MARCH 2020

This is the time to be slow,

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.

- John O’Donohue

Everything is different now. So very different, for all of us. This pandemic has robbed us of many things. In a business sense - cash flow, our work for the season ahead, our wonderful team, our certainty for the immediate future and weekly routines. It has robbed us of brushing past people in crowded rooms, of shaking hands, of coffee shops and wine bars and kissing our friends and parents, our freedom to go out and be in the world. For the time being, at least, we are restricted, isolated, distanced. But I don’t want to write about that. What I want to write about is hope, and change for the better. Because, while none of us expected THIS, there are, perhaps, silver linings to be found. For the moment time - to realign, to refocus - being one of them.

This week we were due to re-open the studio and flower school for the new season, preparing to welcome brides and mothers-of-brides and planners through our doors to discuss colour schemes and hash out itineraries and students coming to study floral design with us for a day, or a week - it’s one of the most exciting stages of the year, the cusp, when everything is just about to get going. For us there’s nothing we love more than a full diary of dates stretching ahead, that blissful workaholic haze of early mornings and challenge and adrenaline, one project after the other until the winter when we exhaustedly crawl back into hibernation again until spring. For the last five years this has been the annual dance, a rhythm we are familiar with and thrive on. We’d lined up the perfect team to work alongside us - all similarly champing at the bit to get off the starting blocks and into the field to join the flowery fray. And then out of nowhere - Covid-19. BOOM!

A week into the UK lockdown and we are only just beginning to come to terms with what this means. Everything looks different. London is deserted; our beautiful city boarded up and unrecognisable. On one of those grim mornings last week I made my usual pot of strong coffee and took a mug out into the garden. My husband was listening to the news, the air was tense with anxiety and everything was eerily still - no children playing in the school playground, no cars on the road, no planes. I stood amongst the potted pelargoniums and drank my coffee. I had a childish and self-indulgent urge to cry but couldn’t. Crying seems to get harder as you get older, perhaps that’s as it should be. Instead I concentrated on the silence in an effort to compose my thoughts and get on with the day. And then I realised something. The world around me was far from silent - to the contrary, the whole morning was full of birdsong. Every day since I’ve tuned into the blackbirds and starlings whistling and chirruping to each other, and the swaying canopy of holm oaks in the wind at the end of the garden sighing like the ocean. In these moments I find I can cling onto a sense of peace, that at some point all will again be right with the world.

In the meantime nature carries on, regardless of us and our viruses. It has its own schedule to keep to. The earth warms, birds chirrup, stag beetles have sex in the sun, the honeysuckle scrambles up over the fence and unfurls its grey leaves. In the garden time slows - yet at this time of the year every day is like watching the plants fast-forward to fuller, more vigorous versions of themselves. This is where we’ve been the past week, in among the leaves and new fronds, keeping close to the earth. Raking soil, planting, watering, making good. These simple acts, the rhythmic, methodical processes of keeping a garden, are utterly life affirming.

The flowers are blooming, more and more every week. We have time to really think about them and give them the attention they deserve. Each harvest we are collecting all the treasures that might be taken for granted in the rapid pace of usual life - tiny narcissus and fritillaria, the first of the tulips, ranunculus unfurling their petticoat skirts.

Against all odds the past few weeks have been a strangely fertile time of creativity and ideas. Even though its just us the two of us now, and far from the jazzy, busy season of hustle we were expecting. Perhaps, without the racing and dashing of everyday life as we know it, there is now the space to reconsider whether all the usual freneticism is worth it, whether there are other ways of operating, as a business, as a family. For us, a chink of light has illuminated what’s important and what’s superfluous. What we thought achievement meant and what it should. And what we want to focus on for the future of Aesme - what it is, really and truly - that we’re trying to do here. Refocus, reposition, make the most of the time available.

The next few months we plan to go back to basics. Growing flowers, learning how to arrange them, studying plants, photographing them, writing about them. It’s safe to say that until much later this year there will be no weddings, no parties, no workshops - this is going to be one long research trip! But while we have our health, we will be in the garden, slowly building on what we’ve started there for the future. We hope to share more with you here as we go.