Bittersweet October
IN THE STUDIO
October is a bittersweet month for us. In these last few weeks of the season the seven-month growing period is winding down and we host our final Flower School classes of the year. There are still so many seasonal materials to arrange with - the studio luxuriously stocked with asters, jewel-coloured dahlias, berries and fruiting branches, zinnia, chocolate cosmos, giant centaurea, flowering shrubs, herbs and perennials, including one of my favourites - Japanese anemones. Acid-toned beech branches, garlands of drying hops and curling bracken like ornate fronds of rusting metal. But the weather is turning, winter coming on, and at a certain point we relinquish the warmth, light and garden bounty of the earlier parts of the year. The wheel turns again as we knuckle down to what will be a busy winter ahead in preparation for spring.
Our ‘Day of Flower Arranging’ workshop and 3-day ‘Intensive Floral Design Masterclass’ were a whirl of activity, flowers and laughter in the studio, with students from London and around the UK as well as Paris, Romania, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore and South Korea. We greedily mopped up the last of the dahlias, coppery rose-foliage and scabiosa from the garden. Bouquets and centrepieces were woven with fine-leaved ferns, pistachio-coloured hydrangea, snowberries and shimmering strands of miscanthus grasses.
One of my favourite installation pieces of the year was this arch of massed hops, ivy berries, ferns, asters and bracken created by the students during the final session of our last Masterclass. The combination of that luminous lilac with the reddish-brown of the bracken was so beautiful and otherworldly.
We are working on our Flower School 2020 programme as we speak and are so excited to share what we have in store for students next year. Dates will be released in November so keep your eyes peeled on Instagram where we’ll be announcing ticket availability, or sign up to our newsletter at the top of the page to be the first to know about spring/summer workshops.
In other news we have recently added a little film to our website. It was created earlier this summer, directed and edited by the lovely Luca Lamaro, to tell the story of our studio and garden. We hope you enjoy it! Click here to watch the full version.
Mid-month our team created the floral decorations for a glamorous and atmospheric autumn wedding in Saxmundham, Suffolk. The ceremony was held in a twelfth-century church and reception at Sibton Park on the Wilderness Estate. I’ll wait to share the professional images as Cinzia Bruschini is an absolute magician behind a camera but there are a couple of sneak-peeks below that we captured during set-up. One of the guests described this wedding as a ‘cross between an Erdem campaign shoot and Brideshead Revisited’; suffice to say an American girl married an Englishman and it was all very stylish and chic. We scoured our cutting garden, surrounding hedgerows and local flower farms for the most exquisite seasonal ingredients. The colours were divine - nudes, coffee, copper, peach and plum with autumnal branches and foliage.
Working away on a wedding, while logistically challenging, is also a lot of fun - there’s a great deal of laughter and camaraderie, especially in the rain, which seems to elicit a rallying of spirits. I’ll remember this wedding for the delicious colours, glorious English countryside threaded with fog and mizzle, large vans navigating narrow lanes and the sound of six sleepy voices calling goodnight to one another down a hotel corridor. If you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods seek out the church of St Mary’s, Huntingfield, the ceiling of which was intricately decorated during the 1860s by one woman, the rector’s wife, Mildred Holland. Reportedly she did so with no help, lying on her back on the scaffolding. Quite a feat and an extraordinarily beautiful sight, worth taking a detour for if you’re in the area.
We have a new account on Instagram where we are documenting our wedding work. Please join us for the journey @aesmeweddings
Looking ahead to Christmas, tickets to our festive wreath workshops are now available via our web-shop here if you would like to come along! We have a morning and an afternoon session on both Saturday 30th November and Saturday 7th December. Spend a lovely couple of hours in our flower studio making a wreath for your door or as a gift for a friend. There will be fragrant evergreens, textural and fruity decorative elements as well as an array of dried flowers specially grown, harvested and dried by us from our Hampshire cut flower garden. And of course, lots of steaming hot drinks and mince pies.
IN THE GARDEN
Rain, rain, rain - the song of this October. The darkest and wettest I can remember. Drizzle and fog, damp leaves, damp bonfires. In the shrub beds the leaves are turning - abelia green to bronze, nandina green to raspberry.
On the farm we began the laborious task of clearing and turning the cutting garden around for a new year. With the last wedding of the season under our belts we lifted the dahlias and annuals, and prepared the beds for spring bulbs. There is some satisfaction to getting ahead with this task and beating the first frost to it. That way you don’t have to witness the plants wilted, blackened and mangled - always a slightly gloomy sight when the temperature drops. What we like most about working on the land, farming and harvesting crops of flowers to supply the studio, is the absolute necessity of a ‘can-do’ attitude. Gardening and growing for harvest requires optimism and faith, there is no room for laziness or procrastination. There is always work to do, and plenty of it!
Becky dug some heroic trenches. In went the narcissus, alliums, fritillaria and iris and, in the tunnels, ranunculus and anemones. The first sowing of sweet peas have already germinated and are throwing up their tender green shoots. We’ll have three long beds solely for herbs next year - so many delicious and useful varieties of mint, thyme, hyssop, sage, lemon balm and rosemary, as well as echinacea, cardoon and lavender. It’s amazing how much four people can achieve in a single day, and how much the garden changes in the course of these few weeks. Although the vista of the garden is brown and green, with very few flowers left besides the perennial beds, everything soon becomes orderly and attractive in another way - neat rows of dark beds de-weeded, fed and mulched. I find the straight lines, raked soil and precise edging immensely satisfying, so different to the beautiful chaos and blurred edges of the summer.
Jess is planning out the next plot of land we intend to amalgamate with the existing garden next month, generating spreadsheets and reams of detailed drawings and diagrams. Very mathematical at this stage, but we can already envisage how glorious it is going to be once the phase of diggers and graft and fence-laying is past and the plants begin to establish themselves. It’s an ambitious project alongside our studio work, effectively doubling the size of our plot once again, but will enable us to supply a far greater volume of flowers to the studio next year to decorate weddings, events and workshops. Importantly, it will give us a greater variety of the different blowsy, vine-y and delicate materials we love and simply can’t get our hands on any other way.
We picked the last few buckets of everlastings and limonium for Christmas orders and parties. This year for the first time, we grew flowers especially for drying (for winter use). We began harvesting in early July and now have an overflowing room strung with hundreds of bunches of beautiful fragrant dried flowers, herbs, umbels and seedpods - a sea of apricot, pink, rust, grey and mauve. All ready for the festive season, just around the corner…
IN THE ETHER
A few things we’ve been loving this month…
R E A D I N G - ‘Land of Plenty: A Journey through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain’ by Charlie Pye-Smith
L I S T E N I N G T O - Desert Island Discs
F O L L O W I N G - @wilderbotanics | @jackdavisonphoto | @alysf
E A T I N G - Ribollita, inspired by Darsham Nurseries
V I S I T I N G - Darsham Nurseries, Saxmundham, Suffolk & Hughenden Manor gardens, Buckinghamshire