What to buy the gardener in your life on Mothering Sunday

This is very far from the average post from me, but it was heard said during the week that I am difficult to buy gifts for and once that had been dug into a little, ( no apologies for the garden puns) what it actually meant was, I have no clue what you might want because it's a mile away from my comfort zone. So here goes.

A glorious bouquet of British grown blooms, that are not difficult to source as long as you are aware of where to look! Both Flowers From The Farm and the British Flower Collective websites will send you in the right direction.

A plant. Not rocket science but us garden folk love our plants and this is the time of year to get our there and start looking at any new purchases. I am very good at leaving the David Austen catalogue open at the page with my newest desire on, but in reality just ask what they might like! And then pop onto the Independent Plant Nursery Guide to find your local nursery that stocks said plant. Easy!!

A gift voucher. There are always things we look at longingly but would never buy ourselves and gift vouchers always make me splash out on things I want rather than what I feel I need. National Garden Gift Vouchers are accepted at a huge variety of garden centres, nurseries and garden shops, or if you know the gardener in your life to be particularly fond of a certain online garden store, buy those! Crocus, Sarah Raven, Chiltern Seeds to name a few offer vouchers but there are many, many more who do.

A Gardening Course. Whether it's Flower Farming for Beginners at Common Farm Flowers, or a day with Charles Dowding, lots and lots and lots of people are now offering amazing days where you not only learn loads but also have a thoroughly amazing time in the process!! You could even send them to us at Incredible Edible Bristol!!

Books and Magazine Subscriptions. I can't even begin to suggest books or we will be here for an age, but great gardening books appear all the time. If you aren't sure about what she has, or are pretty sure she has what she wants, look at a magazine subscription. Often as a subscriber you get special offers so if you know a certain publication gets flung into the shopping trolley monthly, order her that! There are also a fair few independent magazines now, such as Rakes Progress, that are only available in specialist shops, so that's a great alternative to the mainstream magazines.

A Promise.......What most of us want is to spend time with our children, be they 5 or 45. Time is our most precious gift, and in our busy lives we often forget that. So particularly if you are an adult child, the promise of a day out in the summer to a garden of your choice is a gift that no money can buy. Whether you choose a local garden opening for the NGS or a big garden belonging to the National Trust or similar, spending time in a garden with the people you love cannot be beaten.

For some Mothering Sunday is a difficult time. Difficult family dynamics, loss and more can mean for many what is meant to be a glorious day celebrating motherhood, is one of sadness and despair. If you know someone who you might just suspect is in this group, engage them in your day if you can. Maybe get them into a garden, give them some time, a hug, a cuppa. Mothering Sunday is as much about kindness as anything else and no amount of gifts will ever make up for that kindness, whether it's from your own children, friends or others. Never underestimate it!!

And as a quick FYI no one has paid me to advertise their wares here, and other gifts are available!!

Robbing the Flower Fields.....

Flowers. No matter who you are it's impossible to be unresponsive to the beauty of a flower, and to be able to combine flowers and food is an extraordinary phenomenon that can lead to a really emotional connection with what it is being eaten. Part of my and Incredible Edible Bristol's remit, if you like, is creating both beautiful and productive spaces across the city of Bristol, and use of edible flowers is vital to meeting that. So imagine my delight when I was asked, with Incredible Edible Bristol, to put together two small raised beds in the new Grow Zone at RHS Malvern; one that speaks of the city centre Urban Food Trail and one that supports the more beautiful side of what we do, in showing beautiful blooms that we use, either as edible flowers or to attract pollinators, and all of which are British grown.

So fast forward a few weeks and I had a chat with Jan Billington of Maddocks Farm Organics who grows the most stunning array of edible flowers, some which are instantly recognisable as such but some which are a surprise, such as Wisteria which tastes like peas, who said she was more than happy for me to pop along and raid her flower fields. Well that is not an every day offer now is it folks, so yesterday, with our amazing volunteer coordinator Hannah, off we doodled to have a look.
Now I am a long time fan of Jan. Anyone who creates an organic flower farm on overgrown Devon fields, and grows not just a huge range of edible flowers but also looks after the land and the soil to high organic principles, is inevitably going to be a hero. And oh my.......when I say the farm is beautiful what I mean is the farm is heart rendingly beautiful. Not only are all the plants stunning, healthy and pest free, but the farm is buzzing with life. We saw three different species if bees in one polytunnel alone. Swallows were swooping and buzzards flying. A gigantic bug hotel sits by a pond teaming with life. Swathes of plants are there for pollinators alone. And of course by supporting those pollinators, Jan is supporting the blossoming and blooming of the flowers that make her business sustainable both for people and planet.

Often we see edible flowers as a by product. We might grow Tagetes for example as companion planting and then pick a few flowers to zing up a salad. We might grow Borage for the bees and then fling a few flowers into a salad or a gin and tonic. We all grow violas as part of bedding or hanging basket schemes. Our Wisterias are dripping in glorious flower. But instead of looking at these flowers as incidental perhaps we should begin to look at them as a great way of bringing beauty into the vegetable garden and treating them as a really important part of our salad offering. A salad with mustards, sweet cicely and chervil leaves and flowers, borage flowers, calendula petals, violas and primroses, wild rocket with its flowers attached and bells blooms, is far more exciting than a sad bit of iceberg, and tastes amazing, with different bursts of flavour appearing with each mouthful. Plus of course the more flowers we grow, the more pollinators we attract.

So perhaps let's take inspiration from Jan and l add beauty to our veg patches with more flowers that we grow to eat whilst marvelling at Jan at Maddocks Farm and the many ways we see people farming beautiful British flowers.

Alliums just beginning to open ready for use.

Beautiful calendulas flooring their socks off in the polytunnels and making a grey day bright.

White borage, sweet and full of nectar as well as being covered with bees, which annoyingly weren't in the mood for posing!

Jan grows an amazing array of tulips, and the petals are used to adorn wedding cakes amongst other things.

Two to three inches of local, organic manure is spread on the beds each year, feeding the flora and fauna in the soil that are vital for good organic growth.

British Flowers-the 2017 edition!!

Flowers. 

What does that word mean to you?

A birthday present to myself or a lovely friend. A gift. A treat. A piece of beautiful decadence. 

 

And for me that means buying those beautiful blooms from a trusted source, be that through a trusted online shop such as that at Common Farm Flowers, who grow glorious blooms and post them all across the UK, or my local, independent florist, The Mighty Quinn's Flower Emporium in Bristol's Wapping Wharfe, or any of the other places I buy from.

Today I bought my daughter early daffodils from a farm shop in Cornwall from where I could see the fields where they were picked and where the lady wrapped them with love, talking with genuine concern for her blooms in the storms arriving over the weekend. 

 

All these places, and many, many others across the country, grow or buy their blooms with the deepest respect for the land on which they grow, the people who do the growing and the blooms themselves, and this is why I urge you to make a commitment to try to buy British flowers when and where you can!

In years gone by our cut flower industry thrived, and our magnificent flower farmers are today working hard to replicate that success with small flower farms popping up across the land, often growing flowers that are rare to most florists as they travel poorly. Dahlias, Ammi, Foxgloves, Cerinthe and more, growing in huge varieties of colour and form, with little and generally no chemical intervention, proving that British grown cut flowers are not just good but are great. 

 

So before you rush to your local floristry franchise and buy out of season flowers that are generally covered in chemicals and flown in from Africa or South America, take a few minutes to find your nearest flower farmer and  find out how they sell their flowers and make an effort to buy from them! From ranunculus to anemones, daffs to tulips and more, you'll get a beautiful bouquet that has supported an industry that is truly fighting to be the Phoenix from the ashes. 

If you need help to find a nearby British flowers supplier, look at www.flowersfromthefarm.co.uk

For stunning mail order flowers look at

www.commonfarmflowers.com