From Russia With Love

We were standing in the shop yesterday when a mysterious, dark haired young man swept in through the door. We both stared at each other and raised an eyebrow as he approached the counter.

'My name is Fedulove, Roman Fedulove, and I am from Russia!'

Then the penny dropped, Roman had ordered a couple of bouquets from us before, from Russia, via the website. His fiance lives in Edinburgh and he is a man that understands the value of flowers from afar!

As nice and unexpected as it was to meet him in the flesh, he really outdid himself by presenting us with a couple of lovely gifts from back home.

We hope you have a great stay Roman and enjoy some warmer weather than you'll be getting on your return.

In other news, the lovely Leona is presently on a boat (SHIP!) cruising the Mediterranean and soaking up the sun and sangria. We're just about coping without her and hopefully will not have throttled each other by the time she gets back ;)

Keeping up the foreign theme, we have just returned from 4 nights in lovely Florence, an amazing city that seems to be home to legions of designer clad men and women but very few florists....perhaps there is a gap in the market for us to start selling our gucci gladioli and prada proteas that we've been developing.

That's all for now, we'll try not to leave the next one so long.

Locally Sourced Flowers!

For a long time we've been asked by our customers if we could find them locally sourced flowers.

Until recently we've always had problems with either price or quality - or both! - and this has left us somewhat disappointed. Thankfully things have changed due to a lady called Anne and her farm near Pathead.

For the past few weeks she has been delivering gorgeous bunches of home grown garden flowers and they have been flying out the door. We took a bunch home the first week to road test them and were very happy with how good they looked and how well they lasted.

In order to spread the word we've dropped an email to the Shandon Food Group, an environmental organisation in the area, that work hard to spread the home grown message and generally do good stuff for the environment.

Today brought us 2 weddings, one at our local church, St Michael's, and the other in nearby Corstorphine.

This is the first Saturday since Lorna, our trusted weekender, has left us. She walked into the shop many years ago and asked if she could come in and work for free! After taking advantage of her good nature for a while we decided to pay her and she has been a regular feature of our Saturday shenanigans since.

Unfortunately her 'proper' job, offered her more hours and money and she decided to reclaim the weekends for herself, leaving us to pick up the slack, sweep the floors and make our own coffees.

On the plus side, we don't need to pay her anymore so Adios Amigo!

Thats it for now, bye.

Festival Frolics and Flowers

Its raining most days, there are roadworks everywhere, groups of men are sauntering around casually in superhero outfits, women are dragging men along by dog leads... yip, our great city is in the throes of madness that is the Edinburgh Fringe and Festival.

It's at this time of year when we wish we weren't in the flower trade and sold beer, saltire embossed plastic rain ponchos or that tartan flowers existed...we'd make a killing! We have however sent a few bouquets to the thesps and performers from their loved ones and/or supporters, so we've managed to get in on a piece of the action!

Schools are back today too, which is good news as our passing trade side of the business always picks up as the mums have freedom again!

We are noticing a change in the seasons too, from the slight drop in temperature and the endless rain and the fact its dark again at 5am when our alarm goes off! (I can hear the violins playing in the background..). But we do love the the change in flowers too - more deep rich colours are dominating the flower trucks, and some old favs like amaryllis, chillies and snowberry are making a comeback...(how many weeks till Christmas again....eek!)

Web Site Blues

We're florists, we deal in organic matter and generally have our feet rooted in the muck of the physical world. If a lily comes in and it looks like it may have been chilled, we can spot that. When flowers need a little TLC we can deal with that. If a bouquet doesn't look just quite right we can tweak it.

These are things we can do.

When our web site starts playing games with us we get a little worried. When our usually super cool web designer throws his hands up in despair we really start to freak out.

Although the job is in hand and there's a bit of a rebuild going on we're still facing a couple of weeks of uncertainty where the very odd customer may face problems when trying to complete their order.

C'est la vie as they say. It will be sorted and we can get back to our plans of world wide web domination.

Outside of our technical hitches, the Flower Council of Holland have come up with a novel gift to celebrate the great British summer. Combining humour, flowers and the dutch love of all things orange they have created a flower print umbrella to keep us dry during the seasonal months. Very thoughtful of them!

Giant Flower Week!

On our delivery this morning were oversize Celosia and the biggest Dhalia we have ever seen! They dont come cheap but they do make quite a statement we think.

Things are busy as ever with 3 weddings last week and another one this saturday. On top of that there's always a healthy amount of buttonholes and corsages to make up for our customers who are off to weddings of their own.

We created a couple of tribute bouquets for the poor fireman who lost his life on Dalry Road last week. Some flowers you're always happy to make up, others you wish you didn't have to.

On a happier note, our dog, Olive, was up and running in the Pentlands this morning, courtesy of Sarah McLean and Citydogs! She takes Olive and a pack of other hounds out in the wild and lets them be themselves for an hour or two. Then very kindly hosed her down so she flopped into her bed all clean and soft and not honking in the slightest!

In Shandon News, Tom Duffin, our neighbour, of X-Sail fame was on the telly last week, promoting his wind powered land yacht on a beach with no wind....not ideal but they did a pretty good job of selling it all the same - just a shame my gran's dead, she would have loved it! You can check out our local celeb here.

Come Rain or Shine

Phewwy it is hot round these parts! Not that we are complaining, but we have had to invest in a few fans to try and keep the flowers cool and there's a constant argument as to who gets to take Olive, our puppy for her walks (aka leisurley stroll through the park in the sunshine!).

The rain has not been a stranger either though, which at least has been keeping all the garden plants in good health!

Despite the whole of Shandon being away on holiday since the schools broke up on Friday, we had a busy weekend with 2 weddings, one at The George Hotel, the other at Craighouse. See photo above.

Talking of holidays, a couple of the local businesses are off on their hols too - one of which is Blueberryhill cafe next door, how will we survive?! No baked tatties and giant scones for us this week - boo! So we brought our own lunch in today - Innocent (the smoothie people) do veggies pots now, so just eaten a curry one and feeling very 'fu' and have left the shop with a floral yet spicy aroma!

Monday moan alert though - where are the bloomin bin men???! I am surrounded by bin bags and Olive is in her element ferreting around in them! they didn't turn up at all last Monday, and its looking the same this week...rant rant ;o))

Three weddings this week - a sunflower one, a daisy one and a peony one - all very summery but all with a contemporary twist - should be good, especially if the sun hangs around a bit longer...

Flowers for the Teacher.

It's that time of year again where kids are moving up a year or onto a new school and leaving their favourite teacher behind. And more popular than ever it seems is the gift of flowers.

For some it's just a few stems of gerbera, others a nice little orchid plant. And although we love the business we do feel sorry for the people comming in and ordering 4 or 5 bigger bunches, or 6 or 7, or 8 or 9, or even the very rare 15 bunches at once!

I'm not sure if these people have lots of kids or if their kids have lots of teachers but we welcome it all regardless. For next week the holidays start and Ashley Terrace will be a much quieter place because of it.

If it wasn't for the 5 million upcoming weddings we've got booked we might actually have time to be bored!!!

Also, we just want to say a big hello to all the brave souls who made it to the Edinburgh Canal Festival on Saturday. There was a pretty good turn out but I think that with there being as much water coming out the sky as there was in the canal itself, it wasn't quite what the organisers had hoped for.