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Growing, Harvesting, and Arranging flowers from the Garden
flowers from the Garden |
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Written by Carla Allen
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In the picturesque town of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Lorraine Beswick is renowned for her fantastical flower arrangements. She has been told she can “make magic” and for the past 15 years, this is what she’s done.
She and her husband Frederick Longtin own the two and a half acre gardens they tend in Karsdale, near Annapolis Royal. She does planting of gardens, and cutting and arranging of flowers the selection of plant material. For special events she has a talented team that she calls in “by one’s, two’s or three’s, depending.”
Her targeted market is local businesses: bed & breakfasts, restaurants, bookstores, potteries and antique shops as well as weddings, community events, fundraisers and conferences. She supplies blooms in buckets or as arrangements. Working with flowers is more than just a job to her.
She would like to increase the number of weddings and conferences she does and says that although she is not a “shop florist’ people are aware of what she can and cannot do.
What makes her business unique is that she works from her own garden, only rarely calling on the gardens of others or a wholesaler. For the most part, her business is seasonal, late March to November, though she says she can certainly do things through the winter season.
Her working area is simple: a long table, a cooler, lots of buckets, (tin & plastic), “faithful” Felcro snips, a “growing” array of vases (glass & ceramic) and a Volkswagen Golf she uses for deliveries.
Beswick is well known for sumptuous arrangements featuring peonies, Lilium and hemerocallis lilies, flowering shrubs in season – beginning with witchhazels, red and yellow-stemmed dogwoods and Kerria, ending with caryopteris, hydrangeas, and viburnums. She focuses on shrub roses, lavenders, many perennials, biennials, and flowering bulbs in between.
She approaches her craft with appreciation and reverence: “Cut flowers are ephemeral. Carnations, chrysanthemums, last and last which is great. Tulips, roses, peonies, lilies, delphiniums, irises, are ever changing. Opening, unraveling, translucent, ‘painting’ themselves as they dry and die. The spilling of petals – that they are not stagnant makes them, maybe messy, but alive. They change, throughout the day, moving and lengthening with the sun. Tulips become great clown poppies before they are done. All this matters. Should matter,” she says.
Although she focuses primarily on custom orders, admirers of her arrangements still manage to find her. Surprise visitors find their way up the driveway thru the summer.
She uses a frog and oasis on occasion though she also likes the sense of a simple assembly in a vase and starts with a foliage base for foundation structure, as well as using colour ‘echoes’.
“I try not to use more than three or five different flower varieties in an arrangement. I like a natural asymmetry, one that gives a sense of movement, either in the arrangement or to lead the eye into the room, situation. As if one had just lifted a section of garden or hedgerow and put it into a vase. A sense of ‘Hah!’
“Formality has its place and I do admire it, but mostly I like flower gardens. The sense of old perennial gardens. Nowadays, not everyone has the ‘luxury’ of such gardens, but I think in our hearts, we still imagine our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and brothers have them in their backyards and we can just go outside with the scissors and cut some flowers for the table, to carry ... to give. I think this is what I try to do in my arrangements.”
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