Cumberland Flower Farm

12/07/2024

Many thanks to everyone who is pre-ordering gift bouquets! 🙏 It’s keeping me busy, and organised!

Priced from £25 - £65 (pictured £38), our gift bouquets are filled with our beautiful Cumbrian flowers in fully compostable /recyclable wrap. At the moment we’re delighting in scabious, larkspur and the first dahlia! What’s in them changes with the field and the weather… always joyful though!

Please remember:

✂️ Everything is freshly picked so please give at least 24hrs notice.

🚗 Delivery MUST be arranged in advance of ordering, especially if it’s for a specific date or further afield.

🌞 I have Sunday off so no deliveries then!

🏡 Collection is from our Flower Stand CA14 1YS and an email with directions, will be sent once it’s ready.

🌻Our flower field isn’t near collection and isn’t open to the public.

💻 Ordering is online. Link in bio!!

10/07/2024

For Emma, a bright compact ‘country garden’ bouquet full of our roses, with English scented stocks, and pops of yellow feverfew and dill, with mint, cornflowers and lime green alchemilla mollis. A proper English summer bouquet! 🎉

06/07/2024

Details of a great week!

02/07/2024

Last week I scheduled all my posts and got up to date, and although I loved sharing everything, I didn’t feel like they were particularly ‘seen’. So I’m reverting to a more ad hoc approach this week to see what happens and if there’s any rhyme or reason to ‘engagement’ (and yes way too many ‘air quotes’ for one post already!!)

In this photo is yesterday’s DIY Buckets order for today’s wedding. I’m delivering their personal flowers this morning.

I’ve three special weddings to share from last week, when Martyn was away for a few days with his work, and I’ve a few weddings this week while Martyn is away for a few days with work… it’s all a ‘bit mad’ here at the moment, but the flowers are looking great despite the madness, rain and chilly nights. I’ll try to share more as we go through this week!

29/06/2024

For Kirstie// All the peachy roses I could find, nestled in a bed of summery scented loveliness. Wild in a pretty way. All grown here in Cumbria by us…

I say it every time, but this wedding was a pleasure! Congratulations Kirstie and Matthew ###

28/06/2024

We’re busy preparing for weddings this weekend; I’ve picked our flowers, bought a few things in from Lincolnshire, and they’ve all been conditioned in my shady shed. I will spend today sorting them for collection, and others for our styling tomorrow. Some things I make in advance, and just tweak (and fuss over) on the day, other things are done in situ. What once filled me with fear is now part of my weekly routine, and i love this unique mix of farming and floristry; my own creative process and artistic expression.

This weekly harvest is overseen by my trusty pal Breakspear (named after the dog in Quentin Blake’s book Mrs Armitage on Wheels) who would prefer 1:1 ball throwing and cuddles but puts up with all the above for occasional ball play. It’s a tough life! 😆 Here he is loving life at the weekend, smiling after cooling down in a very muddy stream!

27/06/2024

FRIDAY: Regretfully due to a bad case of not-enough-hours-in-the-day and so many lovely varied orders for this weekend… there’s no Friday Flowers this week.

If you need a gift bouquet in July (July! 😱) please order online. Please email to check I’ve capacity to delivery before placing your order, and please give me advance warning for collection. I’ve a lot on at the moment and it really helps if you book ahead HINT HINT …

I’m sorry about Friday Flowers but it’s giving me a really good feeling for 2025! It’s not so much more flowers (although we need more flowers 😉🌞🌸), but definitely more hands! 🙌 🎉💕

Thank you thank you thank you 🙏

26/06/2024

Sabina and Lucy’s Bouquets

I’m still catching up with weddings from earlier in the month, simply because it’s such a busy time of year with so many different things going on!

The brief for these: Small, wild, not matching with different colour palettes, but complimenting one another… everything except the scented stocks was grown here, the roses providing fabulous colour, shape and scent, with calendula and campanula, jasmine and sweet peas. So vibrant and highly scented!

Congratulations to Lucy and Sabina ###

🙏💕🌞

25/06/2024

Designed to frame the wedding ceremony of Lucy and Sabina, these arrangements were jam packed with our beautiful peonies, roses and campanula, calendula and sweet Williams, and British grown scented stocks snd Alstromerias.

It was great to see how effectively the bright vibrant flowers stood out against the incredible landscape behind. Windermere no less.

Although we have a list of Sustainable Styling and DIY wedding flower options, we’re very happy to develop something specifically for you too. So long as we can do it without compromising our environmental values and sustainable design criteria, and we can use what is seasonally available to us, we will!

24/06/2024

Rainbow themed bouquets; two matching bouquets for two beautiful brides. 💕

Peonies and stocks from Lincolnshire, otherwise grown here in west Cumbria.

17/06/2024

All the whites // Amy’s Bouquet

15/06/2024

I’m behind with showing you the weddings I’ve flowered, but it does mean I can share this photograph of Emily holding her bouquet by from the 1st June.

Unbeknownst to me Emily’s favourite flowers are roses, peonies, iris and sweet peas, all of which I included! I was just pleased that I had a combination of flowers that together made the dusky pink with bluey purple colour scheme she and Andrew had requested! And despite the weather and pests, we grew everything but the eryngium and peonies, which are from Helen .It has been a very challenging start to the summer but we are managing to grow, pick and arrange some lovely flowers!

14/06/2024

What a lovely surprise yesterday to be told by a friend that we were the focus of a feature article in the Times & Star ‘Proud Cumbria’ section! Thank you so much to Sue and the newspaper team. We are incredibly proud to be growing sustainable flowers for our corner of the county, somewhere we love very much. It was such a lovely pick-me-up after a tough week on the field! So cold! So many slugs… despite those challenges I’m filling the Flower Stand today, available from 10.30am!

If you’d like a bunch of our west Cumbrian flowers here is the info:

🏡 The Flower Stand is outside our home, in residential Valley View, Little Clifton CA14 1YS: we’re on google, NOT A FIELD!

🌸 Bunches from £6 single varieties; Mixed bunches £15

💷 Payment is online through our webshop AFTER you’ve chosen your flowers, or with cash.

🌞 I will pop out if I see you and am around, please help yourself if we’re not!

🌸 I’m afraid our flower field is not open to the public!

🚸 Please take care driving on our street - all our kids play out!

This week we’ll be open on Friday, and I’ll let you all know if I top up on Saturday too.

Thank you in advance!

🙏🌸🌞

13/06/2024

Last week’s Friday Flowers looked like this; I’m going to have some single variety bunches (sweet williams and campanula for definite!) to mix-and-match with some mixed bunches on the Flower Stand tomorrow and Saturday this week. Gentle, scented prettiness for the weekend! 💕

11/06/2024

To compliment Laura in white with her bright bouquet, Laura’s bridesmaids wore colored and patterned dresses, with all white bouquets. British Duchesse de Nemours peonies, with our Cumbrian Claire Austin white roses, orlaya, sweet william , jasmine, sweet peas and astrantia… with alchemilla mollis, birch and raspberry foliage.

Their bouquets looked lovely on the hallway tiles!

10/06/2024

Here’s Laura’s Bouquet - made with the most joyful flowers I could pick! This bridal bouquet included our peonies and roses, jasmine and sweet peas - highly scented - and foliages, sweet William and calendula. (There’s a stem of British grown Astro in there too!) June started like this!

09/06/2024

Love this so much - congratulations on this brilliant article and success

https://www.facebook.com/cakesbyalisonfawkes

A NORTH CUMBRIAN woman has said she is ‘incredibly proud’ of her business, after gaining national success for her ‘magical’ hand painted…

06/06/2024

It’s British Flowers Week - I started a post but it’s turned into a blog…. So here’s a photo of some of last week’s harvest instead! (For Vicky and Bede’s wedding)

I’ll finish the blog over the weekend when I’m not picking more flowers!!

04/06/2024

Stunning photographs by Freerimages Co UK Wedding Photographer of Andrew and Emily’s wedding on Saturday ###

01/06/2024

Ting-a-ling! Thank you for your patience over the last few weeks with Friday Flowers… they’ll be back next week featuring these beauties! Consider this a Cumbrian alarm bell! 🔔😆😆

flowers

30/05/2024

We’re receiving a lot of enquiries about our wedding flowers, which is fantastic: thank you! May - July is our busiest time so please understand that we might not able to respond immediately!

We recommend that you look at our website and download (and read! 😉) our Wedding Style Book. Booking is online. If the date is unavailable, please email. I will respond as soon as I can…

A few answers to frequently asked questions:

What flowers will I get in *month of your wedding*?
Honestly its too difficult to answer! The seasons are so variable, the weather very changeable and the pests… 😱… Our Style Book outlines the sort of flowers you might expect each season and we keep instagram up to date so you get a flavour of what’s seasonal here too.

Can I call you / pop in to discuss booking wedding flowers for next year?

I will happily respond by email to questions you have after you’ve looked through our Style Book. It has been downloaded 180 times so far this year so if everyone were to have a chat, I’d never get any flowers grown…

Our field is a working space, not for the public. The flowers growing when you visit are also unrepresentative of what might be available next month/year/for your wedding.

I respond by email because it can be done around my work and family commitments, and it means I don’t have to keep notes of communications. It’s an efficiency that really helps me and enables me to stay focussed when there’s a huge amount to do!

Can you provide me with a quote for 2025?
Our 2025 prices will be set in January 2025, so if you want to book in now (which we recommend) you need to budget for a 10% increase. Hopefully our costs won’t rise that much! We are as open and transparent as possible, but I’ve learnt I can’t predict what will happen in the next year…

But I don’t know exactly what I’m going to need. What should I do?!
You can now save the date for a booking fee of £100 (that goes towards your order £££) to give you a little while to dither over an arch and/or milk churns, or ‘to diy or not to diy’… we do need a ‘best guess’ to get growing!!! And of course amendments are possible until a month before you wed…

Hope that helps! Hx

🌸🩷🌞

29/05/2024

A shimmer // this bouquet for Sarah had gentle movement with the dainty feverfew, corncockle and jasmine softening the bright colours and giving it a meadowy vibe. It was a pleasure to make.

Congratulations to Sarah and Andrew!

🎉🌸💕

28/05/2024

“The guests couldn’t stop talking about them!”

As I set up a styled wedding this morning, I thought I’d share photos of another styled wedding we did earlier this month. Jessica and Martin chose our seasonal brights, styled in our coloured vases and ‘s milk churns.

Every week is different when using seasonal flowers - for this wedding pale pink broom from stole the show, along with the very first peonies and our ranunculus.

We can’t say for certain what will be in flower and what we’ll use for your wedding, it very much depends on the week, but if you can trust us to decide what’s looking the best, they are uniquely beautiful and receive a lot of compliments and 5⭐️ reviews!

27/05/2024

Picking in the drizzle - 100 stems of roses, oodles of foliage. I’m reminded that it’s all taken years to establish but now we’re reaping the benefits.

We’ve a busy week of weddings. If you’re looking for seasonal, sustainable wedding flowers please look at our website, download our Style Book and get booked in! We’re planning next spring now….

Our heart and hands might be in 2004, but our head is thinking ahead!

26/05/2024

It’s been a week of extremes; weather, work and emotions. Here’s a download of the last seven days.
1. Early morning sunshine
2. One of many gift bouquets (thank you so much for pre-ordering)
3. Love the early summer meadowy vibe atm
4. Monster sized delphiniums
5. Escapee
6. Roses. I sit in the rose tunnel to breathe in the scent!
7. Some of next week’s flowers…

#

24/05/2024

💕 One of last year’s DIY beauties! 💕

23/05/2024

Was this really taken two days ago?! Yesterday we worked in the rain, because the jobs needed doing and time is limited now we’re juggling sales with growing the flowers; Both core business activities with a definite tension at times between the two! Shona answered my post in March about flexible paid work and so, despite ALL the stuff going on off the field (business and personal) I’m not as behind as I would otherwise be. In fact I’m moving plans forward that have been parked as Too Much - including ducks into the foliage field and some new growing beds - so a huge ‘Thank You’ Shona!

That said, I’ve closed pre-orders and will just have a selection of bunches this weekend. I’m going to be brutally honest; I’m in need of a lie-in! I’ve no free weekends after this one until……… well, I think there’s one in July! It’s very easy to over do things, generally in life but particularly as a small business person, so I’m taking the opportunity to rest when I can.

Enjoy the rain, it’s doing the field so much good, and enjoy these roses; Picking and arranging them this week has brought me a lot of pleasure. Aren’t they lovely?

20/05/2024

For Sharon; the roses opened…

The first of the first flush of roses is a special moment that I look forward to through the winter. The anticipation of their scent adds to this. Like the first strawberries, waiting for them is worth it. Our rose tunnel was a big investment but the value of some things is so much more than their financial worth; the scent of these first roses is so uplifting, so life affirming, so beautiful.

This small bridal bouquet featured our roses, ranunculus, sweet peas and viburnum roseum with Peonies and feverfew from Lincolnshire and Cornwall.