Kiddal Quarry Farm, Kiddal Quarry Farm, York Road, Leeds (2024)

27/10/2024

✨TAKE YOUR TIME✨

Autumnal colours for Danielle who got married yesterday - congratulations! 🙌

This was the first wedding I’ve flowered that I actually gave myself enough time to prepare and that felt so good. It’s not always possible during the busy days of the summer but in the quieter days of October I took my time, left loads of space to make mistakes and even made it out for dinner the night before.

Leaving enough time is a lesson I’ve been slow to learn, but doing the wedding flowers course really brought it home.

I suspect it’s a flower farmer mentality - but perhaps I’m wrong. Squeezing as many jobs into the week as possible and leaving just the minimum time for wedding prep. It makes it stressful and I stop enjoying the work.

If you leave enough time, and respect the importance of what you’re doing, the joy comes back. I loved making this bridal bouquet and flower crown because I left myself loads of time to faff. And faffing is important.

All of this is to say give yourself the time you need to enjoy the job if you can. Sometimes circumstances get in the way, but if you’re like me, stop giving yourself such a tough schedule. Not all work days are created equal and if you need to be at your best, producing beautiful things under pressure, don’t assume you can do full days of that on repeat. Schedule in some down time. It makes all the difference ☺️

That’s it for me for fresh flowers for this season. I’m taking a holiday for a few weeks so I’ll see you on the other side 💫

25/10/2024

✨BUTTONHOLES✨

This little cutie was for Taylor and Dan at the beginning of the month ☺️ Sometimes you just get lucky with the perfect flower on the day ✨

I have 12 buttonholes to do for the wedding tomorrow and by some absolute miracle I have just enough of the flower I need - can you guess what it is? The garden has really done me proud with this one ✨

24/10/2024

✨DUCKS✨

Just a casual duck appreciation post. I sat in my tulip trench yesterday feeling sorry for myself and they waddled over and snuffled around me and made everything better with their contented noises and muddy noses. Thanks ducks for adding so much joy to the garden ❤️

Photo by 🙏

23/10/2024

✨WINTER FUNERAL FLOWERS✨

Although I’m closing for fresh flowers this week I’m going to experiment with continuing to offer funeral flowers. There is beauty in the garden, even over the late autumn and winter, and I want to see what I can create with it. Of course that requires some open minded customers but I’m hopeful.

It’s a step towards offering seasonal flowers all year round, and funerals feel more achievable than weddings. I’m conscious that without the British option you often leave people with no choice other than imported flowers in floral foam.

Hopefully there are some adventurous souls out there who are excited about garden gathered ingredients even in the leaner months. Let’s see!

If you’re a florist do you offer funeral flowers over late autumn and winter?

Photo by the wonderful

22/10/2024

✨SEASONAL✨

The final gift bouquet of the season heading out today - she’s a quirky one but isn’t that the beauty of season-led floristry? The garden shapes the design.

For a very supportive customer - the last of a subscription. I hope she loves it! ❤️

21/10/2024

✨AUTUMN WEDDING✨

It is seriously autumn vibes in the garden now… very excited for the last wedding of the year on Saturday ✨

It has been a bit nerve wracking trying to keep the garden going until the end of the month and I’ll think twice before committing to another end of October wedding 🙈

I still have some space for September weddings next year - if this is your style get in touch 🙏

Photo by

19/10/2024

✨LAST CHANCE✨

This is it! Last chance for fresh flowers from me for the season. After Oakwood market today I won’t be selling any more bouquets until I open again in April.

It feels pretty crazy that this season is almost over but I’m super excited for it. Just a few deliveries this week and a wedding next weekend and I’ll be closing the shop until December 1 when I reopen for Christmas orders 💫

Hope to see some familiar faces at the market today - and if not, I’ll see you for the Christmas market in December!

18/10/2024

✨COLOUR✨

It’s the time of year when colour starts to fade - once the killing frost hits, the natural world is all muted tones until spring.

So it’s pretty magical that by cutting and drying flowers in the heat of summer you can save a slice of colour, press pause on a specific moment and bring it inside for the winter to keep, to brighten dull days with a splash of bright summer sunshine.

Me and my dried flowers will be tomorrow along with the very last of my fresh flowers before my season ends. Hope to see you there! ✨

17/10/2024

✨BRIDAL BOUQUET✨

Celebrating every flower loving bride who takes the British flowers route and trusts that whatever flowers are in bloom on their special day will be the right ones.

It’s a different kind of planning, being open to what the season has to give and not holding on too tightly to a specific flower or image.

I really appreciate that choosing me for your wedding flowers is a leap of faith, and I don’t take that investment of trust lightly. Having the most beautiful bouquet you can imagine on the most special day is of utmost importance, and I hope to always be able to repay your faith in me and my flowers by bringing your dreams to life, even though I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like until the day before, or maybe because of that?

Anyway, thank you to all my brides both past and future for trusting me. It means the world to me ✨

Photo by at

16/10/2024

✨CHRISTMAS WREATHS✨

I know it’s largely about the experience, and that lots of people just want to make a wreath and don’t especially care what’s in it or what it’s made from, but if you do care about using a compostable rather than plastic foam base, and you do care that the foliage is sourced locally and responsibly, and you also care about having a good time making something pretty - then please consider making your wreath with me ✨

My Christmas wreath workshops are in the barn, with the added bonus of chickens for company, and I’ll walk you through making a gorgeous wreath using our homegrown willow bases and lots of farm gathered foliage, plus dried flowers and seed heads.

Let me know if you have any questions. Booking via my website 🙏

15/10/2024

✨CHRYSANTHEMUMS✨

What a fab addition to the garden these have been! Flowering for ages and still going strong - turns out they dry well too 🙂

Really hoping they survive the winter under a blanket of sheep’s wool - have your chrysanths survived outside in Yorkshire?

Lovely pic by 🙏

14/10/2024

✨FLOWER THERAPY✨

Part of yesterday’s wellbeing day was picking out something from the garden and writing a poem. This isn’t what I chose but is a very worthy contender.

It was a gorgeous morning and exactly what I hoped it would be. Look out for the spring edition - sign up to my newsletter to be the first to hear 🙂

12/10/2024

✨CREATING✨

I absolutely loved hosting my first dried flower wreath workshop this morning ☺️

The wreaths created were so beautiful and it was exactly the relaxing few hours I hoped it would be.

As much as possible my workshops are about enjoying the process, and I try to keep instruction to a bare minimum. Today proved once again that really all anyone needs to create something beautiful is some protected time and the right materials.

So rarely do we give ourselves the space to just enjoy being creative, to immerse ourselves in the quiet focus of doing something that we enjoy. What a pleasure to create that space for others and for myself. Thank you for coming and for trusting me with your precious Saturday morning ❤️

11/10/2024

✨SEASONS✨

Just taking a moment to marvel at the floral evolution of the seasons and the variety still in the garden - this beauty is a mix of rudbeckia, sunflower, scabious, daucus, snapdragon, nigella, solidago, cosmos, dahlia, strawflower, chrysanthemum, mint, Himalayan honeysuckle and smoke bush.

There was frost on the ground this morning but the flowers are still going… fingers crossed for just a few more weeks! 🤞

10/10/2024

✨GRATITUDE✨

Eeeee as I race towards the end of my fresh flower season, eeking out the last few weeks of weddings and bouquets and florist buckets, I am feeling super grateful to everyone who has supported me this season.

It has been a pivotal third growing season, the one where I finally found my feet, and really surprisingly met my targets for making something like a living wage.

I’m by no means done, and I hope to continue fine tuning my business such that I can continue to live and work healthily and happily, supporting myself financially, and with enough time and energy left over to enjoy life outside of work all year round.

It is a work in progress, but it now all feels much more achievable than it has to date. There will be challenges. But I am doing work that I genuinely love, that lights me up, that fills me with energy and excitement. Maybe that won’t always be the case, we’re constantly changing and evolving, but right now I am sat in deep appreciation for the experience.

And it wouldn’t be possible without every single person who has supported me and my business, from my parents to my customers to my peers and to all of you out there for your support and encouragement and inspiration.

Deep deep gratitude to be heading out into the sun and the wind, to spend the next hours with dirty knees and joy all the way to my fingertips to be out in communion with nature, digging and sowing and singing along with the last of the bees in celebration of the final flowers of the season ❤️

07/10/2024

✨TEAMWORK✨

Such a fun and satisfying installation to be part of - working together on the mantelpiece, and each making a bowl for the table, and repurposing the arch to create the floor installation - it’s amazing how quickly it all came together with us all hustling.

As I’ve said before, the beauty of sustainable mechanics is the freedom, the flexibility, the imagination. All of the individual components coming together and apart to create something new, the building blocks and the beautiful flowers combining to create something magical.

Thanks to Jo and Sabine for organising and leading the day and to the other amazing florists for making it so joyful ☺️

Photo by .bramley 🙏
Flowers by
Venue

04/10/2024

✨WEDDINGS✨

Congratulations to and - so happy to be a little part of your big celebration - thank you for trusting me 🙏

Wishing you so much love and joy and juicy times together and many happy healthy days ❤️

03/10/2024

✨LOVE YOUR WORK✨

Tuesday was a really great day. I was lucky enough to spend it surrounded by talented florists, beautiful flowers from and learning from two great teachers and at the stunning

So many more amazing images to come from .bramley of the day’s installations but for now here’s a pretty little bowl I made… and I’m celebrating it as a mark of progress that I thoroughly loved creating it. Full credit to Rachel both for encouraging me to practise and play and put the hours in, and for the very helpful advice that often you need to take away rather than add more - make each stem count, think carefully about every flower.

It was such a joy to work with such beautiful materials, in a gorgeous setting, with great company. Thanks Jo and Sabine for a fun and inspiring day of learning and play 🙏

And thanks Damian for getting the gorgeous pics to us so quickly! ✨

02/10/2024

✨SHOWSTOPPERS✨

Finally getting around to sharing this gorgeous floral installation from my time in August with

After another day making a huge broken arch yesterday - more on that to come - I feel confident that I have all the tools I need to make incredible show stopping foam free installations.

What I’ve taken from each of the courses I’ve done is that there is no one way to do this - just gather lots of tools and techniques and use your imagination to bring the vision to life.

The fun of this model is that you can totally make it your own, transform any space - you don’t need to work off a specific structure and each part can be repurposed to create a totally different installation in a different space. And due to the free form mechanics the flowers are free form too - not rigid and structured but natural and flowing.

It’s amazing to watch a beautiful installation appear from an assortment of vessels and some chicken wire and some sticks and grave spikes, plus stunning British flowers and foliage, clearly a key ingredient.

This one was made with a fab team - thanks to all for a really enjoyable few days creating together 🙏

Get in touch if you’re looking for a show stopping foam free installation for your wedding ☺️

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30/09/2024

✨FEMININE ENERGY✨

We had such an enjoyable and informative day visiting Rachel yesterday with our region - conversation, tea and cake, garden wandering and some open discussion about flower farming and floristry and the different paths we can take.

I took away a really fundamental realisation thanks both to Rachel and the chats I had whilst there. So often we are given the message, directly and indirectly, that the feminine way of doing things is inferior, but of course it is never framed that way, so we miss that it’s even happening.

The closer I get to myself, to my intuition, the less I need to look outside for guidance. And the longer I do this work, the more I feel resistance to being told that my way of doing it is less valid. Previously I believed that I was wrong, that eventually I would figure out how to do it right, how to squeeze myself into the shape of a perfect flower farmer based on someone else’s definition.

But I can see clearly now that that’s bullish*t. I am who I am, with all of my strengths and my weaknesses and my own unique set of experiences. What works for me is what works for me, fully embracing who I am. I can open myself to guidance, to learning from those who inspire me, but only I know the best way of running my business for the benefit of me.

It is a battle for me to be organised in the way that other people are organised. I hate spreadsheets with a passion and I don’t like straight lines. I keep my seeds in jumbo bags with approximate date ranges on them and plant out my plants into whatever space seems appropriate when they are ready. There is no master plan other than a trust in my own intuition.

I know full well this will be horrifying to some. But to everyone else out there who is hiding who they really are, trying to squeeze themselves into someone else’s way of doing things, I see you. Don’t buy into the fiction that the masculine way of doing this is superior. If that works for you and you’re a woman with masculine energy in spades, I salute you. But if you’re a woman who is suppressing her feminine to fit an outdated mould then you are robbing the world of your uniqueness ✨

28/09/2024

✨BOUQUETS✨

Still makin em 😄

Happy Saturday ☀️

27/09/2024

✨SEED GATHERING✨

It’s that time of the year again! Wandering around the garden on a seed treasure hunt. I’m trying not to let too much go to seed as I still have weeks of fresh flowers hopefully but some are inevitable - you can’t override a plant’s nature, just delay it slightly.

At the moment I’m collecting seeds from the lupins, scabious, achillea, lavaterra, nigella and bupleurum, and resowing for next year.

I’ll be running my annual seed saving workshop on October 5 from 2-3, an hour of wandering the garden with me and collecting your own seed. I’ll talk about what to look for and how to store them. Saving seed isn’t complicated at a basic home gardening level, and I want everyone to be able to do it.

Tickets are £10 and you can take home a packet of each of the seeds we collect. Bring something to take them home in and to label them with. Let’s hope for sunshine ☀️

26/09/2024

✨DRYING✨

I love dried flowers but boy are they a faff. Part of this is my set up - moving them from my flower shack into the barn then into the house. So I’m super excited to be adding a new space to the farm next spring where I can hang them once and be done with it.

But part of it is accepting that dried flowers just take up time - growing, cutting, bunching, hanging, sorting, moving - and even though it is a good way to use surplus stems during the summer they are a time consuming and valuable product, not an afterthought.

Thankfully I have a friend coming over today to help me sort and bunch in advance of the dried flower sale on Saturday morning - book a free ticket via the website to come and choose your own bunches in person to make up a box. After Saturday I’ll be making my £55 wholesale boxes available on the website.

Thanks to for the picture ❤️

24/09/2024

✨CUT AND CREATE✨

Last cut and create bouquet making workshop of the season is coming up next Saturday from 11-1. Still space available to join me to gather flowers from the garden and learn to make a spiral hand tied bouquet.

If the weather is rubbish we’ll be in the barn for the arranging segment but fingers crossed for sunshine ☀️

Book via my website. Hope you can join me! ☺️

23/09/2024

✨WELLBEING✨

My friend and I are running our first foray into joint space holding on Sunday October 13 from 9-1 at the farm.

The morning will be a blend of meditation and yoga, writing and floristry for wellbeing, including some foraging. I’m a strong believer in the health benefits of all of these practises and I’m excited to bring them together with one of my favourite humans ❤️

This first one is an experiment, really looking to test the water and see what works, so I’ve kept the ticket price (£25) and participants (11) low to reflect that. We’d love to have a range of people willing to give us feedback on the experience.

Very happy to answer any questions - just message me. Booking is via the events page of my website 🙏

Gorgeous picture by 🥰