100% Dorset!
Every week we use British, seasonal flowers and foliage, but this posy might have our lowest carbon footprint so far. All the posy ingredients have been sourced from within a 6 mile radius! If they're not from our garden or plot, they're from a local flower and produce farm. A lot of the ingredients are 'everlasting' and can be dried, such as the statis, helichrysum and pampas.
What's in the posy?
Aster, helichrysum, miscanthus, pampas, sunflower, statis, eucalyptus, senecio, rosemary, sedum, zinnia.
What's scented?
Rosemary, eucalyptus.
What's British?
All of it!
If you'd like to order a posy, please click here.
How long will my flowers last? It’s a good question. I try to design our MeadowSweet posies with ingredients that will last at least 5 days, and often much longer. I find customers are typically pleasantly surprised how long they do last, and they can keep their posies ticking along nicely, maybe picking out one or two bits along the way that are more short-lived than the rest. The posies have lots of ingredients so inevitably some components will last longer than others. Supermarkets demand a shelf-life of at least 11 days from their suppliers because it may take up to a week to get them to the shop floor with 90% of their blooms coming cold-chain airfreighted from flower farms all over the...
Why do we love making posies? Posies are dainty bunches of flowers, often given as gifts. In the 15th century they were called 'nosegays' and their fragrance was used to disguise bad body odours! The exchanging of posies or 'tussie-mussies' was very popular in Victorian times and flower ingredients were chosen carefully to symbolise heart-felt feelings. MeadowSweet loves celebrating nature and we love flowers that make our souls sing. Quite the opposite of the imported, dyed flowers you find at the supermarket or the oodles of faux flowers of Instagram archways. We love flowers that follow the seasons and keep us grounded. We arrange flowers for people that love being around real flowers, not show-offy ones to impress the Joneses. Our lovely customers get to know our posies,...
Naturally fragrant! We find ourselves in a world filled with artificial fragrances and artificial flowers. Sometimes even our posies are mistaken for being artificial! I have decided to take this as a compliment as it must mean they look too good to be true! This week, our posies are so fragrant, I was asked if we sprayed them with perfume. It's an definite 'no', but it does highlight how easy we can forget just how amazing the natural world can be. Flowers are fragrant to attract pollinators and it so happens it attracts us too! We use lots of fragrant flowers throughout the year such as narcissi, mimosa, hyacinth, stocks, lavender, lilies and carnations and we use scented foliage such as...
Can you get sustainable cut flowers? All products have an environmental impact and we need to choose wisely when we make our purchases. A natural product such as cut flowers can have a substantially different environmental impact, or carbon footprint, depending on how and where they are grown. Typically, seasonal flowers grown outdoors with minimal chemicals and artificial fertilisers local to where they are sold, will have a much lower carbon footprint to flowers grown under glass with extra lighting, water and feed that are then flown overseas to market in a chilled container. At MeadowSweet we use homegrown, and 100% British ingredients. We like local, seasonal flowers, and we don't want to use flowers with a large carbon footprint associated with air miles. We like to...
