I've just found out that trachelium is in the same family as campanula! I'd never have guessed it but I suppose the clusters of tiny flowers on this Mediterranean plant are tube-shaped a bit like campanula. Both are a welcome late picking and feature in this week's posy. We've made it to December and I've included a little piece of spruce to start us off gently towards the festive season. This has actually come from Ireland, which very occasionally happens with sourcing our foliage so, not quite UK, but just next door. Please note that we will not be delivering the week after Christmas so if you are expecting an order on the 29th December 2023, it will be brought...
There’s wheat in today’s posies. For some of us, it's Thanksgiving this week, and a chance to be thankful for our harvest. If you’re on the ‘socials’ you might see that my cat, Kika, has been enjoying playing with some of the spare ears of corn.
There’s also early season flowers in this week, including a first picking of ranunculus and parrot tulips from Lincolnshire. It’s always nice to use something new each week.
Christmas is fast approaching and I will start to add a touch of festive cheer to the posies very soon...
Before we wrap and pack our MeadowSweet posies for UK deliveries, our flowers have been expertly conditioned and arranged into our signature 'spiral-bound' short-stemmed bouquets (we call them 'posies') by trained florists and the cut stems are specially-wrapped to stay hydrated for their journey. In this way, we are different from other online flower subscription services who typically send loose, dry stems for customers to assemble themselves.It seems to us that the creative work of experienced florists has been pushed aside in recent years by many of these next-day and letterbox flowers, where speed and cost-cutting has removed what we feel is the most important aspect of flower presentation. You may have had first-hand experience of being sent a box of flowers by post only to be disappointed to find them...
If you were to buy your flowers from a supermarket (tut, tut!) you would be forgiven for thinking that chrysanthemums don’t have a season at all. But grown naturally in the UK, they are an Autumnal bloom and they flower between September and November. Ours are flowering in our cutting garden right now but it can be tough growing chrysanthemums outside as they can get damaged by the ever-increasing number of storms that hit us at this time of year. This week, these pink spray chrysanthemums have been grown protected under glass in Lincolnshire.
We’ve got some lovely dark Physocarpus in here too. Commonly known as ‘ninebark’ apparently, although I’ve never heard that before!
At the Big Sustainability Awards 2023, MeadowSweet was proud to be awarded the Winner in the category of 'SME Sustainability Journey'. The Awards took place at a black tie Gala Night at the Hilton Ageas Bowl on the 26th October in Southampton, and they are run by the Southern Sustainability Partnership. Our sustainability journey began in 2016, working with an increasing number of British growers and establishing our own cutting garden to ultimately achieve 100% British flowers in our posies throughout the year. As well as connecting our customers with nature and celebrating the diversity and seasonality of locally-grown ingredients, British flowers have been found to have a 90% lower carbon footprint than imported air-freighted blooms. In 2020 we switched from reusable plastic to recycled-content British-made glass jars to reflect customer preferences, and we collect these...
