High Summer Flowers

The favourite flowers of the high summer English garden are all here now:  pillowy roses, scented sweet peas, trumpet lilies, lavender, late foxgloves, early yarrow...  The garden is poised on the point of overflowing - have we enough hands to pick it all?

Last week, besides our orders for florists, we provided flowers for two perfect Flower Garden weddings.  Holly and Dave bought buckets of richly coloured, meadow-like flowers with sumptuous old garden roses (Charles de Mills featured strongly), and asked us to make up a loose, merry, tendrilly, colourful bouquet for Holly to carry.  Beth and James had a cooler, lighter palette of lemon, yellow, blue, white and mauve, still with a roses-and-meadow-flowers feel.  We picked alliums, toadflax, roses (The Pilgrim and Claire Austin were perfect), campanula, euphorbia and oodles of love-in-a-mist, and filled churns, jars and bottles with the pretty airy flowers.  Beth's bouquet was as neat and demure as we could manage with our slightly wild style: a rounded posy of dainty, delicate prettiness.