January shoot behind the scenes

A big part of The British Flowers Book is the photoshoots using seasonal flowers in “real life” situations that we’d supply flowers for .

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

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 this case on a cold January day between squalls of rain)

January 2024 was fairly mild, but very wet, so we used a combination of fresh flowers and dried honesty to make our Headbands. All were created by paper taping stems onto taped wire. Our ingredients were. Hellebores, Snowdrops, Clematis, Viburnum tinus, Viburnum bodnantense, Hazel catkins, Rosemary, Pittosporum and Eucalyptus.

We tested the longevity of all the flowers by leaving them on damp paper overnight, and even the Hellebores surprised us by remaining fresh until the next day. The honesty holds the record, as that’s still going strong in the barn almost a year later.

We also learnt that if you hang a hair band in a tree, the wind will catch it , and you will get to see all the wire and tape gubbins!