It's nearly Imbolc, here's our this week floral stories we hope bring Spring sooner...
Your Thursday morning avec coffee read!
Today is the final day of Winter & we can only whoop with joy. For tomorrow arrives Imbolc, the annunciation of Spring & we say Lá Fhéile Bríde/ Happy Saint Brigid’s Day. Personally, we are manifesting Brigid’s power to bring light and bright & so many Spring blooms back into season. Snowdrops are appearing in nooks and crannies around us & sure the festivals will all be focused on in our Sunday Flower School this week - I also will be showing how to create a beautiful Pot-et-Fleur & currently have my own snowdrop plants in our kitchen urging them to bloom to show you their marvels this weekend. Fingers crossed they pop!
In other Appassionata news …
You are the first to see our new siopa display as we made it - Ultan put our morning of making in motion … Oh, and what fun Veronika & I had dressing the display in readiness for the day beginning with V that we cannot talk about … yet!
What a joy it is for us to create weekly flowers for Chapter One and what luck to eat there this month to celebrate a table of friends turning fifty. A million thanks to all of the team there for the evening of welcome, wondrous food & settings we enjoyed.
And then instore, we are delighted that we danced with bright blooms for our bunches using poppies, anemones, muscari, broom & as many scented ingredients to give joy to all who receive.
This week
There’s an eccentric mix of floral stories : a beautiful dress of nettles woven through love & grief, ceramic gingko looms chinkling, filling you in on a major flower event because Putricia just bloomed in Sydney, Martha shows us how a daffodil drift is done & Pharrell brings Azuma Makoto to make Louis Vuitton luggage of floral dreams.
And let us know if you would like anything featured or if you already have a favourite flower story. It is always lovely to hear from you. Hope you enjoy this morning’s coffee read. Ruth X
SOME FLOWER STORIES -
A gathering of all we spotted this week whilst working in our store of seasonal blooms :
IN NETTLES - AN ENCHANTING FILM ABOUT SOULFUL HEDGEROW COUTURE
“Though we viewers can’t touch the plants, thread, or textile, the film delvieres a sensory feast. We breathe in the beautify of the nettles in the woods and can almost feel the fabric’s gentle fibrous embrace” - Céire Kealty - Image Journal
With our soon immersion in the Imbolc light & inspiration by St. Brigid for all she said and did - this film 'The Nettle Dress' arrived in my world too. Yvette, my sister had mentioned that Allan Brown who created a dress from nettles would be taking part in the Belfast Exposed exhibition alongside Helen & Charlie of Mallon Linen, I had to dig deeper.
No, this is not a creation of long nettles sculpted into a skirt in a flower show dressmaking competition ... but more of a journey into 'hedgerow couture' documented in an enchanting film by Allan's friend Dylan Howitt. Allan's wife, Alex, Mum to their four children died at 45 from cancer. This film shows how Allan spun & wove his way through years of tragedy, magic and love as Alex passed, his daughters grew up, he evolved a simpler sustainable life, this film will feed your soul.
'There is slow fashion – the movement to buy better, fewer things, make do and mend – and then there is textile artist Allan Brown’s dress, made from stinging nettles From start to finish it took him seven years: foraging plants, spinning the yarn, weaving the nettle fabric on a loom, before finally sewing his design. This gentle, reflective documentary quietly observes the process, becoming painfully poignant when Brown’s wife, Alex, mum to their four kids, is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 45. The slow process of spinning and weaving becomes his “medicine”. - The Guardian
As Brown points out, stinging nettles are one of the few plants that everyone can identify: childhood tormentors that grow with malicious intent in places where kids are likely to stumble. “They’ve got a fuck you attitude,” Brown says with a smile while out foraging with his golden retriever Bonnie in Sussex woodland.'
Allan created over 4,000 of thread and spun the fabric dress by hand. It is modelled by his daugher Oonagh. Spinning, soaking, retting, combing, weaving - communities from fairy tale brothers in Hans Christian Andersen's 'Wild Swans' to peasant's work clothes to special saints like Brigid all wore clothes of nettle before cotton came into their lives.
He says, “Making clothing this way is slow and gentle. It means returning to the same places and doing the same things over and over. The repetitiveness of so many of the tasks that go into creating cloth feels like a deepening rather than drudgery. It’s as if the cloth is ensouled by intention. Clothing that is being made this way, specifically for you, by people that know and love you, from fibers that are to be found in your own landscape, is the way clothing has been made for most of our history. We were collectively wearing the dreams, stories, joys, and suffering of the people that made up our community.”
Find Allan Brown at Belfast Exposed here
IN A GINGKO LOOM - WE LISTEN TO CHARM
Gosh, Anastasia Tumanova has given such glittering glimmering sounds with her latest gingko loom. Based in San Francisco, Anastasia is a Russian-American artist who created epheremal explorations of nature through ceramics.
Inspired by the shapes of leaves, flowers, sees, buds, berries, her murals capture nature's spirit & bring the outdoors inside a home. Russian by birth, this ceramic artist is influenced by traditional Russian arts and you can find her work in museums, Google HQ and more as well as many happy houses who get to listen to her pieces chime as air moves around.
This particular loom, intended for a baby bedroom follows the transition of the gingko leaf through the seasons from green to yellow. How mindful it must be to meander around listening to such clinks of delicate charm.
Discover Anastasia's work here
IN PUTRICIA WE FAINT - A CORPSE FLOWER BLOOMS AFTER 15 YEARS
Have you heard about Putricia ... The Corpse Flower ... The Botanic Gardens of Sydney 'It' Girl and she's a plant not the stripper Chris De Burgh sang about on a tape when I was 10! What am I saying, you say...well thousands of Sydneysiders have queued for hours to see this 5 foot flower bloom in all her glory and so many botanical folk are excited beyond regular bloom joy. It's the first time that this large Sumatra born Arum, (Amorphophallus titanum for you Latinate scholars out there) has bloomed in Sydney in over 15 years and her flowering, unfurling, intensive stinking has been watched by millions on livestream, TikTok, newschannels since her core temperature rose to a relevant height to fully bloom. Putricia is a major life event!
With a name derived from the Ancient Greek for “giant misshapen penis"!, this endangered species of plant is one of only 1,000 left in the world. The chief botanist claimed that then she would soon show off her crimson velvet insides & fully fill the air with her rotting flesh fragrance & people came from everywhere to see, smell but not touch.
Putricia was placed in the Palm House on a raised stage with a medieval-styled sign "Putricia The Corpse Flower, a red carpet before her lined with a guard of honour of other plant friends, the Twin Peaks theme tune & a pale purple curtain as an ode to David Lynch accessorise this putrid goddess of a bloom. People queued for hours to have this life experience with 25 allotted each time to share the putrid air together.
"Claire, says in 15 years, she will tell her newborn Jack: “I took you to Putricia, and you didn’t remember it.”
“We’re obsessed with her, she’s the Queen of Sydney at the moment,” she says, adding that she found out about her on TikTok.
As the crowd shuffles out, two girls chatter excitedly, buoyed by their experience.
“I’ve never felt so much affinity for a plant,” one muses. “I feel like she’s a person – a sassy queen.”
“I love her,” the other confirms. “I was watching her last night on YouTube. The fact she has a name, it’s given her a real personality.”
As crowds continue to form, another group rolls through. Putricia steadies herself, basking in her moment, finally in bloom. - The Guardian
And now her structure has already shrivelled, her pollen collected for breeding, and she has moved back to her resting space. It could be years before Putricia finds energy to flower again yet she did leave a long corpse smell linger. And like life, another rival has awoken. For anyone of you in New York now, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has Putricia's friend who has begun to bloom at 6 feet tall.
See Putricia’s blooming life here
IN PHARRELL WE TRUST - AZUMA MAKOTO COLLABORATES WITH THE TALENTED MAN
Always a Pharrell fan as he reinvigorates & reinvents himself and his work again wonderfully this year. Only last week as if an ode to our friend Sasha Sykes beautiful craftwork & art pieces, Pharrell Williams invited one of our favourite floral artists Azuma Makoto to re-think & re-interpre the Courrier Lozine 110 trunk for the Louis Vuitton FW25 show.
Makoto's talented team delicately placed fresh flowers one by one in transparent acrylic glass used to shape and cast. Then, they assembles the trunks to create what they call a new technical conception. If you fancy one, these trunks/works of art have sumptuous swingtags of €300,000-€500,000. There you go ...
IN MARTHA’S PERFECT WORLD - WE LEARN HOW TO PLANT OUR DAFFODIL DRIFTS
Although, Martha Stewart's Flower Magazine was very much part of my learning to flower and garden education, it wasn't until I watched the recent documentary 'Martha' that I fully understood this machine lady of aesthetic and drive. What I really admire is her sense of grit, determination and talent in planning. So...then I spotted how Martha creates those delightful daffodil drifts through her main garden and thought that her captures are a good practical visual guide on how to create a waving carpet of yellows and creams so we all can have a bit of Martha's spring vibrations as we look out the kitchen window.
Due to changing around our garden this year. We have to remove all of our buxus and more due to the evil box eating caterpillars who will return in Spring…I digress. This explains my living vicariously through Martha and Floret Flower's bulb planning with envy but here's to next year when those dancing heads of my favourite daffodils will sway in a small breeze to make us all smile.
IN MUSINGS
On what seemed like the longest week ever in the world…or was it just all of us in work? Then a wonderful episode arrives on BBC Sounds to listen to in pouring rain & squelchiness on what always must be done … another dog walk around the block. Even if you don’t like Nick Cave’s music, this listen with Lauren Laverne is so worth it. Ever honest, articulate and fascinating, Nick chooses tunes from T.Rex, Nina Simone, Kanye West, Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash and surprises with The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi too. Enjoy x
Listen to Nick Cave on Desert Island Discs
UNTIL NEXT WEEK FRIENDS - OUR WEEKLY GLIMMER:
“It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming”
Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Thank you for your post, I particularly liked the video about The Nettle Dress. How satisfying it must have felt for Brown to create and his daughter to wear. Beautiful.