Days of Dahlia

18/08/2026

Explorations in flower colour, on the page, on silk.

*Finding the perfect pink rose
*Botanically dyed ribbon ombre made with summer flower pigments
*Test colours
*Trying to name the colour of salvia
*Silk petals
*The many hues of seapinks
*Freshly dyed silks in blue and blush (sky and cheeks)
*The vibrancy of cornflower
*Silk off-cut tangles

Botanical dyeing is a way of making the hidden qualities of flowers visible, it's a bit like unveiling their secrets. A red dahlia can contain purple pigments, a blue cornflower can give pink.

Through the process of extracting pigment, something that is held within the flower becomes colour, the colour becomes recorded in cloth, the flower disappears, but something of it remains.

I find this process so beautiful, creating an archive of the material qualities of a flower. Flowers not simply objects of decoration, but living materials with their own histories and temporalities. Botanical dyeing is a rich exploration of what can be held within a material and what might remain when that material changes, disappears, or is transformed into something else.

Alchemy!
We always joke that we feel a bit like witches at a cauldron :)

16/08/2026

In June, our friend Helen Cross came to spend a morning with us, deep among the flowers. We first met Helen in 2022, when she invited us onto her podcast to talk about growing cut flowers. We’ve been friends and gardening confidantes ever since. Helen is an author, journalist, gardener, and passionate advocate for the many ways gardening can nourish us physically, mentally, creatively.

On this morning in June (which feels like a million years ago now), Helen cut flowers and made an arrangement while we talked about gardening, finding order in chaos, and what flowers mean to us. I filmed little snippets of our conversation and the simple joy of putting flowers in a vase without pressure or overthinking.

It's very fitting that I would share this little film today as Helen is opening her own garden in Netherlee in Glasgow's Southside as part of today, sharing the garden that she has created at home with her family, a place that inspired her first book, and to raise money for .

If you are nearby, Helen’s garden is open today, Sunday 16 August from 2–5pm.

This film is part of The Flower Portraits, a new series of films about people, flowers, gardening, creativity, and the pleasure of making beautiful things together, carefully and slowly.

12/08/2026

Let's talk about this special colour palette; burgundy, blue, pink, purple, green. I am fascinated by flower colours, I love experimenting and playing with different colours, observing their relationships as they grow in the garden, what they look like on a sunny day, an overcast day, in bud, open splendour, fully blown, and even dried.

The colour wheel helps us to understand the relationships between colours, their neighbours, contrasts, complements, oppositions, temperature and depth, but flowers behave differently from anything painted or printed on a page.

A flower's colour is alive. Pigment, petal shape, translucency, age, and light all affect how we see it. Blue flowers look more violet indoors or in shadow, burgundy flowers glow red in sunlight but can look almost black where the petals are most dense in the middle, pink flowers have traces of silver, blue, red, purple, grey, white.

And then there is green. Green might be the backdrop to the garden but it also an active part of the palette. Green makes everything feel more natural, more wild. It changes the way the pinks and burgundies appear, adding contrast, and connecting one colour to another.

I like to refer to the colour wheel, as it gives me a language and a framework to describe relationships and behaviours between colours. The garden gives us so much colour to look at and play with. The real skill is learning to move between the theory and the natural world of colour.

I love thinking about all of this when I am working with flowers, thinking about what we know, but being continually surprised about what we find in front of us, our eyes, the mirror, the camera lens. If you like thinking about flowers this way too, welcome, follow along, grow and arrange with us as we share more seasonal colour studies, observations, and experiments from our flower farm and garden.

09/08/2026

Sunday Series: Week 32 in the flower year

A week of highlights: a special flower drawing class in the studio, the first of many, being invited to decorate the most beautiful Arts & Crafts house with flowers, a wedding in East Sussex in the garden of a 17th century farmhouse, the edge of the world at Derek Jarman's house Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, back home to Days of Dahlia and more dahlias than we could ever have dreamed of. And yes, all of this in one week!

At this time of year, I wonder how we fit it all in, the pace is rapid, sometimes I struggle to keep up, there is no time or place to be idle, flowers come and go, we cut and come again, my feet are sore, we are in the midst of it all, and planning what is to come next. I can't help but begin to think about how much I will miss flowers when we get into November, December, but also how impossible it is to sustain this 12 months of the year, reminders of how the garden teaches us how to pace and rest.

I love this picture I took after our drawing class when my dad came in to see how it had went, and he went straight to sniff a rose, my dad is also called Derek :)

Onwards to flower week 33!

06/08/2026

I finally got the chance to visit the iconic little black house with the yellow windows, on the Kent coast, deep in the Romney Marsh, travelling practically the entire length of the UK, past drought, wildfire, beauty, and strife, on what felt like the edge and the end of the world.

Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage and its garden-come-sculptural-installation has had such a profound effect on my life, even though I had never set eyes on it in the flesh. The garden in the shingle, a garden in the most unlikely of places, growing around and through sculptural formations of rocks, flint, driftwood, and metal, was mostly dried out with only valerian, sea kale, curry plant, and fennel surviving in amongst islands of spiky gorse gnarled by the wind, all plants Derek Jarman has written about and which I have come to associate with him. The health of the curry plant tells me everything I need to know about why I have failed to grow it in this wet, cold place. I was hoping to see some borage (I borage, bring courage) but there was something about the dried husks and skeleton forms of the garden, ghosts, that represented the absence of the gardener and the artist who made this place.

This is a brutal landscape, exposed, hot, with telephone cables interrupting an expanse of blue sky, the detritus of fishing equipment, broken boats, traffic cones, and the Dungeness nuclear power station looming in the background, and yet there is so much beauty here. The sky feels absolutely vast. Derek Jarman himself created such a powerful legacy in the savage societal, cultural, and medical landscape of the 1980s. And yet, this place feels like it represents all the texture and savagery of 2026 too. I understand now what Derek Jarman meant when he wrote "my garden's boundaries are the horizon", something about being pushed to the edge, and discovering the elasticity of your edges, maybe, and that hardship is part of growth.

For any gardener and artist, this place reminds us that we are called to the different creative outlets at different stages in our lives, and that gardens heal, and that they can be decorative, beautiful, abundant, but they can also be sites of grief, broken, bare, paused.

I am writing this at the edge of the sea, looking out towards the white cliffs of Dover with France somewhere out there. Days of Dahlia feels a million miles away but also right here in my pocket with some teasel seeds and a few sprigs of curry plant.

02/08/2026

Sunday Series: Week 31 in the flower year

The week of the Buck Moon and Lammas, roughly halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, a mid point that feels like the beginning of a new season, there is a slight chill forming at night, and the nights are getting darker, it feels too soon and just right at the same time. On the buck moon, I stumbled across a male deer on a walk, we locked eyes for a few seconds before he bounded off to the woods. This week was full of flowers and lots of activity in the studio as we prepared two weddings, and outside the field turned golden, and all of the milk thistles sent little clouds of fluff flying through the air.

31/07/2026

July bowl of plenty, the dream arrangement we made for the latest episode of our film series 'Designing with what the land gives'.

And July gives a lot. I was drawn to all of the soft creams, whites, blushes, apricots, and peaches that the garden was offering. After exploring such rich and velvety colour palettes in our previous episodes and in much of our event work of late, I wanted to explore something more soft, quiet, gentle. A pastel palette is beautiful in theory, but in practice these delicate, barely there colours can become flat.

In this month's film, Lauren explores how to create depth and interest with a pastel palette by focusing on form, texture, shape, light, and shadow. She also discusses something just as important as choosing the flowers themselves, choosing what not to include.

The film and the full list of ingredients, varieties, and mechanics is now available for our Seasonal Pursuits members. if you have been thinking of joining Seasonal Pursuits for a while, now is the perfect time while we have all these beautiful flowers at our fingertips to inspire your floristry practice and your flower growing aspirations for next year's summer season.

29/07/2026

Flowers. Conversation. A 50mm lens.

Sometimes I ask myself why I spend so much time filming, photographing, and writing about flowers and I think this tendency to document is because everything I work with is so fleeting. Flowers fade, seasons change, people come and go. Summer, perhaps more than any other season, has this feeling of abundance that I experience with the knowledge that it won't last. Being so immersed in this moment of abundance, when everything feels like it is teetering on the edge of a precipice, ready to fall. There is something about the joy of this time of year and knowing it is running out, that it makes me want to document, film, photograph, write about it, like bottling it. This is not said with any sadness, but with an awareness that these days are finite. To me, it feels a little bit like pressing flowers, making jam, pickling vegetables, drying herbs and flowers, saving seed. Maybe I am doing the same thing, except my preservation medium is photography, film, and writing.

Summer isn't joyful despite its impermanence, it's joyful because of it.

Knowing that flowers won't last forever is part of what makes them so precious. I find myself reaching for the camera so often, not to make "content", but to remember. To hold onto something that would otherwise disappear. A way of bottling a day in the studio before the days, weeks, seasons, years, all move on.

This little film is a window into a 1–2–1 bouquet masterclass with florist and grower Holly Grows back in early July. The flowers we grew, the bouquet she made, a snippet of the conversations we had. A small glimpse into a summer day that already feels just a little further away, but bottled up to remember forever.

26/07/2026

Sunday Series: Week 30 in the Flower Year

M I D S U M M E R

This past week at Days of Dahlia was full of flowers, as you would expect in July. There were no visitors, so it was just us in the garden and studio. We cut and arranged flowers for two beautiful weddings, spent lots of time on the road in a van, we filmed our latest Seasonal Pursuits episode, and amongst it all, I made my favourite bouquet of the year, maybe, ask me again next week.

We worked with some colour combinations familiar and new, I enjoyed talking about how to create depth and interest when using pastels in our latest film (image 2), and this burgundy, pink, purple, and blue combination (image 1) made me really happy. Obsessed with the burgundy dahlias which are called "poodle skirt" hehe! (image 4)

At last it rained, and high winds blew everything slant and hard. We wonder if things will recover, and the garden constantly teaches us about regeneration. We are getting used to this pattern of drought to deluge as another summer of extremes continues, growing flowers is becoming more challenging every year, but perhaps more important than ever.

This coming week:
~ Two more weddings
~ Lauren heads to the most southerly tip of England with flowers
~ Louisina gathers our wonderful team to flower a wedding just outside Edinburgh
~ Seasonal Pursuits opens for August
~ Plotting and planning 2027 events
~ Garden jobs are on pause, apart from the daily deadheading and watering to keep everything alive

The forecast for the week ahead?
Flowers, of course.

How has your week been? We'd love to hear what you're looking forward to this season :)

26/11/2025

Hello! We are hosting a special Christmas event! This year we are creating something beautiful and new; the Days of Dahlia Christmas Shop, where we will transform our studio into a warm and welcoming festive wonderland, filled with winter botanicals, fine fabrics, dried flowers, candlelight, the scent of evergreens, mulled wine, and lots of fine things to browse and buy. There will be a curated and handmade selection of ceramics, wreaths, dried flowers, handmade decorations, floral infused scented bows, stockings, beeswax candles, silk ribbons, flower arranging tools, and more. There will be materials to make your own wreaths and botanical touches at home. Everything you need to have a beautiful and handmade Christmas where nature reigns over tinsel and plastic. Our approach to Christmas has always been more about a celebration of winter, a reverence for the season, and creating indoor spaces to rest among remnants of the garden brought inside. We will be hosting a live demonstration on how to make a fresh foliage wreath and discussing how to make use of your garden when decorating for Christmas. It’s going to be really beautiful and we can’t wait! Will you join us?!

Join us this festive season for a special Christmas shop event as we transform our flower studio into a warm and welcoming festive wonderland, filled with winter botanicals, dried flowers, candlelight, the scent of evergreens, mulled wine, and lots of fine things to browse and buy.There will be a cu...