Windy Weddings!

What happened to summer?? The sky is looking a tad dark out there, and the wind is blowing all our lovely plants about.  Leona is running outside as I write to grab another price ticket that has blown away down the street, and she just rescued a large white peony plant from the 'summer breeze'!!!


Unusually for a weekend we don't have any weddings to prepare flowers for, as we are actually going to a wedding ourselves tomorrow.  Our friends Nik and Anna are doing the do up in Aboyne, near Aberdeen, and it should be a great day (even if the weather is looking a bit dodgy!). We first met Nik many years ago when we used to do flower classes in the shop.  He was the only male that signed up for them which we were quite excited about, and we bonded over the flowers and too much wine! A few years later at a Hogmanay party, Nik met the lovely Anna (who bonded over wine...and beer....) and the rest is history. 

There must be lots of weddings on this bank holiday weekend though as tomorrows box if full of orders for corsages and buttonholes.  We can't quite decide if we are going to adorn a flower ourselves or not.  I'm sure as florists we are supposed to be showing off our wares, but we didn't even have flowers at our own wedding!

Nice Day For A Hot Wedding

Phewwie, its hotter in Edinburgh today than it is in Ibiza apparently - how the great British weather can change in a week!

The down side to the glorious sun shine is having to work in the shop! The upside though, is that today's lucky bride is able to get married outside.  We delivered the flowers this morning and it was at least 20 degrees then!  Here's a photo of the ceremony table adorned with a large vase of gorgeous white lilies, tulips and delphiniums.

We have some amazing passion flower plants in the shop, they have got to be one of the maddest flowers, we love em.





Another wedding tomorrow at Balbirnie House Hotel in Fife.  It's a beautiful venue, with gorgeous gardens that I'm sure tomorrow will be filled with merry 'sun kissed' (ie burnt) wedding guests.  If the weather holds, we will head up to Elie on the east coast which has a fabulous beach and very nice pubs (with beer garden!). So we'll deliver the flowers for the wedding, then chase our dog into the sea, whilst licking our melting ice creams - HOO RAH for the sun!

Lily Watch

Monday morning, and yay the sun is actually out ;o))) Well it's not exactly tropical and the ash has closed airports throughout the country again, but the sun is definitely poking through the clouds which is a good start to the week!

We are on Lily watch this week - one of the weddings we have at the weekend taking place at  Keavil House, Dunfermline is predominately white lilies.  Lilies, along with a few other flowers such as peonies, can often prove a bit of a challenge for the florist.

They arrive directly from Holland lovely and fresh and tight, so judging how many days in advance to buy them in order for them to be open in time for the brides big day can be like playing russian roulette!  Too open and the petals might just start to turn or look bruised.  Not open enough and they don't look full or colourful enough for the bouquets/vases etc.  Its not unknown on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning for florists to be phoning each other desperately searching for open blooms!

The many tubs of lilies we have in our back shop this morning are looking just right (eek, are we tempting fate here!) They haven't opened yet but the buds are looking nice and full and white....everything crossed!

Wedding Flowers and Sunny Flowers

Well its Friday, which normally means getting busy with the weekends weddings.  Tomorrow we have one in Humbie, East Lothian.  Mavis Hall Park have a fabulous traditional  big farm barn there, and even a wee loch where knots can be tied if the weather is behaving.  For the real canivores out there they can provide a large spit with whole pigs to roast for the occasion too.

 We have done a fair few weddings at Humbie , the first one we did we were even guests at. As wedding venues go, it's one of our favourites.  Its always fun to walk by the chickens and hens when setting up the flowers.

We have had lots of online orders this week, and mainly for our new set seasonal bouquet.  Its so nice to see the sunflowers back in the shop, even though summer hasn't quite arrived (yes there was snow on the hills yesterday, and yes it is MAY), it's so nice to see their happy smiling faces giving us more hope than the met office does!

Flowers for an unusual occasion...

Today we were providing flowers for the University of Edinburgh School of Biomedical Sciences.

Every year they hold a remembrance service to honor the many people who donate their bodies to science and medicine after their death.

If it wasn't for this generous act many lives would not have been saved and many innovations never brought to light.

The service allows the medical staff to give their thanks and for the surviving families to remember their loved ones.

Blue & Yellow - a winning combination?

Well, following on from our last post regarding the choices for what was turning out to be of a 'hung bouquet', the flowers have spoken to us.  The red flowers were just not going to work in the end, they had been in abundance over the last while, but seasons change and so do peoples taste in flowers.

In the end, we opted for blues with some yellow mixed in to lighten the mood of the bouquet.  Who knows if this will work and only time will tell how much money we might make or lose out of it, but we'll live with it for a while and see how the public react.

A hung bouquet.....

We are having a dilema here at Pollination, we have done since Friday.

It all started out straight forward enough, all we had to do was create a bouquet everyone in the country would love, or at least be happy with. Firstly we had to decide on the colours for our design. Would we go for a right old mix of shades of blue, a liberal selection of yellows, or use whatever red flowers we had left in the shop?

We tried the blue flowers first, as we had more of them than anything else, but it just didn't seem to be enough. Then we went for the reds, but there just wasn't as many as there used to be in the shop. We had expected a larger delivery of yellow flowers but were let down at the last minute - seems our suppliers had decided the red and blues were the safer bets to stock up on.

As there wasn't enough yellow stems to do anything substantial with, we first decided to go crazy and mix them up with the blue flowers. This worked on a few levels but the contrast was maybe just too great. Perhaps this would be more to European taste, who knows.

So we thought about the reds mixed up with some yellow, as on paper it would seem like a more natural combination. In reality though some of the red flowers looked a little old and tired and may be past their best...

We are still undecided how we are going to put the bouquet together, perhaps we should go for broke and just proportionally represent all three colours. We don't want to get too hung up about the bouquet, but we will let you know how it turns out.