Summer Hedgerow

Weekend walks are one of my favourite pastimes. Up and out early (well... early for us!), we follow the same familiar path each time. It takes us past stables of horses, fields full of cows mooing for breakfast, while swallows swoop so close they almost touch us.

It's only a short walk from home, but it feels a million miles away. Within minutes we've left the houses behind and are surrounded by fields with views stretching out towards North Wales.

I'll admit, my favourite time of year to walk this path is autumn or winter. Autumn for the changing colours, and winter for the wind and rain.

But late spring and early summer are different.

Almost overnight, the hedgerows come alive.

The fresh new greens mix with buds waiting to burst into colour. Honeysuckle weaves in and out, filling the air with its unmistakable scent, its flowers still creamy in colour before turning yellow. Buttercups sway amongst the long grasses where swallows hunt for insects. Foxglove spires provide a pop of purple amongst the hedgerow.

Then there are the oak trees.

The farmer keeps them in check so they grow more like a hedge than a tree, but every year their new shoots stretch upwards in vibrant green tipped with coppery red, a stark contrast to the deep green of the older leaves.

It's almost as though summer is quietly saying to autumn, anything you can do...

This arrangement is inspired by those walks.

Rather than recreating one flower in perfect isolation, I wanted to capture the feeling of standing amongst all of them at once: the scent of honeysuckle, the movement of grasses in the breeze, foxgloves catching your eye, bindweed twisting itself in and amongst it all, and the quiet beauty of a hedgerow at the height of summer.

It's a collection of a moment in time.

Summer Hedgerow is an original paper botanical arrangement, available to view here.