March 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 March we created a party table scape with glass bottles and jars of different heights and shapes, so we could use all the best of the early season stems, even if there were only smaller numbers if each type.

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 March we went to our local Surrey Hills Biodynamic vineyard - Albury Vineyard and used their tasting room for our table scape, and the bare vines as a backdrop to create an outside scene.

We started off by placing the party table in the middle of the room, but the photos had glare from the large picture windows looking out over the vineyard

We also had the lines of the black window frames interupptting our bottle displays.

when we moved the table to the back of the room, the flowers could really shine.

We then moved outside and were treated to a glass of their pink fizz, which helped our displays and laughter levels considerably.

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