have marked up 25 varieties in my catalogues ranging from the elegant lily flowered "Mariette" to the bouffant peony tulip "Angelique".

As to non pink varieties - well I still have to decide. What is everyone's favourite tulip?

Saying yes

This New Year's resolution was to say "yes" more often - not the advice you would give to your teenage daughter necessarily but for a 37 year old prone making excuses it seemed a good idea.

So when s woman from the production company SMG phoned me a couple of weeks ago to see whether I would be an "expert" on a reality tv show they were making for Scottish Television and Sky - well I said "yes".

Filming was yesterday - and boy it was fun. I had begun to get cold feet about it earlier in the week, worrying about either sounding like I had just swallowed helium or getting that deer in the headlights look. A friend from my book group, Clara is a tv director, presently on maternity leave and she kindly calmed me down - pointing out there would be 5 hours of filming and only a maximum of 5 minutes footage actually used - surely even I could sound compos mentos for that amount of time.

The photo shows crew and contestants with me in the middle - as foraging expert. I can't say more about the programme as it builds week to week - it is called Capture the Castle and should be on in November.

The crew were fantastic and it was SUCH as good experience - I'm so glad I've started saying "yes"