What? So Soon?
Yes, after months and months of nothing, two blog posts within a week. I will spare you the obvious bus analogy, especially as I know from experience that the proverbial three buses are usually followed by another long hiatus and I don’t want to tempt fate now I am on a blog-writing mini-roll.
Anyway, some more lovely photos for you. This time they are of Abi and Sam’s wedding at the Longhouse at the Mill on the Brue in Bruton, a new venue for me.
Abi chose to do some of the decorations herself, so we can only take credit for the table garland, bride’s bouquet and willow heart. She and her family picked cow parsley, campion and bluebells themselves for the pretty jam jars running down the tables, which looked gorgeous. I often get brides who timidly ask if it is “OK” for them to do their own table decorations. When I say “Of course!” they sometimes look surprised – apparently some florists get a bit petulant about such things and don’t like to relinquish control. At JW Blooms we try to do what you want. If that means only supplying the flowers, great. If that means doing the whole kit and caboodle, also great. And all stages in-between are – you guessed it – great. (Especially, in fact, if you want to do the corsages yourselves, as that means an extra couple of hours in bed for me – hoorah!)
Anyway, to get back to the photos, Dorset Wedding Photographer Courtenay Hitchcock has come up trumps again and sent me some beautiful photos of the flowers we did, so many thanks to him. He does all the best venues and weddings, so if we end up doing the same one I feel I must be doing something right! Table garlands, by the way, seem to be big this year…
Where Does The Time Go?
Along with the sun, spare time this year has been a fleeting luxury. The weddings started in March, much earlier than I’ve ever started before. It’s lovely to be asked to do them, but I’ve missed having March and April to get the field in order and already feel like I’m chasing my tail.
This weekend and next, though, are both wedding-less so I am on a mission to get the field weeded and top-dressed and all the seedlings in the polytunnel planted out. It also means I have time to remind myself that I have a blog!
Having said that, all you’re getting is a few photos. But, still, it’s a start…
These pictures are from the wedding of the lovely Ollie and Hitomi at St Audries Park. I’ve done the church there before, but never the actual house – and it’s gorgeous! The gardens were so immaculate that I kept touching things to see if they were real.
Lots of thanks to Phil Chappell of Lens Monkey for sending me the beautiful photos. Take a look at his work here.
And the confetti in the top photo is real petal confetti from Rosie, just down the road at Bespoke Confetti. The choice of colours is amazing. Take a look here.
Tweet-Up
I’m not very good at marketing and networking and all that. Every year, I tell myself to do more of it, but somehow the seed sowing and the planting out and the weeding and the picking and the floristry etc etc take up all my time and ”getting out there” ends up being pushed down the list.
But this year, I am determined to get better at it. As a start I went to a Tweet-Up, arranged by the good folk at Marry Me In Somerset the other night at The Manor, a beautiful venue just outside Wellington. It’s just a gathering of people on Twitter in the wedding industry – a chance to mingle and network and chat to people you wouldn’t otherwise get to meet.
One of the lovely people I met was Sarah Godsill, an artist who stands discreetly in the corner and sketches your wedding. I just thought it was a lovely idea and, as it’s something most people would never have thought of, wanted to spread the word a bit.
That’s me on the left. Check Sarah out.
And if you’re on Twitter and are interested, I’m @jwblooms.
Buttocks Of Steel
Warning! Those of you who visit the blog for pictures of pretty flowers, prepare to be disappointed – this post will mostly comprise pictures of soil. Yep, that’s it, just soil. You may also be disappointed if you are after pictures of buttocks.
Loyal followers who have been reading since the beginning will know that I grow my flowers according to the no-dig school of gardening. As I understand it (not necessarily accurately), fungi in the soil, mycorrhizae, latch on to the root system of a plant, expanding the network of roots, so allowing more nutrients to be taken up by the plant. You can buy mycorrhizae in little pots now to sprinkle around your plants. It costs a fortune. But mycorrhizae are naturally occuring – and free. It’s just that when you dig, you destroy the network.
But, you cry, how can you garden without digging? Well, the other main idea underpinning the no-dig philosophy is that you don’t actually need to dig because, left to their own devices, the worms will do all the tilling and aeration for you. In practice, what this means is, instead of ploughing or rotovating, you choose your spot, dump a load of compost on top and leave the worms to mix it all up for you. Then, having planted into it, you allow the plant to build up its network of altruistic fungi and never dig again.
Which is what I did. I helped the process along by putting cardboard down to smother the grass before putting the compost on, but you don’t have to. Gosh, this seems a long time ago…
Nearly four years later, the plot has expanded to about an acre. I prepare new bits as I go – this is a bed I did last year, which I was weeding today. You can see the original clay soil (which has been under the black plastic) and the soil in the bed, now a mixture of the original soil and imported compost. Never dug, fertile and pleasingly friable – my own brand of alchemy.
And the buttocks of steel? They come from shovelling 15 tonnes of compost into a wheelbarrow. Keep your back straight, point your knees out to the side and squeeze those buns as you bend.
No-dig – the gardening method that just keeps giving.
Giving Thanks
I am not a religious person. It’s not a political decision – it’s just that it doesn’t make any sense to me and the alternative scientific explanation does. I once read that there was a genetic propensity for faith, so maybe it’s a gene I lack. But I can’t say my life lacks anything else as a result. There are times when I think it must be nice to arrive in a new town and know that the local church will welcome you into an instant community of like-minded people but, apart from that, I’ve never envied people of faith and have been happy in my atheism.
However, there are times when I would like to believe that someone created what is around me and chose to place me in it just because it would be nice to have someone to thank.
I was driving back from West Quantoxhead today, having spent an hour or so planning a wedding at St Audries church and the beautiful St Audries Park with its lovely oh-my-god-I-must-have-one orangery. The road home nestles between the gently undulating Quantocks and the Brendons. The North Somerset Steam Railway meanders alongside, running up to the road for a bit then disappearing, to reappear, often with a friendly poo-woo, when you expect it least. Today the sky glowered with dark grey clouds and threatened rain, but the sun suddenly blasted through and lit up the hills and fields in such astonishingly bright colours that I very nearly ran into the hedge, so distracted was I by the incredible, even for round here, beauty.
Generally I’ve been very fortunate in life – I’ve never had to walk miles for water, scrabble round a rubbish dump for food or even worry much about paying the bills (although, I have lived in Hackney so like to think I am not completely unaware of the uglier side of life)* – but I swear to God (or not) that I will never, ever, become blasé about how lucky I am to live where I do and to grow flowers for a living.
Some would say I was blessed. I prefer “jammy as hell”.
* Yes, I know it’s all been regenerated and bits of it have always been lovely, but still…
Not Christmas Wreaths Already
No, don’t worry, not for you lot. I, however, seem to have slipped into that world of retail where you are always thinking at least a season ahead and consequently am beginning (in my defence, reluctantly) to think about Christmas wreaths.
Until this year, I had a proper job, which meant that any flower work had to be fitted around my shifts. That curtailed the number of wreaths I could actually get made at Christmas and meant that I would usually stop taking orders at some point. Yes, folks, people were turned away!
OK, it wasn’t like there was a queue outside the front door or anything, but there seemed to be enough demand to a) hugely inflate my ego and b) make me think there might be a bigger market out there to be tapped in following years. Anyway, to cut a long, rambling explanation short, this year I am going for it.
Which means I need to find the materials to make them with. Normally, I wouldn’t trouble myself with such nonsense for a good six weeks yet but, still in shock, I have already begun gathering materials. So far, it’s mostly holly berries and hydrangeas. I am putting them in glycerine to try to preserve them. In case this is new to you, you just mix one part glycerine (89p in Boots for 200mls) with two parts very hot water and then stand your flowers in a couple of inches of the solution and leave them for a few weeks in the shed. The idea is the flowers take up the glycerine with the water and stay soft. I have had mixed results before, and I have never tried it with berries, so I am not sure how successful it will be. If you give it a go, let me know how you get on and we’ll compare notes.
Although you’re not allowed to be better at it than me, of course.
Groovy Buttonholes
As you may have grasped, I love the idea of men wearing flowers and the whole be-a-bit-imaginative-with-your-buttonhole thing. One of last week’s grooms wanted these. Excuse the immodesty, but they were gorgeous!
Somewhat Slack
I just clicked on my blog and realised it is over a month since I posted anything. How can that have happened? Apologies – not somewhat, but very, slack of me.
As always, there is no excuse other than being totally preoccupied by weddings and weeding. I have taken on significantly more weddings this year than ever before and I am still prone to the odd night of “WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!” fear and thoughts of whether it would actually be that indefensible to just pack up and emigrate (any future brides reading this, don’t panic – my passport’s run out). That usually happens on what I have come to think of as Wobbly Wednesday*, although thankfully it is happening less and less and, so far (don’t jinx it), there have been no disasters.
The other thing constantly nagging away at me is the weeding. Everything seems less important. Horticulturally speaking, it may not be as vital as you’d think – the flowers seem to grow just as well in weedy beds as in neat, tidy ones – but that’s not the point. The weeding acts as a barometer of how I am doing. A weed-free bed delights me – I feel on top of things, organised, competent and in control. It empowers me. It makes me want to do more, better. Messy beds and unstaked, unpicked flowers make me want to curl up and howl. I become paralysed by a sense of there being so much to do that there’s no point doing anything. I start doubting my abilities, talk myself out of doing anything positive and usually end up going home, where I lie on the sofa for a couple of hours berating myself for not being at the field working. And so it goes on…
So, anyway, the point of telling you all that (probably unwisely) is to explain why blogging has fallen down the list a bit. I shall try and put some pictures on occasionally but you will have to forgive me if I don’t write much. A few photos from recent weddings to mollify you:
* That awful day when it’s too early to do anything constructive but near enough to the Big Rush to feel you really ought to be doing something – anything.
Flowers For Men
Yesterday I sent some flowers to Dorset wedding photographer Courtenay Hitchcock of Courtenay Photographic. He had recommended me to some clients getting married next year at Athelhampton House and I just wanted to say thanks. I rarely go anywhere these days without a gift of flowers and so my natural instinct was to send a bouquet.
But then a male friend said something to the effect of ”Sending flowers to a man – isn’t that a bit risky?” It had never really struck me that that might be weird, and it got me wondering. Is it?
The men I come across when I’m doing my weddings seem to enjoy the excuse to wear some flowers. Sometimes the groom doesn’t come to the flower consultations at all, and occasionally you get one who comes but asks if it would be terribly rude if he sat in the car while we discussed the details, but often they seem to take a genuine interest in, at the very least, what will be in their buttonhole.
My own male friends and acquaintances tend to be pretty rounded, reconstructed types – and quite a few of them gay – so any inherent male need to present a macho front is not something I’ve ever really come across, but perhaps my impressions are skewed by that. I also realise that any men reading this are probably only here because they’re keen on flowers, but I would still be really interested to know how you feel if you are given flowers. Is it lovely? Or embarrassing? Do you read anything into it? Find it emasculating? Or is there a line which has to be carefully negotiated? Is a bunch of cornflowers for the table when I’m coming to tea OK, but a big bouquet wrapped in tissue paper on your birthday an entirely different matter?
And, women, do you buy men flowers? If so, just your partner, or would you risk buying them for somebody else’s?
Answers in the comments box, please. Courtenay, by the way (luckily), seemed thrilled. And many thanks to him, too, for the fab photo.
Bright And Beautiful…
..As opposed to Brain-dead And Bleurgh, which is how I’m feeling.
By my standards, this weekend’s wedding was a big one – pedestals, pillars, pew ends, lychgate, steps, garlands for the marquee and field gates, and that’s in addition to all the usual bridal party stuff, of course. The colours were bright and loud, which I love doing, and the clients lovely, co-operative and organised.* You couldn’t ask for more.
But even so, late last night, there was the inevitable anguished cry of ”Why am I doing this?”, shortly followed by the sulky “Why can’t I just get a job in Waitrose?” and, just after everyone had relaxed again, the accusatory “I had a decent desk job, and left! How could you let me do that?!”
Is it just me? What do “normal” florists do? Why don’t you hear weeping and wailing and the clatter of buckets being kicked over coming from the open doors of high-street florists? Is there a special room out the back for this? Or do you just reach a stage – eventually, perhaps before you gamble on opening a shop – when it becomes smooth and easy? God, I hope so.
I did get it all done in time (just) – despite the heat, the unforeseen hiccups, and the leaden fog of tiredness that working 18-hour days brings. Mostly, though, it happened because of the inexhaustible energy, enthusiasm and kindness of Erica and the competence**, goodwill and all-round helpfulness of Amanda. I am feeling a bit slushy from tiredness, so excuse the sentimentality, but I feel SO lucky to have found the people who help me out and really, truly do not know how I’d do it without them.
Anyway, I know you’re really just here for the pics, so a small selection:
*Swatches of all the fabrics used in the bunting and dresses bundled up ready for me – joy!
** She whittles the ends of woody stems into points, where I would hack at it with a blunt pair of secateurs.
