Day Two of British Flowers Week begins with photos taken by the very talented Sarah Mason, a photographer I met when visiting the U.K. last month and whose work simply captures the wild and beautiful character of the region I visited: Yorkshire/Northeast U.K.

These are just part of the evocative images created to promote the variety of British-grown flowers cultivated and grown by Flowers from the Farm members in that region. Many of the wonderful Yorkshire/Northeast flower farmers and florists I met and spent time with contributed behind the scenes to bring the Land Rover Defender setting to life.

They include Sarah Statham of Simply by Arrangement (she’s also tomorrow’s Slow Flowers Podcast guest – stay tuned), and Fiona Pickles of Firenza Floral Design.

The idea of using a Land Rover Defender, says Sarah, “is really just because I have been daydreaming for some time about stuffing a Land Rover full of flowers in a more aesthetic way than I usually do day to day.”

I’m laughing as I transcribe this comment from her last email because, of course, like most florists, the “stuffing” part means loading buckets and buckets of flowers into the back of a car – NOT under the hood, right?!

Sarah drove us around in a Land Rover, which seems to be the official vehicle of UK flower farmers and florists. And she adds: “The Land Rover Defender is quintissentially British. Sadly it has no connections with Yorkshire other than the fact a lot of the growers drive them.We need them here in winter.”

The setting: Hardcastle Crags, a National Trust area located just north of Hebden Bridge, the village where Sarah hosted my mother Anita and me for several delightful days.
The model: James (who I’m told doubles as a web designer)
The whippets: Flo and Ruby
The designers: Sarah, Fiona and design apprentice Holly Marsden
The photographer: Sarah Mason, Sarah Mason Photography

And this is what our friends at British Flowers Week, aka London’s New Covent Garden Flower Market, have created for Day Two of the campaign. Thanks to Liz Anderson and Helen Evans for sharing!

Please enjoy the work of the fabulous young florist Hattie Fox of That Flower Shop in Shoreditch, in which she plays with British foliage, the unsung hero of floristry. Hattie has created three gloriously free and wild floral designs exclusively for British Flowers Week.

Her style lends itself naturally to British flowers and foliages, where no two stems are the same and where seasonality is everything. Hattie has an extraordinary feel for color and texture and passion for British foliage.

Hattie’s design above is wild and loose and overflowing with locally-grown nepeta, delphinium, astrantia, ox-eye daisies, foxgloves, stocks and peonies, offset by the green tones of hornbeam, cotoneaster, a hint of silver eucalyptus, and the yellow pop of euonymous and golden privet.