Midsummer

It seems only a moment ago that it was spring, cold, damp, dark in the mornings. And yet we are already past midsummer, already a week beyond the solstice and accelerating fast into the second half of the summer.

June, true to form, has been busy and beautiful.

This is the month we revel in the sheer abundance and frothiness of the garden at its best, before it gets hotter and drier.

The first flush of the garden roses were wonderful this year. They benefitted from a long wet spring and have been laden with flowers for weeks, their perfume fragrant and heady.

The peonies were glorious too and are just coming to an end. The Claire de Lune were particularly floriferous this year - they have been in the ground three years now. Likewise the pansies which have been flowering their little stems off - we added some new plants this year and they are bedding in well.

Sunset and sunrise in the garden…

We enjoyed arranging with a lot of pale pink flowers this month. Corncockle, valerian and kolkwitzia, geraniums, aquilegia. So beautiful with silvery greens, lime greens, bronze and/or plum!

Our June workshop was awash with incredible varieties cut specially for our visitors who came from all over the world to immerse themselves in botanical beauty for two days at the studio. We love to create a very nurturing space for these workshops so that everyone, no matter their experience or background with flowers, can learn, discover and explore their own creativity with the most amazing ingredients to hand. Growing every flower ourselves it is very special for us to be able to share varieties that some of our guests have never encountered before and it’s always surprising and moving to see what is created with them. Flower arranging is such a personal practice, it’s visceral and intuitive and it’s hard to put into words how exciting the energy is in a room full of people who love handling flowers in an artistic way.

We are very excited to have just released our 2024 workshop dates on the website and tickets are available.

For those who are interested in attending our Flower School next year, all the information can be found here.

This month we’ve had the lovely Aila working with us.

Aila runs a flower farm back home in New Zealand, Hands in the Dirt, and is visiting the UK during the NZ winter season. It has been wonderful having her positive work ethic and upbeat presence with us in the studio and garden and we know she is going to do great things with her beautiful flower business. She also wears great hats.

We’ve had some lovely weddings this month, filling bucketloads of mouthwatering colours and transporting them back to London to be carefully arranged into vases and bouquets back at the studio.

Last weekend at the Savile Club we created a naturalistic display to the central staircase. We’ve long dreamed of using a pale yellow palette at the club - the interiors are icy blues, silver and white, so it has a dreamy, fairytale-like quality to it. We kept the design loose and sporadic to reflect the way the plants look in the garden at this precise moment in the year - sprawling vines of Clematis and Nasturtium, towering spires of Campanula, Thalictrum, Veronica and Cephalaria gigantea (giant scabious), the fading seedheads of Allium globes and tiny flecks of white Gysophila and pale pink Nepeta. We always hope to achieve an effortless, just-gathered look for our clients’ wedding flowers, even though they are anything but! Just gathered, yes, but effortless, not so much… It’s a wonderful privilege to be entrusted to create installations for a couple’s wedding day and its always a joy to work at the Savile Club. We have dressed this staircase many times but we always try to do something new and find a fresh way to decorate it.

This week it’s British Flowers Week and to celebrate all the incredible locally grown flowers we are lucky enough to enjoy arranging with here in the UK we have a summer sale on our online courses until 2nd July.

Click here to browse the full range of classes.