Our July meeting was a flower-arranging workshop with Joanne Hobbs, one of the Club’s members and a professional florist who now owns ‘Bwlch Coed Flower Farm’, just outside Pumsaint village. Adopting regenerative practices, Joanne grows a variety of flowers which thrive in our Welsh climate, without the use of pesticides.
We had all been asked to bring flowers and greenery from our garden, but Jo had also generously brought buckets of cut flowers from her own garden to top up our supplies. She started by laying out groups of the individual flowers/foliage on a table to make selection easier as she demonstrated how to build a bouquet.
Jo explained that you start with selecting a core plant that will be at the heart of the bouquet. You then add stems of flowers and foliage one by one, each at a 45o angle. Hold the bouquet in one hand and keep turning, adding one stem at a time. As you turn, the stems will move, even sometimes the central stem. If the stems are quite firm, you may be able to reposition them, but not if the stems are soft.
Once you’ve got a reasonable amount in the bouquet, if you change the fingers you are holding it with, and hold it quite loosely, you allow the bouquet to balance itself. Then, you can adjust shape and stem placement as you go along. If you place some foliage stems around the outside, that gives the bouquet a soft outline and protects the flowers.
When you feel you have a bouquet to fill your container, you cut your stems to match the height of your container. If you cut the central stems shorter than the outside stems, you should have a bouquet that will balance on its own. Jo finished her demonstration by showing us all how to tie a florist’s knot.
Some gems of information that Jo offered along the way:
- If your flowers start to wilt once cut, put the stems in boiling water for a couple of minutes, then straight away into cool water. If it is a woody stem, you can strip away some of the bark to help the stem absorb the water better.
- If you cut flowers before they have been pollinated, they will last longer.
- In summer, purple is an evening light colour – it can look flat during the day; the light in spring and autumn is at more of an angle and so doesn’t have the same effect.
- Sweet peas last longer in a bouquet if you cut them with long stems.
At the end, on a slightly more sombre note, Jo told us about the chemicals used in the floristry industry (including those that are carcinogenic) and the search for an alternative to Oasis (the foam that used to be so widely used in flower-arranging). It is encouraging to note that there is a growing movement towards the use of organically grown flowers for events, excluding the use of harmful chemicals and plastics.
Everyone who attended felt that we learned a lot from Jo, and enjoyed the sociability and fun of building our bouquets together. Altogether, a wonderful joy- and flower-filled evening!
Cothi Gardeners Summer Social
This year Cothi Gardeners’ Summer Social will be held on Saturday 22 August from 2pm, at Llanllyr, Talsarn, Lampeter, Ceredigion SA48 8QB. Put the date in your diary, with further details to follow by email soon.
John and Helen’s Annual Plant Sale for NGS Charities
Another date for your diaries! This year John and Helen Brooks are holding their annual plant sale in aid of NGS charities on Sunday 20 September, starting at 2pm. The plant sale will be held at their NGS garden – Ty-r Maes, Ffarmers, Carmarthenshire SA19 8JP. This is a plant sale not to be missed if you want expertly grown plants, many of which will be out-of-the-ordinary. There will be a wide variety of plants on offer, in particular a good range of herbaceous perennials
Cothi Gardeners 