Till so far so good. My hellebore flowers are still standing up. 

A few years ago I read in one of Sarah Raven’s books that you can use hellebore as a cut flower. Her advice was then to sear the stems one minute in boiling water. I did so and ended up with cooked stems and subsequent wilted flowers. So no hellebores in vases for me since then. 

Today I thought I’d try again.  I have got quite a few mature Helleborus Orientalis plants, in absolutely wonderful colours from the darkest blue-black to light purple. The flowers are emerging en masse and they'd do wonderful in a vase. As obviously I didn't want to have wilted flowers again, I thought I'd embark on an elaborate experiment with searing several stems at different temperatures and different times. A quick search on the internet though, taught me that Sarah Raven also had adjusted her advice. She now only recommends searing hellebore stems for 20 seconds, and then putting them back in cold water and storing them in the cold for an hour or two before arranging them. (And having at least one seed pod formed as then they last longer, but as it is early in the season, I couldn't do that.)

Rather than raiding my plants and finding out that the new method didn't work, I only cut three stems. And ... success till so far, which is about 4 hours in. I did boil the water, but also waited 5 minutes before putting them in. The true test will obviously be tomorrow morning, but I have every hope that they at least will last tonight's night-in with my friends. 

This was another reason to only cut three stems. There was no point in making a large bunch, as they'd only have to be moved from the table once we sit down for dinner, so a smallish vase, just a bit higher than a wine glass should do the trick. 

From last weeks' bunches of flowers I recycled the twigs as well as the rosemary, and then of course I added some of the powerful scented branches of Daphne Odora Aureomarginata.

The only thing is, like with many flowers, that the hellebore's beauty is especially magnificent if you look at them from below. So I've taken a picture in that way as well, as I don't expect anybody tonight to end up on the floor or to lie on the table to have a look at them!

Flowers make me happy. This is a pretty obvious statement from someone who has decided to put a lot of effort into always having a bunch of flowers in the house, but then flowers really, really do make me happy.

The neighbours a few doors down kindly allowed me to cut some branches off their winter flowering cherry. You've probably spotted them already in the streets while cycling or walking. The trees are still bare of leaves but full with tiny flowers giving it an overall pink impression. And look at how perfect those miniature flowers are. 

Strolling through the garden in search of flowers and branches to compliment the blossom, I noticed the first snow drops and saw that the winter aconites are protruding their yellow heads through the grass. One primula vulgaris is already in bloom, obviously slightly ahead of itself and a few of the tiny flowers of Daphne Odora (Daphne odora Aureomarginata) have opened. You wouldn't pay much attention to them as they are small and few. However, their magnificent scent makes fully up for their size. In the vegetable garden the first rhubarb leaves are showing and while writing I am craving stewed rhubarb with custard. Only a few more weeks ...

While spring is obviously on its way, some flowers have never stopped. The Cape Daisies (Osteospermum) are not as vigorously in bloom as they were this summer, but they keeps producing some buds which I picked. The Golden Celebration rose bush gave me one flower worth picking and before I went back into the house, I also cut  two small branches of the Daphne bush (pictured below) as well as some rosemary, which is not only great in terms of scent but also provides wonderful foliage. 

With the rose I revamped last week's bunch of flowers and with the rest I made this week's bunch. I'm not a professional photographer and I take pictures with my phone, in my house and garden, so they are not perfect, and neither are the flowers. Some leaves have some brown blotches, but to be honest with you I really don't care. Beautiful flowers like the ones I picked today tell me that there is always beauty, that nature gets on with things regardless of what injustice and bad things happen in the world, or how busy and complicated my own life sometimes can be. 

Flowers make me happy. I smile every time I take a look at the vases in my house and I hope you do too when you see my not-perfect pictures.

Ps In case you are wondering, I have promised the neighbours a summer bunch of flowers in return, so I am sticking to my rules!

The mild weather of the last month led to a few surprises in the garden this week. First of all I spotted some flowering cow parley in a weedy patch (which was used as a dumping ground for spare soil in the summer last year) and I was also astonished to see that Achillea millefolium 'Cassis' (Yarrow)  still had some purple flowers. Nowhere near as spectacular as this summer, but purple and purple/red it was! 

My bouquet quickly took shape in my head. Bare twiggly branches would give it structure and foliage would come from the green pompom heads of Dianthus Barbatus 'Green Trick' which haven't all yellowed yet as well as some olive branches and ivy. 

So I picked everything and laid it out on the picnic table.

That's when the trouble began. 

The twigs, from a neighbour's overhanging tree which will produce some lovely catkins in a month or so, were laying flat in the vase, giving it a diameter of about 2 meters. The cow parsley had actually been growing horizontally (as you can hopefully see on the picture below) and the flowers with their curved stems were completely impossible to arrange.

Add to this a toddler who also started to "help" cutting flower stems and the wind that blew over the vase, I quickly ended up in the conservatory trying to rescue it. Although I had managed to tie the branches together with an elastic band so they actually stood up in the vase, it was still huge. The vase's destination is the dinner table and we still have to be able to have dinner. It looked dramatic, but I could really do without the drama of it being knocked over. So all in all, I decided that less was more, as it usually is. 

I threw out the cow parsley, cut a good 20 cm off the twigs and added some Echinacea seedheads and, finally this is the end result:

The Echinacea seedheads are quite delicate, with seed falling out by simply touching it. In one of the heads I spotted one impatient seed that had already germinated (bottom left in the picture below).

I grew some shasta daisies in the garden this summer and those seedheads were simply green in the autumn! I potted a few up and they are doing really well.  

I am also trying to propagate the 'Green Trick' Dianthus. I bought three plugs last summer and they grew lush and produced many stems and will hopefully do so for a few years. The flowers don't actually produce any seeds, which explains why they keep for weeks and weeks in a vase as well as on the plant. This poor plant is continuously trying, but failing, to produce the next generation, which of course was the purpose of its breeders who have created a storm in the cut flower industry. I have potted up two cuttings in the greenhouse and we'll see what happens.    

Further on the note of seeds, I am planning to attend Seedy Sunday this Sunday 19th January in Trumpington. (Click here for details.) It looks like I could bag a few more cut flower seeds by swapping some from the garden. As there are also children's activities among other things, I've decided that the £1.50 entry should come out of the leisure budget rather than the cutflower one, but let me know if you think this is cheating!

Today for the seed swap I have collected some seeds from Rudbeckia Cherry Brandy (brilliant ruby red annual - and I didn't grow any other rudbeckias so I'm pretty sure it'll come true), Echinacea (just the purple variety) and Helenium Helena mixed (autumn yellow/red perennial). Hopefully these will end up as flowers in someone else's arrangements. 

Till next week!

Ps The cats left the willow wreath alone, but the toddler found playing with the crab apples great fun. The wreath has moved to one of the outside tables now, by the way. 

For a change it wasn't raining today. Although the plan was to brave the January (not so) cold, I was glad that the weather did its part to motivate me as well. So on a beautiful sunny Winter's day, I set out to complete the first task of my new challenge. 

My 2014 challenge is to put a bunch of homegrown flowers (or the like) in the house every week. I have given myself a budget of £6 a week, which is generous if you look at £3 for a bunch of carnations at Tesco's, but totally insufficient if you want to buy a David Austin bouquet which only start at £49.95 (and I have been lucky enough to receive one from a dear friend!). 

So £6/week minus 5 weeks of holiday takes me to £282 for the whole year. I have of course long been interested in growing my own flowers. I have bought a lot of plants for our garden with the idea of cutting some branches for the house. I have grown quite a few from seeds and some have been gifts like this David Austin rose "Fellowship" with its absolutely perfect form.

I specifically put three Queen of Sweden roses on the allotment for cut flowers, so I feel I need to deduct the costs of those, as well as £100 for everything else that is already in the garden. This leaves me with £138.50, of which, I have decided, I should roughly spend 75% on perennials, so in coming years it will further reduce costs as well as time spend on sowing and propagating. 

I have no illusion that I will be able to get myself this bunch of flowers every week without some additional tricks and cheats. As vegetables are often ready in the same week, I have no doubt that this is the same for the annual flowers that I am going to grow, and then I am not even talking about the upcoming difficult Winter and early Spring months. So another rule is that I am allowed to pick from the wild and, secondly, I can pick from friends (and stranger's) gardens, as long as I give them something in return. 

So as for this week's project, I thought a table piece would be nice, using the willow that I planted as a fedge (indeed, that's in between a fence and a hedge) dividing the vegetable garden with what we grandiosely call "The Orchard". 

Making a wreath was pretty simple. I used around 15 twigs of willow that were 4 to 5 feet long. The first one I twisted around itself and then the next ones around the first one, building up the wreath as I added more twigs. Getting a round shape looked a bit tricky at the start, but the more twigs I added the easier it became to adjust it, so it looked like a circle.  If you want to do the same, but don't have any willow in your garden, use any wild twig that is flexible enough to bend.  

To finish the wreath I used red crab apples (Malus Red Sentinel) and rose hips for colour and hydrangea for "flowers" and this is the end result.

Now what remains is clearing up the dining area, so it can actually be seen and noticed. 

I'll tell you next week if the cats left it alone. Till then!