As Henry rattled off with his trolley for collecting leaves this morning, taking the dog out…

After a wet dash around the garden to pick flowers on Friday morning, it was the perfect day for putting on the kettle and the radio, and settling down with some bulb catalogues.

The blankety mist this morning, followed by rich golden sunshine lighting up the fallen apples in the orchard and picking out the white sheep on the hills, is powerfully autumnal.

What fun last week to fill the bothy up with buckets of  interesting things from the garden…

The leaves are beginning to turn golden and we feel the change of season in the garden, but we have still been picking buckets and buckets of flowers.

It's taken me a long time to feel confident enough to use things like fully blown roses and things going to seed in our floristry, even though I've often used mature seed heads…

For a wedding in Wales this week we created foamy, frothy flowers in soft shades of pink and cream, with generous foliages in the form of fronds and tendrils.

We are always learning things about ourselves. I used to think that I didn't like making flower crowns, but it turns out that I just don't like not being able to make nice ones…

Along with zinnias and the brightly coloured dahlias, another flower which seems to be positively thriving in this heat is the sunflower.

The backbone of our business has become flower deliveries, in water, to other discerning florists.

The continued heat and drought slowly stifles the garden with an air of languorous, heavy-lidded romance…

These weeks of endless sunshine have had the interesting effect of bleaching the flowers of some of our longer flowering varieties…

It was difficult to choose what to write about this week…

For the last two weeks the delphinium bed has been working very hard, throwing up huge spires of blue and white flowers…

There is a huge, spilling abundance of roses in the flower garden just now, perfect for picking for our six June brides to make romantic, richly scented bouquets and other arrangements.

This has been an exceptional week for foxgloves. Although there are many drawbacks to growing flowers for cutting on a garden scale, rather than farming them…

There is a wonderful feeling in the garden of impending abundance…

The last month of fabulous sunshine followed by the last few days of magnificent rain have meant that the garden has put on a huge growth spurt over the weekend…

Alliums abound this week…

It wasn't really a floristry class, more an opportunity for eight women to get to know each other better over coffee, cake, and a sun-flooded flower garden.