A growing business

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 16

A growing business

Dried flowers are an aspect of floral decoration that has grown rapidly in the past two years. Either available separately or arranged into bowls and bouquets, their renewed popularity has to be for two reasons.

One, they are convenient and seasonless. And two, their interpretation has developed from the rigid formality of the past into softening posies and a natural, spring garden effect.

Two women who are gaining a reputation for their dried flowers are Daphne Douglas and Buffy Savill, from North Canterbury. They do all their own work, from the planting and growing to the harvesting, drying, and arranging.

Daphne began the enterprise. Born and brought up in Kenya, she married a North Canterbury farmer. With three young children she found herself very much tied, with helping on the farm as well as her family and domestic work. But she needed an interest that was something for herself. She tried many different hobbies.

On a trip to England Daphne Douglas saw a beautiful arrangement of dried flowers in a house in London. Until then she had loathed the appearance of dried flowers, but realised that if such loveliness was

possible with dried flowers, then she’d learn. So she started to read widely "experiment and experiment," and generally learn for three years, all the time developing and trying to improve her results. She made arrangements to give to friends whose homes she could revisit later to see whether the flowers had stood up to time and temperature, or if they had flopped and lost their colour.

Eventually she got it right.

In 1982 Daphne went again to England to visit her family. To fulfil the few orders that were beginning to come in, she shared her hard-learnt trade secrets of growing and drying with Buffy Savill, so she could join in supplying the arrangements.

More orders kept coming in, turning the interest from a hobby into a small cottage industry. But both women express concern about becoming too commercial if they are tied to producing so many arrangements a week. They feel they have to be in the mood of inspiration to get their best results. Buffy Savill was also an imported bride. A country girl from New South Wales, she worked in Sydney as an interior decorator before marrying a farmer at Hanmer.

She found exactly the same problem of being tied to home with two young children and yet bursting with artistic ideas. The friends do not describe themselves as partners in a commercial sense, although this could develop in time. Rather they give an impetus to each other. Daphne says that Buffy’s interest and encouragement helped to sustain her through the long development stages. Now they can swap and discuss ideas.

There is no copying because each woman has a totally different style of arranging and design. When they get an order they decide which style best suits what has been requested. Daphne Douglas describes her arrangments as being more individual and daintier with detail, whereas Buffy’s look more informal, like a country kitchen posy.

The work with the flowers is constant, backbreaking and fiddly. First comes planting out the boxes of seedlings. They are annuals, so planting is throughout September, October and November, with harvesting from December onwards.

The planting has to be done after the frost and before the nor’wester in North Canterbury. The timing of harvesting must be precise — if they miss the time, they have msised it completely and lost that type of bloom for the year. After picking, some flowers just need to be put in bunches and dried in a reasonably dark place. Others need to be processed individually and quickly, and then stored until the process has been completed.

Flowers should never be in a moist atmosphere. Buffy fortunately has the top of a large barn in which to hang her bunches of flowers, but Daphne is still trying to organise a more permanent and suitable place for storage.

The flowers tend to take over spare rooms, hang from ceilings and every other space that looks momentarily empty. They also habitually make a dreadful mess . . .

Before arranging the flowers in bowls, there is the final precise and timeconsuming job of wiring each individual stem that needs this extra support. Keeping the interest in

the family, Dephne's sister-in-law. Clare Hill, has started a florist shop in Christchurch called Clarabelles, where she specialises in dried flowers. The demands of farm life for both women are constant. Buffy Savill says the worst thing that can happen is that you have just picked some flowers, when your husband bursts in saying help is needed quickly with machinery, driving or animals.

Meantime, your precious flowers, which shouldn't be left at a critical time, have to wait and very likely suffer.

Disaster can strike in different wavs.

Once Buffy picked and hung a great quantity of honesty in one of the sheds, which she swore she locked securely. When she returned to get it there wasn’t a stalk left - the cattle had eaten the lot.

And Daphne has been seen chasing her bunches of flowers down a Christchurch street. When she had opened her car boot the wind whipped the light arrangements out and away. They both have a nightmare of the possibility of losing four months of grow-

meets two women whose hobby has become a thriving enterprise

ing, picking, and processing through mice, mildew, or animals trampling their gardens. Each year Daphne Douglas looks for new variations to grow. She chooses seeds from a catalogue, many of which she has no knowledge of, but follows the description which may sound suitable for arrangements. A friend glancing through her ticked catalogue asked her if she had any idea of what one particular chosen variety was like. “No idea,” was her reply. So the friend brought her a photograph to show her that that plant looks like a carrot gone to seed and it grows to a height of 20 feet.

So it is obvious that these two women are definitely into a growing business.