The long, grey, seemingly unrelenting drag of winter is finally over, and spring is here. It’s been a tough year, so brightness and optimism are the order of the day. What fits the bill more perfectly that a beautiful bunch of cut flowers? Even better are seasonal, British-grown varieties, or a foraged bunch of daffodils, which don’t just mark the start of spring but are a lot kinder on the environment. Peckham-based SAGE Flowers, headed up by Romy St Clair and Iona Mathieson, are here to talk you through their guide to floristry at home in spring, from creating abundant-looking arrangements to how to ask your neighbour for a bunch of blossom.

Floral arranging at home

We have not always been florists, but we have always arranged at home. Before we knew what conditioning was (the correct angle to cut a stem) or even the names of flowers, we were arranging. From rearranging supermarket stems to reorganising gift bouquets, creating with flowers has been a constant in our lives – looking back at it now, it’s surprising it took us so long to officially enter the floristry world.

Flower arranging at home isn’t a fine art; it’s an art of love and feeling, colours and textures, seasons and time. And you don’t need a flower shop to enjoy the pleasures of sweet peas coming back into season, for example. Going for a walk right now as the blossom is beginning to appear, or walking through your local park when the rosebuds start to open will alert you to the beauty of the seasons and hopefully inspire your homemade arrangements.

There are some things that will make flower arranging at home easier, starting with a good pair of scissors, which will save you hacking away at your stems with blunt kitchen scissors or a knife. The best in the business are by Sakagen, from Osaka, Japan – they’re ergonomic, which so many floral scissors aren’t.  We have designed our own SAGE colourways in collaboration with them.

Before you do anything, remember to strip the stems of any leaves that lie below your water line – leaves rot in water, which contributes to bacteria growth and will eventually kill your flowers. If you don’t have a vase, use a jug, or a large glass. Be sure to always cut your stems at a 45-degree angle, as it gives them a larger surface area to drink from and stops them sitting flush against the bottom of your vase, which makes it difficult for them to suck up water. To keep them drinking, and remove bacteria and fungi growth, it is best to cut 1cm to an inch off the bottom of the stems every few days.

Floral tape (which you can buy online) will help your flowers stay in position if you have a wide-necked vase – there’s nothing worse than getting a beautiful bunch and the flowers flopping out over the side of your vase with gaps in the middle. Stick your tape across the top of your vase in a criss-cross style grid before arranging the flowers into the vase – you’ll notice a huge difference. The alternative is chicken wire, easily sourced from hardware stores. Cut a section off slightly wider than your vase neck, scrunch into a ball and push into the bottom of your vase. The stems will lock into position and can be twisted to your desired angle.

Flower food can make all the difference, especially if you’re not good at remembering to change your water. It doesn’t have to be a posh store-bought one; simply mix 1l of cold water, 1tbs of vinegar, 1tsp of sugar and ½tbs of bleach. The sugar is the food; the bleach will help slow bacterial growth in the water, enabling the flowers to live longer, and the vinegar creates the right acidity for the stems to flourish.

Have fun with your vase choice and get experimental with flower combinations – you’ll soon make something beautiful and engaging to look at.

What to forage

As florists, we dread the winter months. Our old Victorian shop has single-glazed windows, and it’s colder inside the shop than it is inside a fridge. But most of all we despair at the lack of flowers we have access to. There are some winter varieties that we love – beautiful dark hellebores (winter roses), spidery amaryllis, baby cyclamen – but we long for the days of sweet peas, dahlias, zinnias and peonies; their scents, colours and frilly edges feeling like a long-lost memory.

However, just as we get used to the long dark nights of winter, spring comes. Slowly and tentatively at first, daffodils and snowdrops start poking their sleepy heads out of the grass, in bright yellows, oranges and whites. Hyacinths start bursting open to parade their sweet smell on the spring air. Spring is one of our favourite times of the year to forage for the things we’ve missed so much over the winter months.

Throughout March there are some nice foliage options around that you can incorporate into your arrangements. Look out for pittosporum varieties and laurel, and there are also some that come with berries or small clusters of flowers like skimmia or buried ivy. You can also add cut herbs like sage and rosemary, which will bring scent into arrangements.

Now, a word to the wise on foraging. It doesn’t mean stealing – you mustn’t drag up all your neighbours’ bulbs, or cut down their blossoms, but you can ask. We’ve found, if you ask politely and take only what you need, most people are more than happy to share the bounties of their gardens, feeling (as we do) that the joy and spirit of spring is to be shared.

Mimosa, a favourite of ours, is a spring staple. Its bright yellow fluffy blooms will brighten every arrangement tenfold. The blossoms – cherry, apple and pear – come out in March and April. Both mimosa and blossoms have woody stems – be sure to cut up the stem as well as across it before putting them in water, as this helps them drink more and last much longer. Willow and hazel will also last, so you can keep and reuse them. We absolutely love lilac and blossoms, using them as much as we can when they’re in season.

Daffodils and tulips are the main players of spring, and we love the more unusual varieties: parrot tulips with beautiful frilly edges, and paper-white daffodils with bright orange centres that look like tiny fried eggs. Then there are the spring ephemerals – those with short life spans – who seem to leave before they’ve even arrived. Bluebells and buttercups appear, too short to be enjoyed in a bouquet but tall enough to sit in a shallow glass for a few days of spring-time joy. These flowers and blossoms are enough to make us forget winter and remember that after spring comes summer, and that’s when the real fun starts.

Sustainability

Making sustainable choices is something we should all be conscious of in every aspect of our lives. Starting SAGE was no different for us. We took steps to make our business as environmentally friendly as possible, recycling everything we can. Our green waste gets recycled and turned into biofuel; we make a huge effort not to use single-use plastic and our cellophane is made from recycled wood chips. We are committed to using sustainable floristry techniques too, so we don’t use floral foam, a plastic that absorbs water and is used to create vase-less arrangements but eventually breaks down in water and pollutes the oceans.

But then, that’s where flowers come from. Valentine’s Day roses usually come from Kenya or Ecuador. Carnations from Columbia. Waxflower from Israel and hydrangeas again from Kenya. Flowers are flown to Holland and driven to the UK, via a ferry from France – 90% of flowers sold in the UK are imported. And this is where the challenge lies: we want flowers all year round. Weddings and funerals don’t stop happening in winter, even though British flowers stop growing.

We can’t fix the imbalance overnight, but we can educate our customers and show them more British produce, celebrating what we do have. Last year we strengthened our ties with British growers – and what a joy it was. We get English peonies, hydrangeas and delphiniums from Tatchell and Co in Norfolk; acid green zinnias and soft pink nicotiana from Over the Hedge in Sutton; mixed buckets of the most beautiful Dutch masters-esque roses from Wolves Lane Flower Company and the most incredible dahlias we have ever had the pleasure of working with from our friends in Dorset. We are thoroughly converted to the joys of British flowers – the interesting bends in the stems, the curly tendrils, the heady scents and the amazing colours.

Between April and September is the easiest time to buy British – look out for varieties such as peonies, English garden roses, dahlias, stocks, cosmos, ammi, sweet peas, zinnias and nicotiana. Certain varieties also dry well, so you can keep them and mix them into future arrangements – honesty, eucalyptus, briza, grasses, lagurus, for example. If you have the right conditions – a dry, warm place with no moisture –dahlias and roses can dry really nicely too.

So, what’s next for the sustainability movement in floristry? In our mission to continue buying British where we can, Flowers From The Farm, a network of small-scale growers, is an excellent resource for us. We’re looking at ways to support growers by becoming a collection point for London florists, reducing their delivery burden. The resources for running a sustainable floristry business are growing and florists are really starting to share their techniques and knowledge – see Forever Green Flower Co and Shane Connolly & Co for more. We’re starting to think about the damage caused by demanding low-cost, perfect stems year-round; energy consumed by heating and lighting greenhouses being just one example. As a community, floristry is pulling together and having difficult conversations – long may it continue.

Images courtesy of SAGE Flowers.