Tales from my Garden: Growing Flowers to Press
I’m loving these midsummer days in the garden. My garden is my sanctuary; the place to which I retreat when I’m feeling the stresses of everyday life. And at this time of year, as the summer solstice is almost upon us, I like to take some time to potter about my flower beds, breathing in their spirit-lifting scent.
One of the things I love about pressing flowers is that It encourages me to get outside and go exploring. We usually go out for long walks together as a family. My kids like to get involved and run off to find colourful flowers and interesting leaves for me. But recently I’ve become more mindful about taking too many flowers from the wild, and I’ve started growing more of my own.
My garden - and my approach to gardening - is led by my desire to keep things simple, and a teensy bit wild. We’ve been in our current house, with its modest-sized garden, for just over ten years. Early on I designed the beds to have evergreen structure so they didn’t look too bare in the colder months when I was looking out from my kitchen window. I planted skimmia and japonica shrubs, box bushes and grasses. Once spring arrives so does the euphorbia, and the many self-seeded ferns, that have spread wildly.
I’m a lover of colourful cottagey perennials that re-appear each spring and summer, and have the added bonus of helping to keep the weeds at bay. I don’t have time to spend hours weeding (who does?!) so I keep my planting dense in the hope that they’ll struggle to get through. This works, to a point. Self-seeded foxgloves appear each year, along with the heuchera, astilbe, geums, geraniums and astrantia (that I press in huge quantities), but there will inevitably be some gaps, especially if we’ve had a wet winter. Once lightly weeded I like to fill those spaces with new perennials (probably white lupins and the palest blue delphiniums, my absolute favs) and some new varieties of dahlia that I like to experiment with, and, if I’m organised enough, some annuals. White cosmos, deep purple nigella and lapis cornflowers are my go-to choices.
The newly added purple and white aquilegia surrounded by verbena
Amongst the skimmia in spring, huge swathes of self-seeded forget-me-nots appear (so many that I struggle to cut and press them). In early summer, when the verdant green beds are dotted with the tiny white star-like flowers of heucheras, wild buttercups arrive, adding pops of summery colour.
This year I’ve introduced a lovely new purple and white aquilegia, the palest coral pink penstemon and some more jewel-toned geums (as some of my varieties didn’t fare so well over the winter) and some lilac scabiosa. I’ll experiment with pressing all of these for this year’s works. Sweet cicely leaves show up in a lot of my pressed flower works. I keep it by my back door in a small herb bed, where it fights for space with flowering thyme, borage and lots of different varieties of sage (because I love the variation in their leaves) It’s recently gone to seed and produced pleasing little star-shaped seedheads. I keep pots on the back steps that lead up to the shed, which houses my potting bench and against which a huge pot of sweetly scented honeysuckle grows.
This year I’ve sown my sweet peas in pots because my pesky obelisks rotted over the winter, and added some varieties of dianthus, whose sight and scent remind me of my Nan. I can’t sniff a sweet pea without being taken straight to her garden as a child in summer, full of roses, pinks and row upon row of headily scented sweet peas in every colour combination you could imagine.
Now, watching the thrumming bees and butterflies hovering over the flowering herbs, beautifully scented lavender and honeysuckle by the back door while I have my first cup of tea in the morning is one of life’s simplest pleasures.
THE ARCHIVE SALE
I’ve always felt that flowers help connect people, particularly friends and family. Every year my mum sends me photographs of my Nan’s irises and peonies in bloom that were planted in her garden when my Nan passed away. At the end of summer I, in turn, send her packets of seeds from my own garden that she sows in hers.
This spring I took some lily of the valley from my father-in-law’s garden to press for the first time (they came out beautifully and I’ve included them in a new work). He was so chuffed that he could be involved in a small way in what I’m doing, so in a sense it brought about a deeper connection between us. He insisted that I take some of his bulbs home with me (he lives in York, so we’re pretty far apart geographically) and to my intense joy one pretty little plant appeared in my garden this spring.
We have bluebells growing around our front door that we like to encourage as they have special meaning to us. Charlie proposed to me in a bluebell forest (many, many years ago!) and I picked some flowers from the spot to press. I didn’t quite know what to do with them, but a few years later I made him a photo book for his fortieth birthday, full of pictures of us and our kids over the years. I put some of the pressed bluebells on the opening page with a little note. He was really touched when he opened it.
The pressing of flowers has been close to my heart for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a remote part of the Sottish Borders and went to a tiny village primary school that had an average of twenty pupils. Every summer we did a flower pressing competition. Points were awarded for finding the most specimens, for identifying them correctly, and for how neatly you presented your work in an exercise book. It was my favourite task of the year - I looked forward to it and took the challenge very seriously! I was lucky that where I lived was surrounded by fields, and this being the early eighties, there were way more species to be found than you would find now.
An A3 giclée art print of one of last year’s works that will be available mid-July
We had a marshy field next to our house with a stream running through it and I found three different types of wild orchid in there over the years. I can still remember the feeling of excitement when I discovered them, like they were precious little jewels (and I guess they kind of were). There’s something that takes me back to those days when I’m looking for new flowers to press now, and I feel a sense of comfort in that.
I decided a few years ago that I wanted a pressed flower work to hang on my bathroom wall when we redecorated, so I made one - and I liked how it turned out. That’s where it all started. A few people commented that they liked it and I made more, and then more. Every year I make a small postcard-sized version for my mum and she frames it. So she has little pieces of my garden decorating her walls, too. I really do like the idea of that.
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