Flowers

           

I mentioned my dear Granny's funeral the other week and here are some of the images of the funeral bouquet my Mum, Sister and I put together. My Granny was a horse rider and a lover of birds and nature, including wild flowers, so we felt it more appropriate and thoughtful of us to put together out own bouquets from scratch for the funeral, instead of simply ordering a standard arrangement.

We were able to find a lot of flowers in supermarkets, including stocks and sweetpeas, and we found a lovely Lewes local who sells bunches of wild flowers at a Lewes market. She put together a freshly picked bunch for us which we split among our three bouquets. 

Though not necessarily wild, we also decided to put our own flower in each bouquet. Though we weren't being over mournful about it, my sister just likes black so she had a stunning bloom spray painted black for her bunch. My Granny's favourite colour was blue (could you guess) so my Mum found some fantastic dyed blue roses and I have a fond memory of winning a nursery school competition with the tallest sunflower whilst I lived with her so I popped some stunning bright sunflowers in mine.

We found some plain blue crepe paper and some blue gingham tissue paper in a local stationery shop and some blue, white and natural raffia at the Garden Centre at Brighton Racecourse (where we also got more of the flowers including the sunflowers, roses and black blooms) in there fantastic flower department.

We bunched the plants up the night before the funeral and were able to keep them alive by wrapping them in cellophane (as you can still see from the image) and standing them in a bucket with water collected in the bottom of the cellophane. The morning of the funeral, we travelled them up to Surrey in this way too. Once we arrived in Surrey, we emptied the water out and wrapped them in the crepe and tissue paper, wrapping them in raffia to keep them together. As they were wild flowers, we decided that we wanted a more rough look, which was also slightly easier. At this stage, they only needed to survive a few more hours so we didn't put any more water in them so they travelled easily lying down. 

I was really please with the final arrangements and I think it was a lovely idea that my Granny would have adored. I don't necessarily believe in all that funny stuff once someone has parted but a couple of days after the funeral a nice lilac wild flower ended up stuck in the wind screen wiper of my car. I like to think she was saying thanks.