I am also starting to plan what flowers I need to order for the Wedding Fayre on Sunday.  With such a lovely venue I would like to do bouquets using orchids, calla lilies and roses.  The spring flowers are also lovely and lend themselves to more natural hand-tied posies of tulips, lilac and ranunculas.  The lovely green Viburnum Opulus was also in the market last week.

A lovely way to start a grey Monday morning with a brain storming session on ideas for a summer ball.  The theme is The Olympics and we are going to take the London Logo colours as our starting point.  As there will be upto 27 tables we will use a mix of 3 different glass containers and, with a tight budget, it will be fun to see what we can achieve without using a lot of flowers.  Ribbons, fabric, wire and sticks, together with gold, silver and bronze medals and Olympic rings are all possibilities.

The colours are gorgeous – orange and pink, orange and turquoise, pink and turquoise, blue and pink – maybe go really ‘cool’ with turquoise and blue.

Today was the first workshop of the year which was really good fun. It all started in rather chaotic fashion as I was busy decorating small hearts with ribbon and roses whilst trying to get my (almost) 2  year old grand daughter to eat her weetabix.  Workshops are a great way of breaking the ice and making new friends at the same time as learning about flowers.

I started by demonstrating a couple of ideas, one very simple of tulips tied with leaves – the star really being the glass container – and one slightly more difficult using the round glass bowls which are very easy and inexpensive to buy whilst being extremely versatile.  For this I had some very pale peach carnations and roses and couldn’t resist using some beautiful hellebores out of the garden although, unfortunately their beautiy is so fleeting.  Three great shrubs to have in the garden and which are in flower now are Winter honeysuckle and virburnum bodnantense both of which smell fabulous and viburnum tinus.

After that we all got busy on the group arrangement which consisted of the tall curly bamboo, Husky white germini, green anthuriums and folded aspidistra leaves.  At the end everyone seemed really pleased with what they had achieved and we finished off with, probably the best bit of the morning, Marg’s amazing chocolate and banana cupcakes!!!

It was a very cold, early start for Jo and Dan’s wedding yesterday, but what a beautiful sunny day it turned out to be.  It’s not often, fortunately, that I have to worry about flowers being chilled in transit.

Jo choose spring flowers for her bouquet and as her bridesmaids were in blue this was introduced in her bouquet with the little grapehyacinth or Muscari.  At this time of year the ranunculas and anemones are at their best and to these I added hyacinths which introduce perfume and lovely White Akito roses with pearls.  Jo’s two bridesmaids carried similar hand-tied bouquets without the blue.  I was very pleased with the bridegroom’s buttonhole, complimenting the bridal bouquet with silvery blue eucalyptus and tied with very thin organza ribbon – what do you think?

The Oat Barn at Packington Moor is a beautiful wedding venue and I always enjoy working there.  I really loved the table name cards which  Jo had made – they were various photos of New York landmarks in vibrant blue – absolutely super!

I hope you like the two photos of the reception, one showing the martini table arrangements and one with the sun pouring through the windows onto the top table garland,  Jo gave me 5 lovely pearl hearts to hang from the garland, but they are a little difficult to see with the way the light is falling

This week has started off with lots of enquiries and a brain storming session for a forthcoming workshop.

I had hoped to start my article on ‘hearts’ today but my grandson took them all back to the Lake District by mistake on Sunday.  I wouldn’t mind but he left me his fishing maggots instead!

This evening is our monthly flower club meeting and this year we have taken the theme of the Olympics with tonight being the Olympic Torch.  I have a beautiful pinky/bronzy cone to use but at the moment not sure how to support it with tulips, golden rod, galax leaves and pink cornus.  After that I am going to give a short demonstration on next month which will be ‘Bronze’.  When buying flowers ‘off the shelf’ so to speak it is a bit limiting but we thought we would interpret Bronze as being ‘third’ so I have 3 rather beautiful {but large} coppery anthuriums, 3 stems of hypericum berries and three aspidistra leaves with various leaves out of the garden.  I also have a black and pewter container now sprayed copper and pewter and three copper sticks with decorative wire. So we shall see what transpires.

I love the effect of the pink fabric swirled inside the bowl and adding the water helps the reflection when the light catches the scattered crystals, whilst the mirror gives extra depth.

Thought you would like to see the effect low arrangements give in the Oat Barn,

It’s the most beautiful morning in Staffordshire today and am at last feeling better after flu, which is lucky as I have 4 table arrangements to do for the 2nd Taster Evening of the year at Packington Moor. This time they have slightly changed the format in that they have asked for 4 arrangements, all the same, in a low design.  I can certainly appreciate the reasons for this as it  will help brides to picture the barn more easily decorated in the style they have choosen, although for me it is not so good as I love the opportunity to experiment and suggest different ideas!

The colours asked for are ivory, pink and green so I have decided to use the round glass bowls which are very popular for low arrangements and to make these a little more interesting I have put pink fabric and water in the bases with an arrangement of roses, germini and veronica in the top.  I think I will place the bowls on mirrors with glass tea lights and scattered crystals.

I also love using the Midolino sticks and pink or lime green would look good, as yet undecided which to use but will thread them with pearls and individual white hyacinth flowers.

I thought it would be interesting to show you some examples of various ways of decorating hearts which are very popular with brides at the moment. As I have now succeeded in including an image on the Blog!! will do a series of ‘hearts’ next week.

I am not a mad fan of anthuriums which I used in the sundae glass but I thought the green with the pink lines running through was just beautiful when I saw them in the market. I have lots of crab apples on the farm this year and never seem to get tired of using them – this time they complimented the pink and acid green.  I also added lime green Midolino sticks which at the moment I love as they add extra interest and shape to a design.  The little lights I used in the stem did not show-up well enough and I need to look at this further.

I haven’t used the stone column for ages but thought the colour was just right with the quite vibrant pink roses and soft ruscus – got carried away with thoughts of hot Roman ruins.  As luck would have it one of the tables had been set up with a beautiful soft champagne colour cloth, so with some sprinkled crystals I was really happy.

A tip here for brides is to give some thought to the lightling of the Reception and how it will translate from a bright sunny afternoon to a dark evening.

The lily vase also seemed to end up going down the lime green route.  I filled it with coloured water, which if used sparingly can be very effective.  Last year I did some for a 21st party using shocking pink to compliment some lilies – the other colour being black – and it worked very well, particularily as in this instance every table arrangement was lit with a light from the ceiling of the marquee.  (see my note on lighting above).  Mirrors are still very popular but this time I thought the lime green meeting the white table cloth would be better and I scattered pink rose petals and crystals to finish.