This quote sums up my relationships with floristry. I even feel strange calling it floristry, that feels like what people in florist’s shops do. Floral design? So pretentious. Flower arranging? What my Grandma T did in the 80’s. Do we even have a word for putting flowers in a vessel and bringing them in the house and photographing them in a way that makes people on instagram’s hearts do a little leap? Because that’s what I’m aiming for. I digress. The quote.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

I’ll be honest with you. I stopped fighting. I didn’t have the time to go through the process of being disappointed, and last week, I posted something on Instagram. It was something that has been sitting uncomfortably with me for a while and I was glad to get it out into the open. But more than that, it marks a turn. I am ready to start closing the gap between my taste and my flowers.

I have a rather shifty little secret. I am actually not a very good florist. See how my feed is all dramatically under-exposed single stems or flowers on plants? That's because whatever floral design skills I managed to summon up a few years ago (and I have done all the courses but I am absolutely not a natural...) have rusted away to nothing under the pressure of packing seeds, weeding, learning how to get a camera off aperture priority, and then how to get it back on again. I've got a row of buckets of five foot cosmos plants in the courtyard and they are never going to make it into the house, let alone a hand-thrown footed bowl. But I miss it. I really do. I look at elegant bowls of arresting colour combinations, the oversized urns, even the cloud installations, and feel like life has left me behind. I promised myself that one day, I would get back to it, and truly learn the creative art of making chopped off bits of plants look gorgeous. But there is no time like the present. Under the guise of spreading knowledge and skill to the members of Gather with Grace Alexander, I am going to hang on the every word of one of the best florists there is, India Hurst of Vervain. (We are inspired by all the same people and so her style is essentially everything I aspire to.) We are going to make films, and how to's, and photo guides, and little elegantly shot video clips in her jaw-droppingly beautiful barn, and collaborative Zoom arrangements where she tells me what I am doing wrong.

Here are some pictures from my first visit. I cannot tell you how beautiful it is.