Happy New Year!

Hoorah for a new year! I love a new year. Even though it’s dark and damp and cold and wet we’re on the way out from the gloom.

I feel the sap rising as a physical force giving energy to my back, strength to my elbows, determination to my ambitions. I like the idea of a new year resolution: I might forget all about it in a month or so, but the thought process that goes into deciding what I’d like out of a year is useful, I think. It’s so easy to pootle along from year to year, reacting to what happens rather than deciding what the project is, that the exercise of looking at what one year brought, and what the next year could bring if I focused a little on what I’d like out of it, I think is enormously helpful. I do, though, have a rule, that resolutions are always positive: I will learn something, create something, be stronger for something as a result of my promises to myself.

Our workshops are perfect for people making positive new year’s resolutions. Whether it’s time to take your kitchen table business to the next level, make more of your social media, learn to photograph your beautiful things better, turn your blog into something you’re really proud of, all those days are here for you to take advantage of. Small groups, careful teaching, unbelievably creative days from which you’ll go home inspired, enabled, determined, focused and ready to achieve your goals. Or your new year’s resolution might be simply to make more time for yourself, so you might come and have a lovely time sowing seed at a Cut Flower Patch workshop, or making posies at a Garden Floristry day. Time for you is time very well spent.

I’m writing this in December, looking forward to the goodies that January bring. And for us January is a great deal about planning weddings and summer parties. I do love the brides all ringing: people who’ve got engaged over Christmas and new year and are beginning to plan their weddings, or people who’ve been engaged for a while, but decided that January is the perfect month to put a wedding together (they’re right!) Whether your wedding is to be a tiny, intimate affair, or whether you’d like to do it all yourself with us providing the flowers for you to arrange, or whether you’re planning the full Fragonard, a huge event festooned with flowers, or any combination of the above, do ask us for help.