April shoot behind the scenes

A big part of The British Flowers Book is the photoshoots using seasonal flowers in “real life” situations that we as florists and flower farmers would supply flowers for .

For our book 2 photo shoots, we wanted to make sure we used only sustainable floristry methods, and readily available, in season flowers.

For April we created Wedding bouquets with mid month flowers, in 2 different colour ways. We tied them with Twool, and used a naturally dyed silk ribbon.

A Photoshoot is a great way of showing off floristry, without having to be under a time constraint of handing over a display to a customer, but that does mean that sometimes displays made specifically for photoshoots, might stretch the truth about what would be easily accessible, or are unrealistic in what would be included in a customer budget..We wanted to use real life models (us, the British flowers book team) and the actual flowers that are available., and also assess how long they lasted when the camera went away. Our behind the scenes photos show you how we actually got the shots, In April Charlotte Johnston and I dealt with freezing conditions and pouring rain to make images that would look like it was a bride coming out of the church clutching their bouquet.

Thank you to Charlotte for being game enough to get out her wedding dress, and still being able to fit into it!

It really wasn’t wedding day weather, so the behind the scenes photos show the coats, hats and boots that we used out of shot

We had planned to use our beautiful field backdrop, but the rain and dull spring meant that we have do change plan and use the greenhouse, with staging and plant trays moved out of the way.

The first colour way used the amazing copper image tulips, gems, wallflowers and salmone ranunculus. The scent from lilac and the white lion broom was beautiful, but ultimately we didn’t use these as the April images as we preferred the blue and white theme.

There are actually very few months in the year when naturally blue flowers are easy to come by, so we felt this fantastic bouquet made with Spanish bluebells, double tulips, ranunculus, Thalia narcissus, forget me nots and choisya as the foliage.

My thanks as ever go to Kerry Harrison, for capturing the photos that we needed.