Country House Flowers

What fun last week to fill the bothy up with buckets of  interesting things from the garden - Chinese lanterns, great  long boughs of climbing roses, a jumble of feathery old man's beard, fuzzy peach chrysanthemums, fleshy  fragrant tomato stems, brilliant blue late delphiniums, the papery puffs of pink-turning hydrangea - with no especial colour theme, and then to transport them all to the splendours of Millichope Hall, for decorating a golden wedding anniversary party.  We loved suiting the floral displays to the magnificent decoration of each room; pink roses and silvery seed-heads in the magical Chinese-papered music room, and towering slices of the garden on two monstrous heavily gilded and marble-topped tables.  The scale of everything was so enjoyably big, and it was wonderful to be celebrating the other end of a marriage for a change: fifty years of adventures, just what our wedding couples are looking forward to together.