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Umbel Passionate grower of sustainable cut flowers. Shop temporarily closed, due to taking job with

24/12/2022

A miniature wreath to wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

I’ve been a bit quiet on Facebook this autumn as I’ve been taking time to focus on my family and consider my next steps in Umbel’s journey. I love to use this time of year to draw in and be a bit more contemplative, as there’s a special quality to life with the long evenings that is a strong counter to the normal hustle and bustle of life.

More to come on that in the New Year, but for now wishing you all a very joyful Christmas and a peaceful and restorative end to 2022 😊🎄

13/09/2022

It was great to collaborate with Maria from on Saturday for the Batheaston Riverside Pop-Up Market.

Our Flower Bar completely sold out of flowers (again!), and it was wonderful to have conversations with local people about what we do, and meet new customers and catch up with old. Thank you to everyone who came along and chatted with us and bought flowers - and to for organising this great community event.

The market marks the close of my growing season for this year.

My flowers have slowed their production early this season, due to an extended family trip we made during August. We travelled over three weeks by road to Austria, via France, Germany and Belgium - a much delayed family adventure, originally planned for 2020. While we had an incredible time, the flowers, as you may imagine, fared less well! The lack of cutting and deadheading during this time - not to mention the extreme heat and lack of rain - means they have drawn their flowering to a close early. And who, after all, can blame them.

So I would like to thank everyone who has supported Umbel during this year with their custom. Your support and loyalty means the world, and it has been a great pleasure to create flowers for you.

I’m looking forward to some quiet time to take stock of the past growing season, and to plan my next steps. And to share the floral inspiration that I haven’t had time to share yet during this unusually busy summer - so stay tuned.

🌺

08/09/2022

End of season flower sale 🌺

Come on down and join me and on Saturday morning at Batheaston Riverside, 9am-12pm, to treat yourself to some beautiful flowers at our locally grown ‘flower bar’.

We’ll be at the fabulous Pop Up Market, in the Batheaston Riverside Car Park, organised by , alongside lots of other fabulous stalls offering local crafts and produce.

This last hurrah will mark the end of the growing season for me, as my production has slowed, in part to to the long hot summer, followed by hard rains, but also because I have been away for a longer than normal family trip this year, which has taken its toll on my succession planting.

We’ll have lovely mix of autumnal stems available in a pick’n’mix arrangement, so you can choose just the colours you’d like. Come early to get the best flowers as last time we nearly sold out! Hope to see you there.

29/07/2022

It was very special to create a bridal bouquet for my niece Charlotte last weekend, for her marriage to Jack. Charlotte wanted something cascading, in a colour palette of whites/creams and blues. Here’s me modelling it in the studio (with the help of a mirror!).

The bouquet is made entirely with my locally grown flowers and foliage, and includes white malope, lysimachia, scabious, ammi and cosmos; blue clary sage, scabious, agastache and lavender; lime green hydrangea and sweet peas, with pittosporum, eucalyptus and clematis foliage. It’s encased in a collar of scented geranium (for the option of a bit of last minute aromatherapy for the bride).

Congratulations Charlotte and Jack, and wishing you every joy in your married lives together 🥰

18/07/2022

It was wonderful to participate in the first Batheaston pop-up market organised by Grow Batheaston on Saturday morning.

So many lovely local businesses and independent makers and growers to choose from. The sun shone and the people came - lots of them! Many stall holders sold out of produce - including very nearly us! Thank you so much to everyone who came along and supported us, bought flowers, chatted to us, and of course to all those who organised this fabulous event.

I ran a 'Flower Bar' jointly with Maria from The Bath Greenhouse, another local flower grower and florist based in Batheaston, where we pooled our flower stock and allowed people to choose their own stems, in a sort of floral pick and mix. This proved really popular and a great way for people to sample our flowers on a small scale.

Maria and I are both members of Flowers From The Farm, a national cooperative of small scale artisan farmer florists like us, in which there's a strong spirit of collaboration, as we're all on a similar journey of helping transform how flowers are bought and sold in the UK, towards a more locally based model. You can search their website to find flower growers like us all over the country - great if you want to send local flowers to someone far away.

It was lovely to collaborate with Maria (whose garden is open to the public next weekend under the National Garden Scheme), and wonderful to make so many connections with local people. The next pop-up market is on Saturday 10th September, and we'll be there again - so hope to see some of you there again too!

15/07/2022

Head on down to Batheaston Riverside car park this Saturday morning ✨9am-12pm✨ where I’ll be hosting a pop-up ‘Flower Bar’ with 🌺

Come and choose yourself some flowers or just come and say hello and chat to us about what we do 👋

In case you’re wondering, a ‘Flower Bar’ is like a floral ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ - you choose the stems you want, and we assemble and wrap them for you. Or just tell us the value and we’ll chose the flowers for you 😊 We’ll have a sumptuous array of all our locally grown blooms, set out just like a floral sweet shop. Fun huh?

This is the first of a series of pop up markets organised by the fabulous and there’ll be some amazing independent businesses and a variety of talented local makers and producers there.

Check out their pages and give them a follow - and come and meet us all in person. Hope to see you there 🌻

12/07/2022

Flowers for a July wedding…

I promised to share some more pictures of the flowers I created for the wedding of Shim and Jon a few weeks ago, and here they are. One of the lovely things about growing your own flowers as a florist is that you’re able to grow things specially with certain events in mind. In this case it was dusky pink stocks, wine and pale pink astrantia, the deep burgundy of Daucus carota ‘Dara’ (wild carrot), mahogany cornflower ‘Black Ball’ and the softest dusky pink lacy umbels of Achillea millefolium ‘Summer Berries’.

Combined with other garden delights such as Rose ‘James Galway’, Ammi majus, Scabious, Lavender, Knautia macedonia and Sanguisorba it made for a perfect sorbet and berry mix of pinks and creams.

As well as the bouquet there was a bridal wrist corsage, buttonholes and lady’s corsage, hair flowers, table flowers in vintage style bottles, as well as two focal arrangements presented, at the request of the bride, in her groom’s green welly boots on garden chairs brought from their home. (To overcome the hefty slope of the marquee’s field floor these were swiftly transformed into ‘ballet wellies’ to lash them to the chairs and keep them secure!).

It was a real joy to create these flowers, and the location of the wedding on a wild flower seed farm gave an excuse to give a nod to the beauty of the seedheads and pods that are so busy ripening at this time of year, which are textures I love to work with.

Of course I can never promise certain flowers, the vagaries of weather and the like being what they are, and some things I’d hoped to be ready in my cutting patches weren’t quite, which is why I was so pleased to be able to count on other local flower growers , and to provide additional stems where I needed them.

I’ve got two more weddings coming up in the next couple of weeks, and am looking forward to creating more beautiful locally grown flowers for people’s special days. More and more people seem to be recognising the high impact of imported flowers, and that there are real alternatives to this approach, which don't just bring environmental benefits, but also look stunning, natural and beautifully romantic too.

05/07/2022

It was very special to create flowers for Shim and Jon's wedding on Saturday. The brief was flowers with a romantic feel, not too traditional; natural and soft, in a palette of pinks and creams with highlights of wine and magenta. The location was a wild flower seed farm and I wanted to reflect this with hints of seedpods and flowers with a wild flower meadow feel.

These wonderful pictures by Cindy Kitchker Photography beautifully capture the day, and Shim and Jon's radiant love for each other.

The floral brief included a bridal bouquet, hair flowers, wrist corsage, buttonholes and two large focal displays for the marquee (characterfully displayed in the groom's welly boots!). I'll share more pictures in the coming days, but for now I want to wish Shim and Jon every happiness in their married lives together. May your love continue to flourish and bloom ❤️ 🌺

Photography: Cindy Kitchker Photography
Interfaith Minister: Bryony Wildblood - Southsea Soul Work
Bridal Gown: Justforyou Bridal
Hair Stylist & MUA: Kat Sanders-Smith
Florist: Umbel
Catering: Strawberry Fields Catering
Band: Sons In The Wild
Wedding Cake: Family friend Peggy Foster

Siobhan Kelly Jon Slade ❤️

22/06/2022

The bees were buzzing busily on yesterday's Summer Solstice. Here they are on my Canterbury Bells which they seem to adore.

These beautiful blooms will be just some of the ones we'll be using at this Sunday's Summer Solstice Celebration workshop that I'm running with Georgie from Bright Blue Yoga.

Georgie will be taking us through a mindful, feel-good yoga practice to offer balance and ease. I'll be leading us in the making of a summer posy jar, made of freshly picked, locally grown flowers and scented herbs to take home. There'll be herbal teas and quality home made snacks too. A chance to slow down and reflect with yoga and flowers.

If you'd like to join us there are still a few spaces left - message me if you'd like one.

The workshop is taking place from 6.00-8.30pm on Sunday 26th June at Weston Methodist Church, Newbridge Road, Bath ☀️

More details on https://www.brightblueyoga.co.uk/special-events/

07/06/2022

It's the start of June and the Umbel cutting patch is transforming into a riot of delicious mid-summer colour. Now the spring flowers are over it’s time for the salvias, foxgloves, ammi, love-in-a-mist, cornflowers and sweet williams to take centre stage. It's a favourite time of year of mine and the garden is starting to feel like a sweet shop of cottage garden favourites.

If you’d like to come and create flowers with me this June, there are still places available on the Summer Solstice Celebration Workshop that I’m running jointly with the lovely Georgie from on Sunday 26th of June, 6.00-8:30 pm in Western Methodist Church.

This workshop promises to be a real treat of yoga and flowers, and a wonderful chance to reconnect and centre yourself at this pivotal moment of mid-summer. The price is £36 and you can book your place at https://www.brightblueyoga.co.uk/special-events/ . Beginners to both yoga and flower arranging are most welcome, and we would love to welcome you there! ✨🌺

24/05/2022

I was asked to create flowers for a funeral in Bath Abbey, to celebrate the life of a woman who had loved her garden. I met with her daughters, and we discussed the flowers she had especially loved, which would be seasonal in May and would hold up well in an arrangement. Their request was for lots of different types of foliage, something a bit wild, eclectic and unique. Something which felt like it would reflect the act of gathering and arranging stems from the garden, which had brought her particular solace in her latter years, once other activities in her life became more limited.

The result was a casket spray in greens, whites, blues and purples, all using locally grown flowers and foliage, and all supported by sustainable foam-free floral mechanics. I also provided matching buckets of flowers and foliage for a pedestal display in the Abbey, beautifully arranged by one of her daughters.

This gentle process of meeting the family, and getting to know a little about the person, and what was meaningful to them, is a special part of creating remembrance flowers. It’s an honour and also a responsibility to take on the task of creating something that reflects both them and their family’s wishes.

It was therefore lovely to receive this feedback:

“Thank you for the beautiful and natural flower display you created for my mum's funeral at Bath Abbey. It made the day particularly special for us to see such a wonderful display. The choice of local flowers and greenery was stunning and fitted with mum's style completely. Your approach when meeting us was very thoughtful and considerate; getting to know mum's character a little and then being able to carry this through to choosing flowers which she would've loved. I sat in the limo behind the hearse and just looked at the flowers as we drove through Bath. This was very special to me.”

Flowers have a special power to convey emotions that we can’t always put into words at the poignant moments in our life. While the flowers themselves may only last a short time, the memory of them is carried with us.

With thanks to , and for additional flowers and foliage.

11/05/2022

I’m delighted to be collaborating on a Summer Solstice Yoga Celebration workshop with Georgie from Bright Blue Yoga.

💐 Say it with flowers 💐

🌟 Sunday 26th June
🌟 6-8.30pm
🌟 Weston Methodist Church BA1 3PP
🌟 Seasonally tailored yoga and meditation to connect with the vibrancy of mid-summer as well as to cool us down and bring balance
🌟 Create a summer posy jar to take home for your kitchen table using Umbel's freshly picked, locally and sustainably grown flowers
🌟 Tasty homemade snacks and herbal teas
🌟 All yoga kit provided – including mats, bolsters, eye pillows, blankets and blocks
🌟 Large spacious venue

Georgie is a wonderful yoga teacher and an inspiration on wellness and wellbeing. This combination of yoga and flowers promises to be a real treat, and a chance to reflect, ground and re-centre yourself at what can sometimes be a busy time of year, whilst also creating something beautiful and seasonal to take home.

I’ll be giving guidance on what flower combinations work well together, how to arrange and condition your flowers at home, and what’s good to grow for summer blooms in the garden.

An evening of immersion in yoga and flowers - we hope you can join us!

To find our more message Georgie Bright Blue Yoga or head to her website www.brightblueyoga.co.uk

22/04/2022

Lovely to be out delivering bunches of local, seasonal, organically raised and low carbon flowers on Earth Day 🌎🌱😊

16/04/2022

Wishing you all a very Happy Easter!

With the arrival of the tulips and now the first of my ranunculus, my flower shop is now open, and this is one of the bunches that went out this weekend.

You can order Seasonal Bunches (£25, pictured) and Hand Tied Bouquets (£35) for Friday delivery on my webshop at www.umbel.co.uk , or alternatively message or email me to enquire about availability on other days of the week. Delivery is free across Bath and the surrounding area.

It’s a joy to be providing flowers for people again, and I’m so looking forward to all the flowers to come in the season ahead.

With the arrival of longer evenings, warmer weather and now Easter celebrations, it truly feels like spring is fully underway… and that summer might be just around the corner.

07/04/2022

My tulips have continued to come on this week, so that I can now offer, for Friday delivery, a limited number of:

Seasonal bunch - £25
Hand tied bouquet - £35

Both comprise a beautiful selection of tulips together with other seasonal flowers and foliage, all locally and sustainably grown. Delivery is free within Batheaston, Bathford, Bathampton, Larkhall, Swainswick and Box.

This year my tulips are mostly grown from organic bulbs, which are more expensive to buy, and less readily available, than non organic bulbs. It’s not often recognised that tulip bulb production comes with a hefty input of chemicals, from pesticide sprays (up to ten applications a year) to artificial fertilizer manufactured from fossil fuels.

It’s easy to forget the full life cycle impacts of the products we buy, and the planetary price tag (usually hidden) that comes with them.

These organic tulip bulbs have cost me up to £1 per bulb to buy. Each bulb gives me one stem, as tulip bulbs are generally used just once by cut flower growers. (This is to ensure stem length, and also since after cutting, bulbs are generally less productive in future years). Added to the bulb cost is the cost of the peat-free compost I use, plus my labour costs for growing them. These costs are high, and it’s hard to compete with supermarket tulips, grown non-organically, for as little as £3 a bunch.

But I want to offer them, because by supporting organic bulb production we’re helping to grow the market and raise awareness of the benefits of buying organic. My cost of production might be high, but I know that the impacts are low: as well as being raised organically, these bulbs have been grown on by me outdoors, with no hot-housing, zero chemical or fertilizer use, and minimal flower delivery miles.

And hopefully, if demand for organic tulip bulbs increases, a wider selection will become available - so that we can all share in the benefits.

If you want to explore buying organic tulip bulbs for your garden, check out and

And if you’d like one of my bunches or bouquets delivering this Friday, drop me a message via DM or to [email protected] 🌷

02/04/2022

Spring is finally here! With the arrival of my first tulips, my first bouquets are now available, with just a limited number each week for the next few weeks.

If you’d like one, DM me for details, as it will be a couple more week before website officially reopens. Hurry, as when they’re gone they’re gone!

If I’ve been a bit quiet this last month, it because I’ve been taking some time out to launch my community choir project (), to complete a Permaculture Design Course, and also to get my growing season underway.

The growing is in full swing now, and I have hundreds of baby seedlings, potted plug plants and ranunculus sprouting in my cold frames, bulbs that are shooting skywards, and perennials gradually beginning to wake. I can’t wait for all the blooms to come in the season ahead.

These longer evenings are a blessing to every gardener and I hope you’ve been enjoying the gradual spring awakening too 🌱

18/02/2022

Solsbury Community Choir - time to sing!

I’m very excited to be launching a new singing project, ‘Solsbury Community Choir’, starting on on Monday 7th March. Taking place in the wonderful Batheaston New Village Hall, in Batheaston near Bath, this will be a new friendly, mixed choir welcoming all singing abilities. The emphasis will be singing for fun, with no need to read music and all songs taught by ear.

This is a project of mine that’s been in the dreaming and planning since the depths of lockdown a year ago, and it’s wonderful to see it finally come together. Do check it out on Solsbury Sings and www.solsburysings.co.uk and let me know what you think. If you live locally, please follow along and share with anyone who might be interested. It would be lovely to see you there!

Singing is a wonderful way to connect with each other; it's joyful, inclusive and it’s increasingly proven to be great for our health and wellbeing. I feel that we’ve lost many of the opportunities that we’d have once had in our communities to sing together, and feel passionately about helping people reclaim their voices, and the role of singing in our lives.

Spring feels like the perfect time to strike out and create something new. And like these beautiful primroses and snowdrops seem to be saying, maybe it’s also a great time to unfurl and sing! ✨

08/02/2022

Enjoyed an amazing day of talks and inspiration yesterday at the annual online conference of Flowers From The Farm, with highlights including the fabulous Dave Goulson (books ‘Silent Earth’ and ‘The Garden Jungle’) on insect biodiversity and what we can all do in our own gardens to support these fabulous little creatures, that are the basis of so much of the food chain.
Appropriately enough I’d just been making a bug hotel with friends in our garden the day before - see my Instagram stories for details. A bit more filling in needed but it’s coming on!
It’s been a super busy few weeks, so I’m a bit behind with my challenge, but a few more final posts still to come on this. With the mornings and evenings now noticeably lighter I’m beginning to feel the spring sap rising - is it just me? 🌱

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It was wonderful to participate in the first Batheaston pop-up market organised by Grow Batheaston on Saturday morning. So many lovely local businesses and independent makers and growers to choose from. The sun shone and the people came - lots of them! Many stall holders sold out of produce - including very nearly us! Thank you so much to everyone who came along and supported us, bought flowers, chatted to us, and of course to all those who organised this fabulous event. I ran a 'Flower Bar' jointly with Maria from The Bath Greenhouse, another local flower grower and florist based in Batheaston, where we pooled our flower stock and allowed people to choose their own stems, in a sort of floral pick and mix. This proved really popular and a great way for people to sample our flowers on a small scale. Maria and I are both members of Flowers From The Farm, a national cooperative of small scale artisan farmer florists like us, in which there's a strong spirit of collaboration, as we're all on a similar journey of helping transform how flowers are bought and sold in the UK, towards a more locally based model. You can search their website to find flower growers like us all over the country - great if you want to send local flowers to someone far away. It was lovely to collaborate with Maria (whose garden is open to the public next weekend under the National Garden Scheme), and wonderful to make so many connections with local people. The next pop-up market is on Saturday 10th September, and we'll be there again - so hope to see some of you there again too!

The bees were buzzing busily on yesterday's Summer Solstice. Here they are on my Canterbury Bells which they seem to adore. These beautiful blooms will be just some of the ones we'll be using at this Sunday's Summer Solstice Celebration workshop that I'm running with Georgie from Bright Blue Yoga. Georgie will be taking us through a mindful, feel-good yoga practice to offer balance and ease. I'll be leading us in the making of a summer posy jar, made of freshly picked, locally grown flowers and scented herbs to take home. There'll be herbal teas and quality home made snacks too. A chance to slow down and reflect with yoga and flowers. If you'd like to join us there are still a few spaces left - message me if you'd like one. The workshop is taking place from 6.00-8.30pm on Sunday 26th June at Weston Methodist Church, Newbridge Road, Bath ☀️ More details on https://www.brightblueyoga.co.uk/special-events/#seasons

The beautiful earthy, muted tones of this bouquet feel very autumnal, so are suiting my mood today. Using some of my favourite flowers to work with - fennel, daucus (wild carrot) and ammi (all umbellifers of course!), it also draws in the rich dark reds of dahlias and rudbeckia, lime green zinnias, and the fresh whites of feverfew, snapdragons and cosmos. Overlaid with the gauzy sprinkles of panicum ‘frosted explosion’, to add movement and sparkle. . Sometimes it can be wonderful to work with a more limited colour palette, as it allows the natural beauty of the flower shapes, structures and textures to shine through.

These Small Tortoiseshell butterflies were loving the Cenolophium denudatum flowers at my friend Alison Jenkins’ house @damsonfarm a few weeks ago, when I did a garden photography workshop there with @evanemeth. Many of our butterflies and moths have had a hard time of it this year, as the unseasonably cold and wet spring delayed the emergence of many key species. The Small Tortoiseshell, Speckled Wood, Comma, Green-veined White, Large White and Red Admiral are all down in abundance compared with their 10-year average. To understand how this will impact on this summer’s butterflies, the Butterfly Conservation Society is running a 3-week citizen science project, in which they’re encouraging everyone in the UK to spend 15 minutes counting the amount and type of butterflies they can spot in any outdoor space. It runs from 16th July to 8th August, which means there’s still time to head out this weekend and spend 15 minutes seeing what you can see in your garden! Or indeed while out on a walk… If you want to take part then head to www.bigbutterflycount.org or @savebutterflies to find out how. There’s a lovely downloadable butterfly chart to help your butterfly spotting skills (and if you get really into it, the Butterfly Conservation Society is offering half-price membership at the moment 👍🦋). #ButterflyCount #GetOutForTheCount

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