Celebrate our female filled stories full of pansies, the pursuit of flowers & pastoral gardens.
A sunny Thursday read!
"It's that idea of active hope - you create hope by doing something positive in a world where there are so many challenges" - Donna Cox - Pastoral Gardens
This week is one of our favourites of the year sa siopa. Our gang of floristas get to make flowers that adorn events, gatherings, bringing togethers of so many terrifically talented tribes of women. The frisson of energy as everyone binds and twists such Spring arrivals is recognisable as you enter our store. We so enjoy that the privilege of all we mostly make in flowers this week helps womenfolk celebrate womenfolk.
Our store will be brimming with bunches, posies and nifty plant gifts for anyone needing an International Women’s Day gift. The night before & the day of March the 8th is always a good time to witness how so many recognise the amazingness of a woman be she a toddler to a grandmother. We hope the everyone enjoys their token of appreciation this weekend.
And now to our stories, all featuring females from the garden and flower world, all individually paving their pathways & teaching us all tricks along the way. Erin of Floret Flowers releases her new documentary series today where she interviews many flower farmers & opens our eyes. Then Clare Foster’s ‘Pastoral Gardens’ book has just arrived in stores & is so worth enjoying, absorbing, loving, as she along with breathtaking garden portraiture, brings forth the new ideas of how we should see our gardens. Amelia Stein has a Japanese Garden themed still photography show in the Oliver Sears Gallery & then Brenna Estrada illuminates our viewing points on pansies with her new book too.
We will have a great Sunday Floral Story this week too again with a female focus to stay on theme. Until then, as I know most of your lovely subscribers are wonderful women, wishing you the most wonderful day on Saturday, International Women’s Day, celebrating you. X Ruth
SOME FLOWER STORIES -
A gathering of all we spotted this week whilst working in our store of seasonal blooms :
IN A BEAUTIFUL PURSUIT - WE FIND OUT SO MUCH ABOUT FLOWER FARMERS WORLDWIDE
Erin Benzakein of Floret Flowers needs very little introduction. One of the most influencer flower farmer florists worldwide, Erin has contributed to creating floral design trends, popularised flower growing & farming. However, Erin is also a researcher and educator at heart and she has inspired so many growers and designers to build great flower-based businesses around the planet. Today marks the launch of a new 3-part documentary by Erin & director Rob Finch, called 'The Beautiful Pursuit'.
Starting with the simple question in 2024, to flower farmers 'What do you wish people knew', Erin surveyed thousands of this hardworking tribe, all with different and varying experience levels to see what themes emerged.
'The overwhelming response revealed a desire to tell the whole story of what it takes to be a flower farmer—the challenges alongside the triumphs, the grit alongside the beauty.
Inspired by their heartfelt sharing, we decided to explore the idea further and set out on a 10-month-long journey that ultimately led to the creation of a documentary series called The Beautiful Pursuit.'
From today, we will be able watch over 30 conversations with flower farmers from so many countries. This collaboration between Erin as flower farmer and Rob Finch as director brings forth the idea that growing is a calling within a career move that will be a rollercoaster of challenges, joys and wins.
As florists, we empathise as the physical demand of growing are discussed. The documentary is also brutally honest about the heartbreak when crops, infrastructure, livelihoods, are lost with weather events, how financial managing combined with the seasonal stress of running a farm can strain family & friend relationships.
Don't worry, it is not all gloom because these 3 episodes allow an authentic celebration of how joyful this career path can be as it teaches all to connect more deeply with nature & our environs as well as showing off how bloody brilliant it must be to seasonally work through the year cycle & be rewarded with beautiful blooms to make yourself and everyone they are intended for, delighted.
IN PASTORAL GARDENS - CLARE FOSTER HAS A BEAUTIFUL NEW BOOK
"It's that idea of active hope - you create hope by doing something positive in a world where there are so many challenges" - Donna Cox
Clare Foster has been the insightful garden editor on House & Garden magazine. She also has a Create Academy programme and one of my favourite Substacks subscriptions with her Bud to Seed publication where she shares so many tips and ideas for the ever trying gardener like all of us in work.
I just received her new groundbreaking book 'Pastoral Gardens' thorugh the door and thought it would be lovely to chat about. Firstly, it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever leafed through with over 250 exquisite photographs by Andrew Montgomery, wonderful interviews with over 20 gardeners and insightful essays by Jinny Blom, Nigel Dunnett, Kim Wilkie and Tom Stuart-Smith.
The pastoral garden is an intriguing contradiction. The word conjures up a rural idyll, with Hardyesque visions of a wild, untainted landscape - an idea that goes against the manicured expectation of formal or 'designed' green spaces. But our warming climate is propelling a monumental change in how we garden.
The premise of Pastoral Gardens is a contemporary one as Clare Foster documents and discussed how garden-makers are responding to our new reality of 'climate change' by filling spaces with plants to renew habitats and increase lost biodiversity. Brilliantly, she includes urban and country gardens, and examines how a pastoral garden can also describe a space for emotional well-being. I truly believe in her mantra :
"In the light of the environmental crisis, I truly believe that gardens have the power to be transformative on a global as well as a personal level, and as garden-makers we must understand that collectively we can make an impact to help repair our ravaged world. "
FIND CLARE FOSTER ON SUBSTACK - BUD TO SEED
FIND ‘PASTORAL GARDENS’ HERE IN HODGES FIGGIS
IN A KYOTO GARDEN - AMELIA STEIN MAKES US STOP TO THINK
A momentary stop happens when you see an Amelia Stein still drop into your inboxfrom an email from The Oliver Sears Gallery. The setting of 5 x white blossom blooms amidst a bamboo structure earthed with soil fascinated me as Japanese Gardens have fascinated this renowned, so talented photographer.
Amelia has an upcoming exhibtion in the gallery. She has curated eleven of her photographs as captures of structured forms with the constructed Temple Garden landscapes in Kyoto, Japan. From portraits of branches to styled sand encircles, Stein reimagines these landscape with light and dark. Each photograph is a meditation on the various forms of nature with the Gardens, the stillness and reverence conveyed.
These timeless images still you to stop. They are hanging peacefully in The Oliver Sears Gallery until March 30th.
IN PANSIES - BRENNA ESTRADA IS AN AMBASSADOR OF THIS UNDERRATED FLOWER
"Brenna Estrada's beautifully illustrated and photographed new book provides detailed information on cultivating pansies and inccorporating them into your garden. I especially enjoyed learning the history of this delightful flower and its popularity in the 19th century. This book will create a renewed enthusiasm for growing pansies and rightfully so." Frances Palmer, ceramic artist, author of Life in the Studio
Like Brenna Estrada of Three Brothers Blooms, I completely agree that pansies are an underappreciated or overlooked flower. Perhaps it is because like geraniums, they are the kind of flowering plant that always has been around. They were so beloved from Victorian times, their pretty faces were probably peering up at you in your granny's house. Then sadly, now they tend to sit on desolate trolleys outside hardware stores and supermarkets without care or consideration to their beauty. As florists, upto now, we have been unable to use pansies or violas in our cut flower work as they are too short. I have to say pansies provide such petite glimmery joys when you arrive to your front door and need someone else apart from your dog to say hi to you.
Enter Brenna, who has a flower farm on Camano Island, in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and 3 boys who is about to show us all how to grow longer pansies hence alerting possibilities that after so long, we could have a new ingredient to add into our floral mixes. She has worked on her book 'Pansies' for over 4 years and it will launch this week around the world. Inspired by the pansies grown at Floret Farm when she worked there, she started to trial hundreds of pansies and violas. Her innovative experience with this previously ignored blooms is that she has succeeded in growing long stemmed pansies with wonderful fragrance and new colours.
'There's this whole huge audience and this movement of growers and florists that have entirely different desires for Pansies than what they see at the hardware stores, and the seed breeders need to be paying attention. There are four or five varieties now in my book that were my favorites that are being discontinued this year, and I'm hoping that we can kind of halt that and reverse it with enough attention. ' - Brenna Estrada
Brenna, called the Ambassador of Overlooked Flowers by her publisher really shows us to grow and be enchanted by these showstopping flowers. Her mission is that more pansy seeds become more available in different colours and textures and she really is urging growers who specialise in hybridising to experiment so new beautiful varieties of pansies evolve past the lost Victorian plants. This book is not only for growers but Brenna has included so many pansy stories and such a great curation of flowermaking ideas with said pretty pansies.
"The beauty of a cloud or flower lies in the it's unconscious unfolding of itself - Kakuzo Okakuro - 'Extracts from Ideals of the East'
In cultivating, studying, researching and growing pansies, Brenna has actually brought a new cut flower that could be adopted by both flower farmers and and growers too. She embraces the pansy whimsy, textures, reliability and effortless cheery nature. House & Garden magazine are calling 2025, 'The Year of the Pansy' and I for one am here for it. I have pre-ordered this wonderful sounding tome and I can't wait to progress my pansies so that they can sit sturdily in my favourite vase at home.
FIND PANSIES ON THREE BROTHERS BLOOMS
FIND PANSIES IN AN IRISH BOOKSHOP
IN WALKS WITH ELLA
I know that I have mentioned this podcast before but I have to say it is so insightful Gwendoline Christie was actually the most fascinating soul and so open with her thoughts. This week it is Haider Ackermann before he shows his Tom Ford show in Paris which is so exciting in the fashion, design, inspiration arena. I am hooked on this show Bella Freud.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK FRIENDS - OUR WEEKLY GLIMMER:
"Everything you do in making a garden should be a containment of the heart' - The Venerable Myoko-Ni - Extract from The Japanese Garden