Wolves Lane Flower Company

15/09/2023

BIG CHANGES UP AHEAD FOR WLFC

The 2023 season will be drawing to a close soon so it's time to share some news. Marianne has stepped back from the day to day growing and running of the business and is busy juggling family life and new projects. Camila has loved managing WLFC for the past couple of seasons but will be having another baby in October.

For those of you that don't know, WLFC started from nothing in 2017 and has grown to be a meaningful presence in the London and British flower farming scene. We're immensely proud of what we created. We've published a book, grown and sold thousands of flowers, flowered up multiple weddings, run various flower filled workshops, been featured in Vogue, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Gardeners World, Gardens Illustrated among many others. So it's with a mixture of enormous pride and some sadness that we say that we're going to be taking a break from flower farming for now. We're giving up our growing space at Wolves Lane and won't be able to supply you with our gorgeous flowers next season. We are so grateful to all of you for your support over the years and for being brilliant champions of British flowers.

We're going to be selling fresh flowers until late October. Our next dried flower sale is on the 19th September at 10am, or you can ask us to mail them to you. We have a lot of plant stock, growing & floristry kit which we'll also be selling as much of on the 19th September at 10am.

Our next PYO session is on the 24th September.

Florists, never fear you can always find a grower on the website. Our pals will be able to help you out.

We'd love to have made a schmaltzy montage reel with all of our high points over the years, but in true form reality trumps insta so we were up with the sparrows cutting flowers & doing workshop prep so we'll make one another time! You'll have to be happy with this image taken by the wonderful for How to Grow the Flowers (published a year ago today!) which captures it all, friendship and the absolute love of flowers.

Camila & Marianne x

30/08/2023

I’m baaaaaack! After a 2 day wait to get on a flight from Barcelona back to London am firmly back with the flowers and on emails. Apologies to everyone who has emailed about the dried flower sell off and has been waiting for a reply. I’ll be getting back to everyone today about slots. If you missed the post about this. We’ll be starting to sell off our dried stock on the 12th & 19th September at 10am at Wolves Lane. £50 minimum spend. Please email to book your space as we can’t have everyone turn up at the same time!

26/08/2023

The glasshouse and plot are producing so many gorgeous blooms at the moment. It sometimes gets a bit lean and scratchy at the beginning of august but by the end of the moment new successions have hit their stride and the dahlias are in full flow. Thanks so much for capturing this haul so beautifully. There’s still a few opportunities to visit us, learn about growing flowers and take some blooms home this season. Check out the workshops page on our website to see details on our open session and PICK Your Own on Sunday 10th September & our dahlias workshop taking place on the 14th September ❤️

20/08/2023

For Sonia who married Rob at the Barbican last weekend. A bouquet full of sunshine and dahlias and brimming with phlox, rudbeckia, cosmos and a touch of ninebark. Thanks to the mega team for helping me set 25 linear metres of continuous table runners and making it so fun. As always this was one of the only photos I took! It’s always a joy to create flowers for couples who truly embrace seasonality. They get the best out of us and the flowers. Huge congratulations again to S&R ❤️

17/08/2023

DRIED FLOWER SELL OFF!

If you’re on our florists mailing list you’ll be receiving all this info plus the stock list this morning. For everyone else here’s the info on how and when we’re selling off the dried stock this season.

We have been ridiculously efficient and nimble fingered this year growing more flowers for drying than ever before.

We're so excited to share our dried flower sell off dates with you so that you can be as creative and flowery as possible during the fallow period. These are going to take place on Tuesday 12th September at 10am and Tuesday 19th September at 10am.

There is a minimum spend of £50. Please email to reserve a space on either day. Spaces will be first come first served. There may well be other dates to purchase so do let us know if you can't make it and we can be in touch about what's left. Sales and delivery to UK by courier/post is possible with a minimum spend of £150 + courier/p&p.

We're also going to be selling off some of our workshop and event stock on the same dates. Vessels, vases, sundries, urns, plinths, anything and everything a florist might need!

31/05/2022

Wolves Lane Flower Club is back!

We’re offering a one off flower delivery of scented seasonal and sustainable blooms to north Londoners. Be quick though we only have 25 delivery slots! Flowers will be delivered on Thursday 2nd June between 8am - 2pm.

For £45 including north London delivery*, you’ll receive a bunch of flowers and foliage to arrange & enjoy at home. Just need to remember to leave a bucket out on delivery day and it’ll be filled with a fresh bucket of seasonal blooms.

Check out our FAQs below for information on how it works and also watch our video about why buying local flowers matters to our small business and the planet.

Please note that this is a one-off flower delivery and is not a subscription service.

https://www.wolveslaneflowercompany.com/buyflowers/flowerclub

The Wolves Lane Flower Club is a monthly flower subscription service. Have beautiful, ethically grown flowers delivered to you from our sustainable flower farm in north London.

08/03/2022

isn’t just about women who inspire us although there are many. It’s really about the women who have fought so many battles before us for a gender equal world. There’s still so much more work to do to close the gap in this country and beyond. And we truly hope that the global cut flower industry listens up and starts protecting women’s rights in flower farms in the developing world where safe working conditions and a living wage aren’t a given**

But here’s a nod to the women in our lives, our mothers, sisters, godmothers, grandmothers, aunts, SILs & MILs who have worked, strived and mothered (in all the forms that motherhood takes) to be able to do what men have been able to do for millennia. We hope we’ll be able to continue to set this example for our children.

In this pic: 3 generations of Camila’s family: her mother, sister and niece. Plus Bri!

We wanted to put a pic up of Marianne’s fam as well but ya know she’s still nursing a tiny baby and couldn’t find a pic!

**if you love flowers and just can’t live without imported fresh blooms please consider buying so that the women and men who grew your flowers can be guaranteed a fair wage.

07/03/2022

Hello we’ve been feeling a little paralysed and overwhelmed by everything that’s going on. We’ve been trying to find a meaningful and practical way of helping people in Ukraine. So next Wednesday 16th March at 3pm GMT we’re hosting an online Q&A to raise funds. Spring is THE time for so many flower growing jobs: seed sowing / mulching / potting up dahlia tubers - there’s so much to do which we know can feel very overwhelming! So we’re here to answer your questions about what to do, what to prioritise, what to sow now and where to concentrate your efforts 🌱

The event is free but you will be asked to make a donation with all the money going to DEC] to help people who are fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. We’ll also be asking everyone to send their questions in advance via the VERY SHORT survey that’s linked to the eventbrite. Please fill this in it takes 2 mins and means we’ll really be able to cut to the chase and focus on what YOU want to know 📈

If you can’t make it at that time don’t worry you can still sign up for the event and ask a question. Once it’s over we’ll be sending a recording out to everyone so that they can catch up 💻

The last time we ran a charity Q&A like this we managed to raise £385 so we’re really hoping we can raise that again for DEC] 💕

Thanks so much in advance and if this looks like something your followers or insta community would be interested in please share! 🗣

04/03/2022

What a week. What a time to feel grateful for what we’ve got. Unbelievably we’re only a month away from having the tulips in bloom. For us the changing of the seasons have always been a source of great comfort. Whatever is going on in the world, nature will prevail. Something we like to do when we’re not on the plot is take a walk and nosy around London front gardens to see what’s in bud, what’s in flower (hello irises, blossom & viburnum tinus). It provides us with a connection with something joyful, promising and grounding. Reassuringly the seasons will continue to change and it’s what we’re holding onto at the moment 💕

01/03/2022

Everything is feeling so heavy right now but the 1st day of meteorological spring is nearly over which means we’re nearing the end of the seasonal fallow period. Some spring colour is desperately needed. Here are some of our tulips to look forward to. Believe it or not these guys will start flowering at the end of the month. Joy and relief at least from the flower world is on its way 💕

01/03/2022

Look up & spot the blossom 👀 it's the first of March & officially the first day of meteorological spring 🌱 This year it's a soggy one, but the blossom is providing some joy & diversion on the wet stomps around wheeling a buggy 👶 After the storm damage in the last few weeks we've also looked 👇 down 👇& come across lots of fallen branches, thwarted from flowering after months of hard work developing those buds 😐 But even the branches that have been languishing for a week or so can be snipped off, taken home to be plonked into water and then left to slowly unfurl into flower. The easiest floristy possible for the time starved! Saw that has done the same with some horsechestnut buds which are equally pleasing. A great way to bring spring inside when it's proving reluctant to arrive outside!

26/02/2022

Following the lead of . Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine. Something we only recently discovered due to the most heartbreaking & senseless of circumstances. Countries like Ukraine are names on a map, places we don't think about much day to day. Perhaps we express an opinion about their Eurovision entry. Something flippant & fleeting like that. But Ukraine is home to over 40 million people. People who have gardens, grow flowers, have babies, just like us. The thought 'it could happen to us', the imagining of bundling a tiny baby into an underground bunker has been unbearable these last few days. Posting a photo of a sunflower - it's cheerful yellow petals reflected against a blue sky just like it's flag - feels farcically futile. As does writing this long post to be honest. But what more can we do? We can keep the people of Ukraine, the gardeners, mothers, fathers, dreamers & just ordinary folk in our hearts and minds each day. We can donate & remember it's not 'just another' good cause. It's people's lives - just like us - and they don't deserve to have them ripped apart due to one man's unhinged avarice. Thinking of all Ukrainians today 💛💙🇺🇦

24/02/2022

Following example of posting joy (some Just Joey joy in this case) when the news is sad 🌱

23/02/2022

It’s crazy to think that 2 years ago this half of the glasshouse didn’t even have a bed in it. It was still staging and concrete. After a couple of years of scrimping and saving all our pennies we invested in the timber to create the raised beds and a lot of 💩 and compost to fill them! Swipe right 👉 to see how crazy it gets in the glasshouse in the summer. This season the top half of the glasshouse is planted up with umbellifers: daucus, ammi, orlaya and dill, with larkspur on the other side and a full change to zinnias once they’ve all gone over. We’ve learned a lot over the past few years and absolutely love the process of growing from seed. f you’re interested in growing your own flowers from seed, tuber or bulb. Check out the workshops page on our website 💫

22/02/2022

Thanks so much for all your kind words after the break in at over the weekend. It was amazing to see our DMs overflow with messages and offers of support. We’ll keep you posted here on how you can help the wolves lane site get back on its feet. In the meantime here’s some may froth and moody blues to look forward to 💕💜

17/02/2022

Growing - full of joy and heartache in equal measure. Every year we sow wallflower, without giving it much thought. It’s not our most prized spring crop by a long shot. The tulip and ranunculus make sure of that. It is a welcome flower after so many months of grey so last season we sowed wallflower like we always do and clearly we did something wrong because none of it germinated. NONE. When we usually have more than we need! So this season we’ll miss the wallflower terribly and promise never to take it for granted again 😭

You might wonder why we share instances of failure here and why we don’t just push the stories of success. We could do that but since we want to encourage as many of you to grow your own flowers, we want the idea and process, to be accessible. Perfection isn’t accessible so it isn’t our goal, if it was we’d have moved onto something else a long time ago. Embracing imperfection is part of life so it’s a given that it will be part of growing as well 🌱

16/02/2022

Normally we have a pretty good larkspur crop at WLFC. We sow the seeds in the autumn and they start flowering at the end of May in the glasshouse and keep going through to mid June until they get zapped by 🔥 The problem is the GH just gets too hot for spring sown larkspur so this season we’ve eeked out some outside space for some summer froth! We know we won’t get the same height as all those stems that overwinter in the GH but 🤞🤞🤞 for a decent late summer crop. BTW because we know some of you will ask! Do yourself a favour and put the larkspur seed packet in the fridge for a few days before sowing and you’ll get a better germination rate 💕

14/02/2022

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Make sure you show yourself a bit of love today. I left the grey and very soggy site half and hour early so I could squeeze in a hot drink and biscuit before the boss 👶 gets home.

A spring bridal bouquet from April last year filled with seasonal blooms all grown at Wolves Lane. April - when the British flower season really gets going ✨

My grandad was born on Valentine’s Day well over 100 years ago and was called Valentín. I didn’t have much of a relationship with him because he lived a couple of continents away but I’ll always think of this day as his birthday and making long distance calls on crackly and delayed phone lines 🎈

11/02/2022

It's mid February. We keep reminding you that there won't be blousy roses for some months to come ( 🏵️👮‍♀️) , but seeing as our gorgeous bride Yasmin from last summer hunkered down in the winter gloom & very generously shared some kind words on our Google reviews today, it felt like a good excuse to share again the much loved 'meadow trough' from her & Sandeep's wedding. Couldn't have loved creating this more 💛 Flowers & colour was the extent of the brief & dreaming up the design was a lot of fun...We're probably the first florists to plonk a gutter in the middle of that hotel's conservatory! Happy February dreaming & scheming all ✨

📷

09/02/2022

Chamomile plants all ready for our Galentine’s gift boxes. This is the Roman variety that is shorter than the German kind that people grow for the ☕️

We’re genuinely excited to be making a chamomile carpet in our glasshouse this season. It’ll attract pollinators and provide a pretty green bridge between the beds in an area where we don’t usually grow anything apart from unwanted grass w**d!

Chamomile is really easy to grow and if you haven’t got a garden it’ll do absolutely fine in a pot.

Last orders for your gal / pal this Friday please! Link in our bio 💕💫

08/02/2022

Just another day living the dream that is running a tiny business and raising tiny children. Match made in heaven riiiiiight????! Not whinging promise….just acknowledging that sometimes this combo isn’t the best.

This pic of Marianne + Jem from September looking far more photogenic than anything we could muster today while we shovelled woodchip 💪

And that’s rat tail statice - yes we’re going to grow lots more this summer!

05/02/2022

Sweet peas have been planted out in the glasshouse and the next succession has been sown. We’re hardening off the ones that we’re planning on growing outside and will be getting these in the ground next week. Sweet peas are such a faff, as soon as them bloom you have to stay on top of the cutting daily or else they go to seed and we grow A LOT of sweet peas. The first crop is always the best for us- look at that stem length! Plus Marianne loves them so we’re mainly growing them so we don’t get in trouble with her when she’s back 😬

29/01/2022

Every year round about now seasonal farmer florists around the U.K. start to get a little bit tetchy. The two most flowery dates in the calendar: Valentine’s and Mother’s Day fall just outside of the British flower season meaning that imported stems or blooms grown using artificial heat are the only solution for flower lovers. It’s a SUSTAINABILITY CONUNDRUM 😖

This year we decided to change that. We sowed a few extra seeds last autumn to offer Londoners our Valentine’s / Galentine’s & Mother’s Day plant gift boxes. The promise of beautiful, seasonal and scented flowers without the carbon footprint, plastic wrap and chemicals that come with all those imported flowers ✈️🚛

We’re offering a limited number of these gift boxes. Each pack will include SIX of our most favourite hardy flowering plants. Varieties that we grow every year without fail for their beautiful blooms. We’ve sown and nurtured these plants for you so that they can be planted out straight away. No garden? Pots will do just fine. We’ve included mostly cut and come again varieties, which means that the more they’re cut, the more they’ll bloom! We know we’re biased but the happiness and satisfaction of growing your own blooms outlasts any supermarket bought bouquet. We’re talking real JOY here 💫 See the other images to view just a few of the varieties that we’ve included 🌸🌱❤️

We’ve included a beautiful pressed viola card & a bunch of gift wrapped fluffy bunny tails (grown and dried by yours truly) and some Love-in-a-puff seeds (saved by us as well) for your loved one to sow themselves 🌱

For those that want some instant gratification, every gift box will include a delicious heart shaped, iced, vanilla flavoured biscuit, adorned with edible flower petals from our friends .and.bakes 💕

To order click the link in our bio - all the delivery / collection details are there 🌿

27/01/2022

Glasshouse meets golden hour ⚡️ It might not look very flowery right now but give it a couple of months and this place will look like a jungle and we’ll be cutting lots of calendula 🏵 If you’re keen to grow flowers from seed this season don’t start sowing yet! (Unless you’re sowing sweet peas, snaps or cup & saucer vine) you’ve got to wait until we’ve got 10 hours of daylight to start sowing so hold fire until V day is over 🌱

26/01/2022

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks at our favourite place- the allotment! We’ve been building paths, re-no-digging wayward plots and generally doing a lot of shovelling. The allotment is 5 minutes up the road from wolves lane but a world away from the intensity of the way we grow on site. It’s here that we get to experiment and trial varieties that we just don’t have room for in a world of efficiencies and glasshouse growing. It’s where we get to really enjoy working with flowers. It’s also where we’ve amassed a group of septuagenarian friends. We talk about what they’ve sown, their childhoods, family and how awful the season is. FYI the season is generally awful…even when it’s not, it’s always the worst year for something. Allotmenteers against the world sort of vibes, well against blight and carrot root fly ✊ Back to wolves lane tomorrow…I’ve already clocked some spider mite on the ammi 😭

17/01/2022

Do we specialise in anything?

YES! WLFC is really all about encouraging others, all of YOU to grow flowers yourselves. We cultivate and sell thousands of stems a year but it’ll never be enough to satisfy the insatiable appetite for flowers in the capital especially with our micro urban farm. And while flowers have been turned into a very profitable international commodity over the past 60 years, no supermarket or postbox blooms will ever compete with the intense joy that your own seed to vase journey will bring. So 2022 is going to be really focussed on empowering others to grow their own whether they have a postage stamp sized patio or 90ft south facing garden. We’re taking on fewer weddings so that we can run more workshops. We’re delighted that our first Growing Flowers from Seed workshop of the year is practically sold out - thanks so much for all your bookings. Check out our workshops page and if there’s anything that you want to learn about that isn’t listed then send us a message and if it’s something we can run we will! If not, we’ll point you in the right direction of someone who does that sort of thing 🌸

14/01/2022

Yesterday morning, just me and the 🦊. It was bliss even though it was freezing and I wasn’t wearing thermals. I potted on for about 4 hours solid in the prop house, listening to the radio. Perfect….until someone drove into my car 🚗 Gotta hold onto those good feelings while they last! Happy weekend all ❄️

12/01/2022

FLORISTS!

We’re making some changes to the way we sell our flowers this year. If you haven’t already filled in the form on our website on the Florists page please do and we’ll send you the info. It saves us having to resend the same email 20,000 / year. If you’re not a florist you can still buy buckets of flowers from us at our normal email address: [email protected]
Please don’t fill in the form unless you get paid to work with flowers. Wishing you all a brilliant season 🌸

11/01/2022

Who is on our team?? YOU ARE

Raising plants / kids - takes a village. We’re part of various teams & communities and they help us grow and sell our seasonal & sustainable flowers. We have our community of london florists, our bread and better, other small business owners who support our tiny enterprise and kindly shout about our flowers in hundreds of stories and posts. Our community of U.K. flower farmers - we’ve learnt so much from so many of these growers including all 3 members of so many flower farmers are career changers who want to grow on scale or just in their back garden and there’s room for all of them. It’s exciting to be part of an emerging network of British flower growers. And there’s you Instagram, the team that keeps the dialogue going and open, we hope. This time of year is tricky for seasonal growers. There are no fresh flowers and two of the BIGGEST flower dates in the diary are coming up in February and March. It can feel quite polarised in the floral community on grown versus flown and while imported flowers will never sit comfortably with us we’ve learned that these issues aren’t binary. For us it’s all about informing and educating the consumer and allowing them to make their own choices.

Picture of our husbands and kids (in desperate need of an update because this was taken BC (before Caspar) because they have shovelled, tinkered on square space, reviewed contracts, potted on and built lots of raised beds. Like so many other flower growers our families have provided us with invaluable support. And other than our amazing and tiny team of growing helpers (see 2 posts ago) they keep us going all 365 days of the year! 📷

10/01/2022

10th January and we’re super late joining in with 😬 We took a week off!

Who do we like working with? EACH OTHER!
We’re a real partnership. We started growing together in 2017. What began as a passion project is now our full time job. We love working with brides, grooms, florists, corporate businesses and the extended WLFC team who help us run our workshops. We each work to our strengths but support each other behind the scenes to run our micro flower farm in sunny north London (sun currently on sabbatical but due to return in a couple of months times 🤞)

Last season we were away from the nitty gritty of flower farming a lot of the time as we were working on really exciting projects, a lot of weddings and shoots. So for us 2022 is all about getting back to basics, back to the farm, back to doing what we love the most and that’s growing flowers. We’re looking forward to working with all of our London florists - surely the most enthusiastic bunch of seasonal flower lovers out there! We’re excited for all our couples getting married especially the ones doing the arranging themselves. We arranged the flowers for our own weddings and it’s a wonderful thing to do. You just need an organised and slightly bossy ringleader to make sure it all gets done on time! This season we’re making more room for workshops, we only ran a few last year because of Covid, babies and the sometimes insurmountable vertical cliff edge that small scale organic growing feels like. There are never enough hands and the jobs are never done. But! We absolutely love running workshops and sharing our flowery knowledge with future growers. We can’t wait to get started 💫

August flowers all grown and arranged by us 🌸