The Garden Gate Flower Company rose bowl
A huge thank you to Becca for this incredibly generous and really terribly useful demo. I enjoyed watching it so much, and enjoyed putting an unusually dramatic backdrop to my roses almost even more. Yes, we both went for unseasonably dark foliage, and I think it looks stunning.
The video is half an hour long, and it is absolutely jam packed with beauty and all of Becca’s considerable experience. I strongly recommend you sneak off to a quiet place and just absorb.
It does make a huge difference to cut your roses a little bit in advance and to let them sit and drink. Inspired by Becca’s rose bowl with a hint of autumn, I wandered around the field and cut everything and anything with even a hint of red in. I’m not talking red flowers (because that would only be corn poppies, and we all know they don’t last) but the red foliage of the Daucus carota. Gillenia trifoliata with its frothy flowers and russet stems. The crazy blueish purple of the Rosa glauca. In honour of the occasion, I cut a bit of my very scarce copper beech. I really should have planted more.
For me, the very first flush of roses is over, and I have dead-headed everything I can reach. (Feed now if this is also the case for you.) However, a little bit of rummaging and a very generous Jude the Obscure meant that I had fifteen or so stems to add to my bowl. Florists so rarely give recipes for their creations and I can understand why but it really does make a difference when you are trying to understand how they make designs look so beautiful. I left all the flower in jars of water to let the pollen beetles fly out of the window and to have a bit of a rest.
Becca’s flexible chicken wire looked perfect, but I don’t have any so I used the copper square mesh scrunched up a bit. An excellent tip from Becca to make sure that the wire comes up proud of the lip of the bowl so you can poke in flowers horizontally and well as slotting them in top down.
Ok, so here we go. Step by step.
Pick your bowl. I have the beautiful Magnificent Mud bowl that Milli Proust sent me and I was very keen to use it but observing Becca’s rule of thirds, the finished arrangement would have to be tiny and all the roses crammed in. I have a lovely fruit bowl made in Helston that looks suspiciously similar to Becca’s lovely rounded bowl (I am screwing up the courage to ask her where she gets all her ceramics from, head over to her Instagram highlights and find her studio tour; I have significant envy.) I think my fruit bowl is too big and, even if it wasn’t, I keep apples in it so I have emptied all the eggs out of my Lucy Rutter mixing bowl and I am going to use that.
Screw up some chicken wire. If you don’t have chicken wire, Shane Connolly swears by some screwed up birch branches, although chicken wire doesn’t shift about as much in my experience. Tape it into the bowl. Pour water in, being careful to not let the tape get wet.
Get your most branchy, woody bits. Strip the stems so that there won’t be any foliage in the water. Going around the edges, make the frame that fits the space where you will put it. As Becca says, a windowsill or side table can be big and long with the odd sweeping bit going up into the air. If you put this in the middle of a dinner table, you won’t be able to have a conversation with the person opposite. The first three ones should be the biggest and woodiest. (measure out the golden ratio if you fancy it, but a general policy of one long up, one medium across, and one shorter down is a good policy.) This is what I used the beech for, and then filled in between with more beech and some filler foliage (the Daucus carota leaves and the Rose glauca).
Tuck in the roses. Some forward facing, some tucked in, some showing their back. Don’t neglect the rear of your bowl, even if you can’t see much of the flowers; adding a bit of depth will make all the difference. At this point, you will realise that the combination of rose thorns and chicken wire is a bit of a pain. Strip your thorns off with snips otherwise you will put the whole arrangement out every time you try and move a stem.
Add your textural elements and wispy gestures. I don’t have any violas (except the tiny tricolor ones and they’d be swamped) so I went for some Daucus carota ‘Dara’ flowers, some sanguisorba and the odd pink aquilegia. Oh and some side shoots of the Digitalis mertonensis… Even the side shoots were a bit linear and strong, but the colour. I avoided pink in the roses because I think the softer, warm colours go with the beech better, but I couldn’t resist these. Talking of colour, I tried a pop of blue from my palest nigella. Not entirely sure it worked, but I was proud of myself for trying,
Don’t forget to top up the water and put the creation somewhere out of direct sunlight. Roses don’t last forever so make the most of them before they elegantly shatter all over the kitchen table.