Boden????? Surely not

Yesterday Suffolkmum wrote a post about having been namechecked in a newspaper article as one of a group of "Boden bloggers". The article was a good example of snidely written lazy journalism, probably dashed off so the author could get away on holiday, and Suffolkmum was a bit miffed.

I would have been too and it is obvious that the journalist had simply visited the Country Living Magazine website and copied down some of the names without reading the blogs. Suffolkmum strikes me as someone who thinks a lot and writes sensitively and humanely about some very difficult topics. I enjoy reading her blog.

The article as a whole was poking fun at the Boden set - now I suspect that this is one of those groups that we all say "Oh yes, I know who that is" but would never admit to being part of. Even in my wildest fantasies I wouldn't identify myself with the smugly smirking models with "their" spookily groomed children in Johnnie Boden's catalogues. My self image is much more mucky.

And yet back to the article . . . we have decided this year to cut down on flying for leisure so shall be getting the train to Paris in October

. . . and Zoe has mentioned that she fancies holidaying in a yurt . . .and Euan watches airstream caravans on eBay and dreams of one parked in our drive . . .and we have a couple of Emma Bridgewater mugs . . . and a Cath Kidston ironing board cover . . .I've just finished Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (but didn't find it boring) . . . the children have a lot of hand me down Boden t-shirts and I have a pink linen dress. Apart from the school fees, the guilty foreign holidays and the drawstring trousers I pretty much ticked the supposed characteristics of a "Boden blogger".

And yet . . . I am so many, many miles away. In muck.

Fairly depressing reading for a non-conformist though!

The photos today are more cornflowers because I forgot to mention that they last out of water brilliantly so you can cut them up and make jewellery, or if you are being more elegant, cuffs for candles and napkins. These will last a couple of days - ideal for flower fairies.

Cornflowers blue . . .

Cornflowers with their searing blue are one of the essentials of the cutting garden.

I grow mine from seed sown in April, though I keep intending to start it off in September and over winter the seedlings - perhaps this year.

I don't actually grow that many plants - just a single row - as the important thing is keeping on top of the picking. Let just a few flowers turn into seedheads and the whole plant will stop flowering.

In the case f cornflowers I find less plants is definitely more flowers.

Some flowers I sell at the van on Fridays but that still leaves a lot flowering through the week that still need harvesting so I have taken to drying them.
It is important to catch them at the right stage or they will disintegrate into (very pretty) petals. While this is ideal for confetti or for sprinkling onto tables it isn't what I want as I have plans for delicate cornflower wreaths.

This top picture shows the stage they need to be harvested at both for drying and as cut flowers- the centre of the flower a pointing inwards tightly - the whole flower seems to be slightly inward looking.






The lower photo shows the next stage - a much more open centre with the stamens spread out. Flowers like this will still dry but just won't keep their shape - if you want confetti just cut the heads off and put them on a tray somewhere warm and dark for a few days, pull them to bits and store them in the dark somewhere dry until the wedding - (if it is ages away, one of those silica sachets you get with shoes would help keep it all very dry).







To dry stems of cornflowers cut flowers as per top photo and then bunch 20 or so stems together with an elastic band. Hang upside down somewhere warm and dark until the stems are stiff enough to support the heads - probably a week to ten days.

If you are storing them wrap carefully in a shoebox and ensure that the stems don't tangle.

On a different note we had Baldernock Garden Club to visit yesterday evening and it was quite a different experience - I knew it would be as they phoned in advance t check they could bring wine. It was a lovely sunny evening with enough of a breeze to keep away the midgies and everyone was an absolute delight.

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 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.

sweet peas

This afternoon I have been trying to get the sweetpeas under control - the strong winds had tangled up a lot of the stems, blowing them off the frame and the miserable weather had made me put off doing anything about them. The result was a whole load of flapping stems at funny angles and hoop shaped stems. Today has been sunny though and it is good to have a job to do that isn't muddy so that I can still serve in the shop.

So I have cut off most of the old leaves and the tendrils - the former so that the plant's energy goes into making long stems rather than supporting the leaves and the latter so that the stems don't get caught and bent by the tendrils clinging on. It is a tedious job really and the sweet pea vine looks much worse afterwards - a gangly mass of awkward stems - but hopefully by the middle of next week it will be covered in flowers again.

The sweet pea bouquet was put together for a man who ordered our whole sweet pea crop (120 stems) today for his wife - how romantic is that?

Schools out for summer - what summer?

Tomorrow school breaks up for the long summer vacation - this is a great benefit of living in Scotland, allowing speedy Scottish parents to take cheaper summer holidays before the English schools break up and it becomes high season prices.

I love the summer holidays - though this year we are not going away. I love the more relaxed pace, the children being able to just mooch and read and draw if they want to, without the pressure and rush of having to be at set places at particular times. I love the fact they don't have to dress up or wear uniform.

We have a relaxed house over the holidays as I still have to work so while I do that, they can do pretty much what they like (as long as it doesn't involve television or power tools).

Last summer was glorious, the sun shone all holiday and the children turned almost feral with sun kissed hair and ingrained dirt from days spent outside making dens and lying in the grass. This year - despite the promised hot summer - it does not look as good. Thank heavens we have not had the rain that has effected Yorkshire but today it is cold with a steady drizzle.

I think that I shall have to go and stock up on lots of glitter and glue.

I am helped as well by the fact that the girls spend 2 weeks each summer with my parents which allows me to compensate for the slower pace of life when they are here. Many other working parents are not as lucky - and it makes you see why mothers are desperate for jobs that have the school holidays off - I know nurses, dentists and pr people who are all working as classroom assistants simply because the holidays fit in with their lives.

The picture is of a box of flower posies destined for the lucky teachers at a local school.

When to cut flowers - daisy types

Today I had a meeting with a bride who is going to be getting married in Scotland in August but who lives in New York. She was wanting wild looking flowers for her wedding but was worried that they would droop and die within the day.

It turns out that she regularly buys flowers from a New York Farmers Market and they are all dead within a couple of days. She thinks it is the type of flower and inevitable.

This really shouldn't happen and that it does is a big problem for me.

My biggest problem in the business is getting people to trust that flowers picked from a garden will last. I guarantee that all but a few varieties (sweetpeas, lilac for example) will last more or less a week, many last longer.

Garden flowers won't last as long as an irradiated carnation but then again do you really want flowers hanging around so long that you have to dust them? They certainly do not die within a couple of days.

I think that part of the problem is that people remember their own clammy hand childhood attempts to pick flowers - the slightly bent bunch presented to Mums after a walk in the country.

It is also something not helped by the magazines - the recent feature in Country Living Magazine on the flowers sold by Wiggly Wigglers is an example.

Now Wiggly Wigglers is a reputable company - they will not be sending over-ripe flowers through the post but the photo shows them proudly displaying a bunch with cosmos flowers in it that have been pollinated and should be in the bin, not in a bouquet. The photo must have been a last minute set up.

Perhaps this seems petty - it is a very pretty photo but it gives people the wrong idea about when flowers should be cut for the house and they won't have good results. I don't think it is good for Wiggly Wigglers either as it presumably misrepresents their product, but then control of the photos after the shoot is very difficult.


Anyway I thought that I would put in a couple of photos of the chrysanthemum "Duro" a lovely small cerise flower that sees me through the early June gap.

The top photo is exactly right - the central boss is tight and flat with only the very outer edge of the yellow showing pollen.

The one at the bottom shows the fluffy pollinated bit halfway up the yellow - this is too far gone, the bees have been at it and all that flower want to do now is curl up and become a seedhead.

The top flower will last 7-10 days away from direct sunlight - the bottom one would do well to stagger through 2!

William Lobb

Despite the fact that they are the most asked for flower, I do not grow many roses. Our climate is really too damp and it is very difficult to grow roses commercially without using a lot of herbicides and fungicides. As Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Company pointed out, brides don't want greenfly climbing out of their bouquets.

Last year however a 3 for 1 end of season offer came in from David Austin that was just too tempting and I plumped for 3 moss roses called William Lobb (named after the Cornish plant collector), planting them with the growth tied to a dome made from hazel so that they will become a flowery heap in the border. Eventually they will be 8' tall.

They have just begun to flower - the bluest dark pink I have ever seen with a lovely scent. They have been a joy since the oddly bumpy buds arrived.

I am doing flowers for a wedding on Sunday and hope to use some of these in the table decorations - if I can bear to part with them that is.

Flowers are very emotive things. I am always reminded of that at this time of year as the first sweet peas and sweet williams arrive in the shop and customers begin to reminisce about their grandparents gardens.

I too associate particular flowers with particular people - foxgloves, at their peak this week, I associate with my Australian friend Sue.

Sue moved with her family to stay in a cottage near our old house for the year of 1998 when her husband Phil worked on a job exchange. Sue is one of these people with a natural ease which makes everything that she does appear to be exactly the way it should be done.

She loves flowers but the exchange rate difference made Scotland a very expensive place to stay, particularly with 3 children. There was no room in her weekly budget for the flowers she was used to buying back in Melbourne. So she would pick cow parsley and foxgloves from the verge outside her house and arrange them in tall jugs in the kitchen. It looked wonderful, as it would.

I was very influenced by Sue- it was her who introduced me to Country Living Magazine and, more importantly, who showed me a more relaxed way to parent. She hates computers so I doubt she will read this.

Does anyone else have flowers that remind them of specific people?

The foxglove in the photo is a variety called "Elsie Kelsie", a sport of the native white foxglove with a very dark mark for the bees to see how to get into the flower.

How to - Part 1

I have been meaning to add a kind of "how to" series onto the website. Today I have finally got my act together with time, flowers, space, camera and (probably most importantly) Sally asking questions about when exactly I was planning to get it done.

So here we have a very easy table centre - the instructions are here - it doesn't have to be in a pewter goblet, any small vase will do, and it doesn't have to be sweet peas.

Have a go and let me know how you get on. I'd love suggestions as to what "How to" s people would like. I was so overwhelmed by the number of e-mailed photos of poppies after my poppy tips!

Balmy balmy weather

At last we have the warm balmy air that the half hardy annuals need to start growing.

This has been a very peculiar and rather difficult year as far as flower growing goes. The very hot April brought on tulips very fast and they flowered in a great lump of colour over two and a half weeks rather than 6. The very cold wet May delayed all the flowers that should have taken over from them an for a few weeks, until the alliums emerged we were scrabbling around for flowers to sell.

The seedlings I planted out a few weeks ago - cornflowers, cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers - all seem to have stayed still until this week (unfortunately not something I could say about the weeds) but in the past 3 days of hot clammy weather they have doubled in size and finally look as if they might turn into proper plants.

I am turning into a proper farmer with my ability to complain about the weather whatever it is. Next year I wonder about starting the seedlings off under tunnel hoops until the weather warms. We really have such a short growing season here it may be the only way in a chilly spring. That said - I really don't want the cutting garden to look like a strawberry field with chenilles of plastic glinting in the sunshine.

This poppy is Papaver orientale "Manhattan", a stunner if ever there was one.

The greenhouse today

Just a quick post today with photos of the greenhouse and the flowers etc. for sale today.

My favourite flowers are anchusa dropmore - a great deep glowing blue which mixes well with the deep pink chrysanthemum "duro" and red astrantias.

The other photo shows cushions and toys on the vintage french metal cot.

Testing lab

A large percentage of the flowers that I grow and sell are not the kind of flowers that are grown commercially as cut flowers. You will not find them in most florist shops, you cannot look them up in Alan Armitage's reference book on growing cut flowers. There are no DEFRA or USDA figures on yield, vase life or post-harvest treatment.

This is why I have my very low tech testing lab - a row of old glass bottles on the dining room mantlepiece. The site is typical of a house - not in full sun but open to the steam of the kitchen - the bottles are filled with plain tap water and the flowers get no special treatment bar searing where necessary.

For a flower to pass the test it has to last a week.

As I type this we have Gladiolus byzantium, (a small pink gladioli I first saw in the meadow at Great Dixter), Allium christophii; Briza media, (my favourite small grass), Briza maxima, (beautiful but a nightmare to pick); flag iris (which are just going to squeak it to a week I think), wild oats and a bright orange Iceland poppy.

It is an essential part of the process - to let the customer know how best to treat the flowers when they get them home. The gladioli for example will need a bit of flower food and a pinch of sugar in the water to give it the energy to open right up to the top of its spire.

The odd side effect is that this ever changing parade of individual bottles is quite my favourite thing in the house.

Poppies

Every year - at exactly this time - I write a post about poppies.

Every year - at exactly this time - I am overwhelmed by their beauty.

We live in a house that isn't exactly as I would like it to be - when we bought it, it was a typical 1980s farmers bungalow - built as an economical tied house with straight blocky lines, aluminium windows and hardboard doors. We are gradually changing it but it often feels, with our painted chipboard floors and complete lack of storage space, as if we are still a long way away.

The relevance of this to the poppies is this. I think the magic of having cut flowers in a house, and what separates them out from houseplants, is that they change from day to day. The doyennes of this are poppies and tulips and to my mind this makes them the very best of cut flowers.

The top photo is of our living room - with a crock of poppies taken straight from the shop and plonked in the middle of the coffee table. Every time I go into the room it is the poppies I see, more have come out into full flower, some are just ready to burst, darker yellow amongst the bright mass of the open flowers. This somehow stops me noticing or minding so much the piles of junk that are scattered in corners, the discarded sweet wrapper on the settee. If the flowers didn't change so much they wouldn't be so distracting.


Poppies are also one of the most difficult flowers to sell. Most people's experience of poppies in a vase is picking some open red corn poppies on a walk and having them wilt and shed before they are even home. I often end up giving them away the first time and then people come back to buy more.

How to pick poppies - this works with all varieties bar opium poppies, the ones with the giant seedhead.
1. Put the kettle on
2. Pick in bud when you can see the coloured petals shining through, like the ones right at the left of this photo.
3. Put straight into a bucket of water.
4. Take into the house, cut to the length you want the finished flowers, pour 1" of just boiled water into a mug and put the stem ends into it. Count to 5.
5. Put straight into a vase of water and put somewhere cool for an hour.
6. Arrange. If you have to recut the stems sear them again.

They should last a week if you put the vase out of direct sunlight and away from strong draughts

A different scale.

One of the things that bothers me about the cut flower industry is how, over the past couple of decades, we have become conditioned to buy what is most convenient for the large scale producers and importers.

90% of the flowers available to buy in the supermarket or florist shop conform to the size which will fit easily into a standard florist package box - smallish head, long straight stem. This cuts costs right down all along the production line from mechanised growing, spraying and harvesting to a certain number of boxes fitting onto a pallet or into a refrigerated van.

What has been lost is a sense of different scales - whether that is eight feet tall plume poppies or miniature astrantia - if it doesn't fit into the system you are unlikely to be able to get it. The most convenient is rarely also the most appropriate or attractive.

One of the flowers shops that I have come across via Amy Stewart's site is the Bonny Doon Garden Company which addresses this, producing a range of posies - many of which fit into a teacup like the one in the photo. I think that these are an ideal solution for those occasions when you want to send flowers - say to celebrate the birth of a baby - but know that the recipient will be inundated with flowers. An arrangement like this - our one is an an elegant C19th gold and white cup - can fit next to a bedside, comes ready arranged so it won't need another vase, and when the flowers fade there will be something left, a beautiful cup which will perhaps become a family heirloom. This one sold on Friday but I usually have a range available from £11.50 at the van, from £16.50 delivered within a 12 mile radius. They are also available as table centres for weddings and parties for when a "village fete" kind of feel is required - it is one way of getting a pretty vintage tea set, though I also loan the cups and saucers out.

I always feel sad when I see so many bunches of flowers propped in sinks or even just left on kitchen work surfaces as there are just no more vases to put flowers in.

1707 and all that . . .

Yesterday was my birthday and the chance to do some party flowers for one of my longest standing customers - one of the customers who has been taking a couple of bunches from me weekly since 2002 when I didn't even have somewhere proper to grow them.

It was her wedding anniversary and an excuse to hold a themed party. The theme was 1707 - this year sees the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union of Scotland and England and also of the birth of Linnaeus the Swedish scientist who came up with the system we still use today to categorise plants and animals - so it had layers of Swedish style (she is Swedish), historicism and flowers.

I was asked to provide small arrangements for the long trestle tables and the buffet.

I love working to a brief like this. One of the great advantages of having so many antique dealers in the family is that I have the chance to pick up vases etc. and squirrel them away for the right occasion. About 6 months ago I bought some french pewter goblets and plates, thinking that they would be wonderful for weddings - church candles grouped on the plates, flowers arranged in the goblets.

So when I got a 1707 theme I knew exactly what I wanted to do - loose meadow type flowers - all introduced pre 1707, many native to Scotland and Sweden. I also wanted to make it yellow, blue and white, alluding to the Scottish and Swedish flags. The table centres are pictured above - the goblets are taped in a fine grid of waterproof tape and then hellebores, alliums, pig nuts, columbines and buttercups are arranged as upright as possible. When I delivered them yesterday I was told they looked "just like a Swedish meadow".

I also made a rococo arrangement of grapes, sweet rocket and wisteria (wisteria was actually another 100 years in arriving but visually it worked so well I cheated) and a candlestick draped in grapes and golden hop.

The party had a lot of effort put into the detailing - I am sure it was a fantastic night.

And then they were gone . . .

Because I plant such a wide range of tulips with differing flowering times I usually have flowers for 5-6 weeks.

Last year I did a school fair the equivalent of next weekend and had 12 different varieties blooming and some still to flower in the cutting garden.

This year with the warm sunny weather they have all flowered in one spectacular whoosh! and are now sold out.

The flower in the photograph is Blue parrot, misnamed really as it is much more purple than blue. It is an unusual colour, a bit like that bruised colour that you get in bearded irises (now that doesn't sound attractive at all and it is in reality gorgeous)

The alliums are beginning to flower to take over from the tulips - I just hope that there isn't too much of a gap.

What is it about yellow . . .

I don't really like yellow flowers . . .I don't really plant them . . . so how come, when I went to select flowers for a gift bouquet, I came back with this?

Is it the odes to yellow I have been reading on various blogs? Is it the fabulous sunshiney days? Is it because I am making an effort to become a mellowy yellowy person?

Or can we just claim that this bouquet is orange?

The tulips are - for those who are interested - Texas Gold, a yellow parrot; Dordogne, an apricot with good long stems, Ballerina, orange lily tulip that smells of freesias but has weedy stems which need to be supported in an arrangement like this, and Gavota rust/burgundy with a yellow edge.

They made me feel happy - I hope the person who got the bouquet feels happy too.

Tulips - how to stop them going bendy

One of the questions I get asked again and again is how to stop tulips going bendy in the vase. So here we go!

The bendiness is caused by 2 different things. A bendy stem is usually caused by an airlock in the stem, preventing the water from going right the way up. A bending over head is usually due to the tulip continuing to grow after it has been cut which along with the increasing weight of the head, leads it to bend over.

To cure the air lock - take your tulips, make sure the stems are bendy and lay them side by side, all heads level, on a piece of brown paper - them roll it into a tight straight parcel and bind it well with string - see photo.

Put the kettle on and pour an inch of boiling water into a mug, cut 1/2 and inch off the bottom of the stems and put them at a slight angle into the mug. You should see an air bubble come out of the bottom of the stem. Put them immediately into a vase of tepid water and wait 2 hours before unwrapping - they should be set in a straight position. This can be done both with tulips just bought and ones that have done that croquet hoop thing in the vase.

If you want to cure the twisting stem of the growing tulip (and I must say I like the elegant writhing of the parrot tulips) you can destroy the growing plate of the flower by repeatedly inserting a needle in and out of the stem, just below the flower. Seemingly people used to be employed just to do this in stately homes. The tendency of tulips to continue growing means that they didn't work well in the very ordered symmetrical arrangements of the C19th as within a couple of days they would be poking out an inch above the rest of the flowers.