Happy new year! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas – here’s to a blooming great 2018.

We had a fabulous Christmas at Organic Blooms. We decided to run all our Christmas workshops over a single weekend to make sure that everyone’s wreaths, table decorations and garlands were made at the optimum time to last beautifully through the festive season. Our venues – Winterbourne Medieval Barn and Acton Court – felt incredibly Christmassy and provided perfect settings for all our beautiful local greenery. The roaring fire in the huge medieval fireplace at Acton Court was extremely welcome and we loved meeting our 90 participants across the weekend and seeing the remarkable variety of their beautiful finished creations. A particular thanks goes to the lovely Medieval Barn volunteers and Lisa and Jenny at Acton Court for being fabulous hosts and welcoming our course participants so warmly.

If you fancy learning something new in 2018, come and join us for a workshop or course. They range from half a day to a full week and include a variety of floristry skills and land- and horticulture-focused topics. Some of our 2018 dates are up on our website now and we will be adding more very soon.

Our team, including some of our trainees, worked flat out in the run up to Christmas planting up beautiful hyacinth planters and making wreaths, table decorations and our new hampers. We were busy couriering them out right up until the last minute. We loved receiving feedback and photos from some of the lucky winners of our luxury wreaths from Yeo Valley’s Festive Fruit Machine and Pukka Tea’s festive competition, and it was lovely to see our local customers, many of whom order every Christmas, who called in to collect their orders – we always love seeing you and wishing you a happy Christmas in person.

Once the chaos of running courses and making and sending out all our Christmas orders is over we love spotting Organic Blooms wreaths, including those made on our courses, on the doors of our local villages. Though we say so ourselves, they do stand out from the crowd.

Most of us overindulged during the Christmas and new year celebrations. If gluttony is a sin we’re already paying for our wickedness – it’s only 2nd January and things are already in full swing here on site.

We’re busy sorting and clearing out our polytunnels, and planning and laying out our new field that we are currently converting to organic. Our ranunculus are coming through and our anemones, planted out in the polytunnel earlier in the winter, are coming on well. Checking the young plants for botrytis cinerea, a fungal problem unavoidable in polytunnels, will become a regular and painstaking task from now on – we deal with it by simply wiping it off the plants and removing any that succumb to rot before we can save them. Under the vigilance of our trainees, however, we will hopefully lose very few.

Although we don’t do flowers for Valentine’s Day because it’s too early for British flowers, we are gearing up to offer gorgeous gifts in the shape of our organic hampers and vouchers for flower subscriptions and workshops.

We are also sorting our seeds ready for early sowings and this always coincides with planning our wedding season. We already have wedding bookings for this summer and several brides booked for consultations with Wendy, our head florist, over the next few weeks. We don’t do many wedding fayres but we’re thinking of taking part in one at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol – it’s an unusual, quirky venue and, we think, a great fit with our flowers.

If you’re getting married between May and September this year and would like to explore naturally gorgeous organic British flowers to set off your big day, take a look at our gallery for inspiration and give Wendy a call or drop her an email sooner rather than later. With availability defined by our growing season, we get booked up fast. We may be in the depths of winter with the Organic Blooms log burner roaring and relentless drizzle misting the field, but summer is now our focus and will be upon us before we know it.