to love a tulip

It seems to me there are many reasons to love a tulip - biweekly bucketsful just arrived from Hay to go with those I have here - some a little too far open but that means my house will be filled tomorrow and luckily it's a sociable weekend so lots to share around.....

May already?

I can scarcely believe I haven't got on to the blog for a month, I guess it's been busy! So, in the last month, there was a wedding in Kent in the most amazing church ever with a whole set of Marc Chagall windows, and a wedding in Worcestershire in another stunning church now owned by the Church Preservation/Conservation body and not available for ordinary services so the couple had to get a special license from the Archbish of Canterbury in order to get married there. Lydia desperately wanted beech leaves in the arrangements, her bouquet and her hair, and two weeks ago there just weren't any around, the trees had not burst into leaf. So I drove west until I came across the first beech tree that was on the point of opening... all was well. She was the first bride I have ever done flowers for who requested a headdress including guinea fowl feathers!

Meanwhile, things are finally moving in the gardens here and another week will see sweet rocket, astrantia, centaurea, campanula, a very few cornflowers and maybe even the first peonies along with the end of the tulips and the already abundant tiarella, solomon's seal, lily of the valley - which have moved very happily and seem to love it here, hurrah - and shrubby offerings. And Rosa Banksia Lutea is about to bloom, there are literally thousands of buds. Akebia is so vigorous it has climbed right up the house and on to the gutters towards the chimneys, and I need to chop back clematis armandii and passionflower that have literally strangled the wisteria which is hanging on by a thread and flowering already.

I finally got all the perennials that I moved into the ground, or at least heeled in where there simply isn't space. I've lost some roses that were bare root too long when the frosts were very bad a month or so back, so have put about half the others rather too closely planted into one bed by the main lawn and others at the top of the old veg garden and in pots, (I haven't been able to cultivate the area I wanted to use in the field as it was too wet for too long) but otherwise I think all is well although some things will obviously be checked. 

But what I am really loving at the moment are the wildflowers. Even in the orchard there are runs of bluebells - especially under the magnolia which is now fading and pear blossom taking over behind with apple blossoms about to burst. The field is a sea of lady's smock among a huge array of grasses, the wild garden is about to be turned completely blue with a huge swathe of bluebells, following beautiful circles of wood anemones around the trees and abundant primroses. And I saw my first orchid there yesterday. When I also saw the most wonderful ancient collection of wildflowers I have seen in many a year when I went for a long walk circling back through a holloway a mile or two distant - there were spurges, wild parsleys and lovage, primroses, ladys smock, bluebells, whitebells, orchids, wild garlic, marigolds, celandines, stitchwort, campions..... When I was a child I could name so very many flowers and grasses growing in the wild, at school there was a competition each year and we were allowed to pick and bring back anything we could name. One year I named 91 separate flowers and grasses. Now I am hard put to get a couple of dozen which is shameful and I am determining to improve again.

There is now a new entrance/car parking area, very necessary, I've turned the old single garage into a useful workshop, and the builders have left the house. Sanding, filling and painting will have to wait a while. It's been all go!

Late flowering

Usually I have heaps and heaps of tulips by now. My daughter got married last April and I was worried they would all be over by 21st. But this year a few are just stumbling towards the starting blocks. Consequently mail order is very different from usual years - hellebores are almost finished, tulips are only just about to get into stride. It does feel odd to be scrimping around for things at this time of year!

Also, I am getting the tulips from my Herefordshire patch, then bringing them back here twice a week, so logistics are a bit nuts.

But here I finally got roses into homes, albeit not the homes I had anticipated.

Most of the perennials that I can get into the ground are in the ground. Though there are still a lot of homeless treasures as I still haven't been able to cultivate the field.

Potato boxes are full of various composts for mini growing areas.

The new parking area is almost done.

The new kitchen is almost done where I'll have space for courses as I'm not building a studio yet.

And the sun is almost breaking through. Hurrah!

Work / Business / Life

I've been cogitating on business (and busyness) lately. Of course I want my business to work. Passionately. Because I really like what I do - and of course for all the usual reasons that one needs to work. But I am not and never will be a thrusting in-your-face businesswoman with lots of pushy marketing campaigns and networks and goodness knows what because that just isn't my way. Nor will I, I hope, take other people's ideas and pretend they are my own. And I hope I never pretend my business is anything other than it is.

When I started growing flowers to pick and arrange and package and sell I didn't really have much of an idea how it would all work out, but I was positive it would work, even if I didn't know exactly how. I have never been someone who plans with much precision, more a big picture optimist. And because I didn't know how it would all work out I didn't want to start with some great fanfare but wanted to give things some time to develop. In fact it has of course worked out fine, or better than fine, with some interesting diversions along the way and I hope there will always be interesting diversions.

I am notoriously admin-lite because I still (ridiculously) feel that time spent on businessy things in front of the computer is time wasted when I could be doing something outside, and because there are times when I am just so over busy there is no time to spend at the computer apart from dealing with the immediate necessities. So I don't send out efficient mail outs, I don't email all my customers from time to time although I know full well that I probably ought to, I'm hopeless at anything apart from utterly necessary follow up. It's not because I don't care about my customers. I do. I really really do. I want every customer to be a happy customer. And to that end I want to be out there doing or organising things to make sure every customer is a happy customer. And I want to be out and about getting ideas and inspiration rather than sitting in front of an email package or whatever. I think that is how things can stay fresh. I know the business might be a lot more efficient in terms of numbers etc etc if I spent more time at the keyboard, but I am totally sure it would lose out in terms of energy and originality, and care. And I did have someone helping me out with all office stuff last year but I felt guilty she had such a boring job, though I will have someone else here too, but only for a few hours a week if possible. I still won't do efficient email mass mail outs or newsletters and the like.......

Some years ago, when the business was still very young, Jigsaw clothing stores asked me if I would be interested in supplying flowers for all their shops. I thought about it, was pleased to have been asked as it was a new venture for them, but knew it was a bit of a tricky one as I was still finding my feet. However, I had discussions with them and got stuck in. But I didn't have enough of my own flowers to supply everything from my garden and fields all the time, so I bought in part of what I was sending out. I bought in British flowers of course, and made up interesting bunches BUT it didn't feel right, it just felt like business rather than the joy of the flowers. And I was naive and didn't realise that actually I could easily have bought in cheap and sent out expensive and didn't need to put a huge variety of blooms in each arrangement, and didn't need to stress about the look so much, I could just have gone to the professional growers and bought stuff in and kept it simple. But I didn't. And ultimately it didn't work for me because I wanted to give them the true nature of what I was doing, and felt I couldn't because of the volume and because I had to buy some flowers in to go with mine, and because of the hot lights in the shops which meant that certain flowers only were really up to lasting the distance and I'm more a fan of slightly more unusual more delicate things that will last at home for good while but couldn't withstand shop conditions in the same way , and it didn't work because I was a small business and couldn't wait up to 90+ days for payment from them, so I told them it wasn't working for me and we stopped working together. But I then did the weddings for several of the girls who worked in the Head Office or the shops, and supplied the Head Office with flowers for some special occasions, so it wasn't a failure, it just wasn't a way of working I wanted to develop. Though I have to admit it was a nice cheque even the way I did it, when it arrived. And I did love doing their Christmas arrangements. And I was terribly pleased to have had the chance.

Jigsaw didn't have flowers for a while then another company, much larger than me and incredibly business minded, got the contract to supply their flowers and I'm sure it's working very well. That company is very clever and has always traded on the impression that they grow everything themselves etc but they don't, they buy in but they buy in British so it's all good, just a different thing, and their flowers are put together by professional florists with a much better eye for cost than I could ever have!  Good luck to them, I would not want to be a company like them though they have mildly irritated me at times as they were always a bigger venture than me but seemed to keep a close eye on what I was doing and go in big on imitation - from packaging style to even selling exactly the same jugs after I had exhibited well at Hampton Court. Perhaps it's just competitive business practice. They are very bright - what a brilliant wheeze to harvest your corn for bird seed and package it and market it well for example, I can't imagine how much a tonne that must work out at compared to normal agricultural practices, very very smart.

There are increasing numbers of people out there doing the sort of thing I do. And that is A GOOD THING. But it's not all good when people just jump on a current bandwagon -  there are some brilliant growers and flower providers out there, and some less so - why oh why put pictures on your websites of wilting or dying arrangements? We should all try to give our customers the very best at the very least. Sometimes it goes wrong, inevitably, but at least start from the right point?

I do hope this business doesn't go down the same line that so many others do, where people are all in effect turning out the same thing to a greater or lesser degree. I do hope everyone can keep/inject originality into what they do. It's a little dispiriting to trawl through sites (I finally thought I'd better take off my blinkers and see what else is going on!) and find so many young businesses almost using exactly the same words and descriptions of their flowers. Copying is not actually very flattering. Though I have been quite amused to see edible bouquets appearing now, they always went down best for me at trendy markets and events quite a few years back, a lady who came on one of my courses a few years ago kickstarted her whole flower selling business with edible bouquets and they certainly are good fun. I have one bride this year who is going for the whole edible theme, it should be interesting! And it has been interesting having a quick look at what other folk are doing. What oh what is an artisan florist? Not a term I like, at all, it's just so meaningless and dare I say pretentious. I do understand the difficulty in what to call yourself, I am not a florist because I don't have any florist's training, I don't think like a florist, and rarely have clean hands and finger nails, but I do the same job that some florists do.  I am not a grower because I don't grow professionally like those who have been trained to do so, but I do grow flowers. So what do we call ourselves - or do we need to call ourselves anything at all? I think the time to define oneself by a job title is so long gone especially as so many of us chop and change through life. I hope we can all maintain our differences and manage to grow ever better and more interesting ranges and produce ever more inventive produce.

Gosh, I need to get off the page and into the gardens. I feel as though I'm veering towards a rant which was never the intention!

And your question is?

In answer to many questions. For early production in most parts of the Uk you do need a tunnel. 

But apart from that, spot the difference:

The garden on the Welsh borders this week

And the garden in Dorset

Kitchen flowers

Not just for orphan lambs  (and bountiful baking, I think I shall eventually burst if I keep cooking as much as I have been since coming down here, an Aga is a wonderful thing but also a tyrannical beast, telling me constantly to bake bake bake as it's costing me money not to) today the Aga  has also been a useful flower warmer. I have been worrying for months about a wedding going out today as the wedding is on Saturday but there are no couriers to deliver on Friday morning, so flowers have to sit around an extra day.

As it happens, rather than worrying about them going over, my main concern has been trying to get buds popped and started into flowering so they're not all tightly furled, not a good look. So buckets and buckets sat on the table near the Aga all night and looked a bit more hopeful this morning. I know, it's exactly what I would usually advise people not to do.

Building work starts next week, more chaos. The trouble is, now that I've been here a couple of months the need for doing anything seems rather irrelevant even though I know really that things need doing. Certainly it will be a good idea to mend the roof, and stop the electrics being scarily dodgy, and I am looking forward to making a lighter brighter sunnier kitchen. I briefly looked rather quickly at the idea of a new kitchen, feeling rather bamboozled and indecisive one day. And just as swiftly reverted to plan A, new worktops, new cupboard fronts, return of the original sink that has been in the garden now for almost 35 years, and old freestanding cupboards coming back in. ...... Who needs to hide a fridge behind a door when I can just as easily hide it through the wall in another room? Why have so many kitchens become banks of doors?

It's dry. But freezing, literally. The flowers that stayed outside in the store last night had  n layer of ice around their stems. Roll on spring.

Box scheme

I've decided this year it's all about the garden, the business is going to follow the garden rather than the other way round. I'm just so excited about this garden, it's so different from any garden I've ever had or imagined and I just want to make it beautiful. And low maintenance. And all for cutting. And super productive. All feels possible.

So first it's to boxes. As I moved so may plants, lots of boxes/crates were involved. And lots are still involved. I found a lot of secondhand plastic plant (or other uses probably) crates and moved loads of plants in them, and now I'm using lots of them for emergency growing. I don't have tulips at the new garden, though still have tens of thousands at the old garden which I hope will be appearing here (sent in more boxes) soon, but I needed to have some of my favourites here so hurled them into the plastic crates. There are a few lines of crates strewn about the gardens so far.....

But most plants were moved in potato boxes, secondhand of course - people who know me know I'm a rather keen recycler. And these are a godsend. It has been so bloody wet and vile that cultivating the field next to the garden has become rather a joke. I sprayed off a bit, finally, in ancitipation of cultivation, but I just don't want to get any machinery on to the patch as it will make a hideous claggy puddled clay mass not far below the surface and I'll just be storing up problems. So it will just have to wait until everything has dried up, maybe it will be in waiting for months. And the main patch will definitely have to wait for many months as I do not want to start off by creating a whole heap of future problems. So the solution to getting some annuals going has to be elsewhere. It's boxes. I've filled some with leaf mould/grass clipping compost which I'm topping off with gold dust compost from the proper domestic compost pile (beautifully rotted now for three years) and sowing little spot crops of annuals while other ground gets happier. I've made plastic covers for warmth and I'll raise them on cloche hoops when they appear. Mini tunnels I reckon.

The peonies which I moved from the other garden are coming up beautifully. Unfortunately there is a secret weapon at loose in the garden. She likes the peony bed more than anywhere else, and new shoots seem a bit of a draw. Oh and that was my favourite sheepskin boot in the picture.....