Learning a trick or two in the art of arranging
If anyone is thinking of popping round for dinner at my house, I’m warning you now that it will have to be a tray on your knee.
No meals can be served on my dining room table until I remove all the seed packets strewn there.
Deciding what flowers to grow is one of life’s pleasurable dilemmas and I like to take my time at the planning stage, working out colour combinations and foliage patterns.
I’ve been growing flowers since I was knee high to a daisy, but when it comes to arranging them I’ve never graduated from simply cutting the stems and plonking them in a vase.
Or I hadn’t until I met Emilia Robledo. She runs the Narcissus Flower School in Edinburgh and spending the morning in her studio was my idea of floral heaven. For a start it smelt divine, a zingy blend of fresh foliage and perfumed blossom, and the deep buckets were overflowing with gorgeous blooms of every kind.
Emilia, who was an illustrator before becoming a florist, specialises in teaching people like me who love growing their own flowers and want to do more with them than just the usual snip and dunk. She has the knack of making tricky things look easy and, under her tuition, I found that I too could make something lovely.
As we worked to create beautiful hand-tied bouquets, we chatted about what makes a great arrangement.
“It’s about using lots of lovely foliage and seasonal flowers,” said Emilia.
“People want to create that sense of bringing the garden indoors, so they don’t want arrangements that are stiff and formal.” To do this, Emilia showed me how to add every stem at a slight angle to the one beneath it and to work my way around the bouquet so that the finished article had a twist in its stems.
“That way there is a little bit of bounce to it and the flowers aren’t held so tight that they can’t move.”
Foliage is a vital ingredient of any arrangement and Emilia has no doubts about her favourite.
“I just love eucalyptus, we use it with everything.”
You can grow this easily at home. And, by cutting down the trunk to ground level every couple of years, you will have a constant supply of the young leaves and your tree will never get out of hand.
To keep arrangements looking good for as long as possible, Emilia recommends adding a drop of bleach to the water in the vase and she is a stickler for changing the water daily.
“A build-up of bacteria will prevent the flowers from taking up water and that’s how they die,” she said.
Back home I took Emilia’s advice and my bouquet lasted for 10 days. Now I can’t wait for this year’s harvest to be ready for picking because, armed with my new skills, I’m itching to create something amazing.