Spring has Sprung: we’ve had a whiff of a summer’s promise with a spell of warm weather, the polytunnel is filling up with seedlings and events have begun! This month, our flowers graced weddings and celebrations. One waited two years to say ‘I do’ whilst another was proposed and finessed within just six short weeks.
This sums up well the year so far, and how it seems to be panning out. A coaction of patience and spontaneity.
One of the events illustrated perfect symmetry and synergy. The brief was for botanical, greenery and plants that don’t look like flowers. We used viburnums, eucalyptus, tendrils of climbers, ferns, cotoneaster, fennel fronds, artichokes and rosemary together with dark hellebores seed heads and leaf like petals.
It is a great time to cut these shrubs and tend to them - another one of those ideal partnerships between client, brief, seasonal availability and styles. Once the greenery had beautified the celebration, we returned on the following day to ‘break down’. We undid the arrangements, cleaned the vessels and shredded the branches. Again in perfect timing, we made the first grass cut and together with the shredding’s, we had the materials to make the first compost heap of the year.
I am trying a new technique learned from sitting at the feet of the Land Gardeners; by using this method, I should have compost in under 10 weeks meaning that we will mulch the very shrubs that were used to adorn the party of last week.
This is a testimony of what we do, reaffirming our purpose. To grow, nurture, cut, create, compost and repeat. This work has aspiration beyond growing for the sake of growing, beyond arranging flowers for the sake of beauty (though both are reason enough!). Growing and gardening helps our environment in so many ways, sequestering carbon, providing food for pollinators, sheltering for local wildlife, maintaining a healthy biodiversity and much more. Our flowers help celebrate the every day in our home, in our hearts and amongst people we celebrate, whilst supporting a sustainable business model. In many ways, it is a radical act to grow and use naturally grown flowers like this but it shouldn’t be. This simply is the why and way we grow flowers.
These principles are touched on in every class, event and blog, detailed in depth in the Year Long ‘Grow Your Own Course’. We have another class, on this Saturday, ‘Gardening Naturally’, where we will focus on ways of seeing and working in our gardens and spaces. Actually, it makes quite a good ‘Grow Your Own’ taster to inspire ahead of our 6th iteration of the course this September. We will sow seeds, transfer seedlings and turn the compost, make feeds for our plants, look at supports, pest control, all in a holistic and gentle way. I have never enjoyed gardening so much and done so little! The flowers are a wonderful result of our work but paradoxically, rarely the goal. It is about noticing and assisting with the different elements of your space in order to help it thrive.
Right now is the most exciting part of the year - starting to cut flowers as the season begins, sowing seeds, cutting back last years growth and planting out. You know dear reader, that I love the process and I’m feeling optimistic to receive and work with that again this Spring.
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