Notes From The Field - June

I’ve been writing to you in my head all season. We’ve been so busy that there’s not been a moment to get it all scribbled down and ready to press send. A cold, wet spring was tough on a lot of our crop, and yet we had the best narcissus we’d ever had that flowered and flowered for florists and our own events for what felt like months. It’s been, as always, a time of ups and downs, wins and sorrows.

We’ve enjoyed cutting and suppling for others more that I ever imagined we would, and our ALMA|PROUST florist list is still growing rapidly. It’s utterly joyful working a colour palette, choosing the juiciest stems and arranging them in a bucket, with none of the extra work of clients, emails, and endless flower transport logistics. The new field is far behind the established cutting garden here at HQ, so we’ve been cutting extensively from both, stretching ourselves across the two sites on a fairly daily basis. We’ve not nailed this tandem site situation yet, but learning plenty as we go.

We’ve been harvesting and selling our blooms to ourselves too for a myriad of lovely events. Some of the highlights from May include filling the celebrated restaurant Cycene with boughs, meadows, and daisies pushing their way through rocks to celebrate Beltane with spring at its peak and summer arriving. We flowered a beautiful makers dinner for ABASK at Jikoni in Mayfair. And created tiny little mountain-scapes celebrating the wild flowers of the Alps for St. Moritz in collaboration with Gianluca Longo of The World of Interiors.

We’ve spent a lot of time in traffic this last month, chatting and laughing and thinking up more details for the some of the briefs we’ve been given. We whittled down the sweet pea varieties for this Autumn’s seed shop whilst navigating Piccadilly Circus, crop rotations were discussed down winding country lanes, and Paris now knows who my questionable celebrity crushes are after a slow crawl through Old Street traffic- long car journeys with flowers as our cargo it seems, is where we get most of our admin done.

installation for Cycene

Now summer, and the sweet peas and the roses are here. Sweet peas are Paris’ favourite, Roses are mine, so this really is our time. Some sheep arrived to keep the meadow grasses down and the soundscape we work too has benefitted from the bleating of the lambs who are rapidly growing by the day. The heat is blowing everything open fast, the time of abundance really is back, but it’s hard to keep up with tasks at this time of year. We get to work amongst the flowers though- so in June, there’s no greater job in the world.

Croissant flowers for abask