The Flower Appreciation Society will be decking our Marylebone shop with flowers for its re-launch this Thursday. In their final dispatch before the main event, Ellie and Anna present their brief guide to edible flowers. Be sure to try violas, pansies, primroses (great sugared and used to decorate cakes), borage (an excellent addition to cocktails), and nasturtiums (brilliant in salads).
This week, The Flower Appreciation Society provide us with their top tips for superior flower arranging. Ellie and Anna will be decking our Marylebone shop with flowers for its re-launch on March 21st. As a prelude to this, the girls will be featuring here regularly. Next week: The Flower Appreciation Society’s guide to edible flowers, complete with Easter recipes.
Remove dead flowers as they appear, in order to keep the rest of the flowers healthy.
When using woody stemmed flowers or foliage, cut directly up the stem to allow more water to travel to the heads.
The Flower Appreciation Society celebrate all things wild, floral and English. We asked founders and friends Ellie Jauncey and Anna Day a few questions and found out about their love of lilac and passion for poppies. The girls will be decking our Marylebone shop with flowers for its re-launch in March. As a prelude to this, Anna and Ellie will be featuring here regularly. Next week: The Flower Appreciation Society’s guide to flower arranging.
The flower you most relate to?
Ellie – All flowers, my middle name is Fleur… it makes sense.
Anna – red poppies.
You can’t wait for…
… the day we can buy a smart van.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given?
Appreciate…
The Flower Appreciation Society are not your average florists. Founders Anna Day and Ellie Jauncey met at the Scolt Head pub in North London two years ago. Ellie had spent the summer helping her mother, also a florist, with orders for wedding flowers, and Anna had just completed a (very uninspiring) year-long floristry course. They were both bored by the endless tweaking and prinking of professional floristry and instead bonded over a love of fresh, English flowers, arranged in a freer, more natural way…
Jon Day.
To Southwold in Suffolk, where the long sandy beaches with their abrupt drop offs provide good conditions for sea angling. The mackerel and bass will be moving on by now: autumn is the time for flatfish.
We rig up our long beachcasting rods on a beach to the south of the pier, near the centre of town. Though tempted by the cove to the north labelled ‘Sole Bay’ on our maps, the wizened bait-shop owner who sells us our ragworm baits tells us that the commercial fishermen have moved in, and there aren’t many sole left there. He’s a friendly, patient man; happy to answer our questions while his friends, a group of Jehovah’s witnesses, stand by. He taps his scriptures while we um and ah over weights and rigs. He is a fisher of men, but doesn’t try to convert us…
Jo Lennan.
As hikers go, I am more your fairweather sort. I like to lounge and idle. Give me a pack and I’ll stuff it with books, venison pie and a bottle of Marlborough port. I prefer a certain style of hike: a run of days, a couple of friends and a stunner of a track. The point is the simplicity of walking, the single path when you’ve set off. It’s become a summer fixture, a way to mark the season and contemplate existence. In my case this time round, it also comes ahead of a milestone birthday, the kind that looms like an accusation, like I ought to have done more with my dilettante years to date.
Which brings us to the Milford Track in New Zealand’s Fiordland. Or, more precisely, a boat is what brings us to it, a tidy little ferry whose barometer sits on ‘Fair’. This atmospheric indication bodes well for what’s ahead, a 54 kilometre trail through glacier-carved valleys to the coast of the Tasman Sea. Though it is sometimes described as the finest walk in the world, this means the scenery, not the weather, because Fiordland is notoriously rainy…
If you were tempted or intrigued by our post last October about Joanna Osborne and Sally Muir’s instructive book on how to knit yourself a pet dog, Best In Show, but found yourself daunted by the level of knitting skill required, then you’re in luck… On Friday 12th and Saturday 13th October Joanna and Sally will be holding a two-day dog-knitting workshop at the V&A to celebrate the launch of a third book in their Best In Show series. Bring along a photograph of your own dog and they will instruct and guide you in how to replicate him or her in miniature. They’re both brilliant company too!
Find out more about the workshop on the V&A website here. Learn more about Joanna and Sally here.
Jon Day finds a taste for wild country food.
There is a cottage in the South Downs with a small valley of a garden, sunk below the brows of the surrounding hills. It is right on the wood-pigeon flight path – at dawn and dusk hundreds of birds cruise along the tree line, finding or leaving their roosts in the dense copse behind the orchard at the bottom of the garden; taking off with an explosive rattle of leaves and branches, landing with a series of exhausted coos. In the undergrowth, lords-and-ladies stand proud like fluorescent orange hand grenades jutting through the leaf-litter, startling and incongruous. Behind the copse is a field, and in the field a dynasty of rabbits dig the ground to pieces. The farmer who owns this land is always happy for someone to take a few for the pot…
‘Build a boat from a city’s waste, take it to the source of the city’s river – the river without which the city would not exist – and row the boat back.’ This is the Hudson River Project, a film (and enterprise) by Antony Crook and James Bowthorpe that intends to connect, to join the city with the natural world from which it came. Why should the two be seen as separate?
To learn more, and to help fund the film, visit the Hudson River Project website.
The lengthening evenings and prospect of a long Easter weekend leave us unable to think of much else at present than getting out of town and out of doors. There is something about the changing of the clocks, the moving so consciously from one season to another, that re-focuses attention on the world around us. It’s as though the new, expanding light gently makes us aware again of our place in the larger world, shows us what we’ve been doing that is unnecessary and reminds us that the best work is that done with modesty, without distraction and with singular intention. While we re-orient ourselves in this way, here are some other people and things whose simplicity of focus we admire…
