FLORET FARM’S A YEAR IN FLOWERS

Chronicle Books, £21.99 ISBN 978-1452172897

A book that persuades you that anyone who loves flowers can succeed in making beautiful, seasonal, sustainable arrangements – and enjoy it.

Reviewer Ambra Edwards is a garden writer.

How I wish I’d had this book last summer, when I was faced with 130 arrangements to make for my daughter’s wedding. The bride was adamant that she didn’t want stiff, blingy commercial flowers produced in developing countries at hideous environmental cost, but graceful, informal arrangements of fresh garden flowers, fitting for an English country wedding. But how to achieve it? (Flower arranging must surely have been one of the arts you learned at finishing school, along with how to address a dinner invitation to the Archbishop of Canterbury.) If only we’d known about flower farmer Erin Benzakein…

Reading A Year in Flowers is like being taken by the hand by a very patient, very thorough, very smiley teacher. First she sets out the basics – the equipment you’ll need: tools, tapes, flower supports and vases. Then she comes on to flowers. She too loathes the characterless blooms bred to travel half way round the world without water. ‘Flowers are just like food’, she writes, ‘the best results always come from using local, seasonal ingredients picked at their prime.’ Imperfection and irregularity only add to their beauty.

She explains how to condition flowers, helpfully dividing material into ‘wimpy’, ‘woody’, ‘sappy’ and ‘dirty’. And now comes the hard bit – putting arrangements together. Except it isn’t hard at all, she insists: every arrangement requires just six fundamental ingredients, and once you’ve grasped this, you can do more or less anything – bouquets, centrepieces, posies, even floral crowns – as she illustrates with a range of seasonal examples.

The book is written in American, so English readers may be temporarily baffled by plant names such as winebark, honeywort or apple of Peru. Happily, most of these plants reappear, with their botanical names and larger pictures, in the helpful A-Z at the end of the book. Beautifully photographed, practical and succinct – give this book to every bride

(and her mother).