A Bouquet for Friends
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14.08.2023
One of Ed’s running friends and his fiancée have recently had a baby, and I really wanted to be able to give them a bunch of home-grown flowers to celebrate. Baby girl was born towards the end of July but our wet and overcast summer, coupled with our first year soil, has meant that our flowers weren’t quite ready. Knowing that life with a newborn and your firstborn is quite full on and there will have been lots of people queuing up to congratulate them and meet their daughter, we waited a couple of weeks for the flowers to be ready before paying them a visit ourselves, with flowers and a loaf of homemade bread.
Flowers freshly picked, and popped in a vase of water.
The finished bouquet includes dahlia ‘snowflake’, dahlia ‘orange fubuki’, dahlia ‘fleurel’, cosmos ‘white cupcakes’, cosmos ‘antiquity’, cosmos ‘atrosanguineus’ (chocolate cosmos), jacobaea maritima, phacelia tanacetifolia, euphorbia peplus, and a couple of stems of an heirloom sweet pea mix. The phacelia is from a bed of green manure, and the euphorbia is technically a weed that self seeds across the plot and I let live because I find it pretty.
I arranged them, then hand tied them with a piece of recycled sari ribbon, then trimmed the ends and seared them in boiling water for 20 seconds. Searing flowers feels strange, but helps stems that are wilting to perk back up. The euphorbia and the jacobaea both needed it, but there was no harm in searing the other stems too. After a night in a glass of cold water on the balcony, they were looking as good as they were before I cut them.
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