News & Announcements

Why floral foam is still everywhere and what is used instead

Walk into the back room of almost any commercial florist in the country on a Monday morning — the day after the weekend rush — and the floor will be scattered with crumbled green blocks. Floral foam, sold under brand names like Oasis and Smithers-Oasis, has been the structural backbone of arranged floristry since the 1950s, and despite nearly a decade of sustained criticism from environmental campaigners and progressive florists alike, it remains the default material for bridal work, sympathy tributes, and hotel lobby installations. The conversation around foam tends to get stuck in a binary: bad material versus virtuous alternatives. What that framing misses is the question of why it persists so stubbornly in professional settings where the people using it are often fully aware of its problems. The answer involves logistics, labour costs, client expectations, and the specific physics of keeping cut stems hydrated — and working through all of it honestly is more useful than another call to simply stop using it.

How to make a stem bundle last more than four days

Last Tuesday, a delivery of garden roses and eucalyptus came in from a Worcestershire grower and sat on the studio bench while a wedding consultation ran long. By the time the stems went into water, the roses had already begun to close tight and the eucalyptus had dropped its lowest leaves. That single hour of delay cost two days of vase life, conservatively. The mechanics behind that loss — and what intervenes against it — are not complicated, but they are specific, and most of the advice circulating online gets the sequence wrong. What follows is a working account of how Simple Willow Works approaches conditioning, drawn from what actually holds up across tulips, dried pampas, seasonal British foliage and the other stem types that pass through this studio regularly.

What is actually in season in September in the UK?

The most common mistake people make when ordering flowers for a September event is trusting a wholesaler's availability list as if it were a crop report. It is not. A September price list in the UK can quietly contain peonies cut in May, sweet peas picked in June, and ranunculus that left a Dutch glasshouse before Wimbledon. Those flowers are not 'available' in any seasonal sense — they have been held in controlled-atmosphere cold stores at around 1–2°C and released slowly onto the market to extend their commercial window. The cost of that confusion is real: arrangements built on stored stock behave differently, vase life is compressed, and the colours in stored blooms often shift from what the catalogue photograph shows. Understanding the difference between a flower that is genuinely in the ground right now and one that has been warehoused for eight weeks is the first practical skill anyone ordering flowers for autumn should develop.

What to tell a florist when you do not know what you want

A customer came in last spring carrying a screenshot of a hotel lobby — marble floors, low amber light, a single enormous arrangement in the corner that was mostly foliage. She pointed at it and said: "I want that feeling." That is, genuinely, one of the most useful briefs we receive. The difficulty is not that customers do not know what they want; the difficulty is that most people assume a florist needs exact flower names and stem counts before anything useful can happen. What actually helps is a different set of information entirely, and it takes about three minutes to gather.

Garden party flowers: how to plan for heat, wind and a long day

A marquee goes up on a Friday morning in late July, the florist arrives at seven, and by two in the afternoon the dahlias in the low centrepieces have started to nod. Nobody panicked, but everyone noticed. Outdoor event floristry operates under a different set of pressures than a Saturday wedding in a stone church or a corporate installation in a temperature-controlled atrium: the variables are genuinely uncontrollable, and the margin for error is compressed into whatever hours separate setup from the moment guests arrive. Heat accelerates every biological process a cut flower is already fighting. Wind turns a tall arrangement into a lever, multiplying the force on every stem and every vessel base. And a garden party that starts at noon and runs to dusk asks flowers to perform for six, eight, sometimes ten hours without refrigeration, fresh water or intervention. The floristry decisions that determine whether an outdoor event looks extraordinary at 6pm are almost entirely made in the week before it, not on the day itself.

Sourcing within 60 miles: what that limits and what it does not

Does a 60-mile sourcing radius mean every stem in the shop was grown down the road? It does not. That is the honest answer, and this piece exists because the honest answer is more interesting than the marketing version. Regional sourcing is a practice with real constraints — seasonal gaps, crop failures, minimum order quantities — and understanding those constraints is the only way to evaluate whether a florist's claim is meaningful or decorative. At Simple Willow Works, the 60-mile rule has shaped every buying decision since the business opened, and what it has produced is a very specific understanding of what this landscape can and cannot grow at scale. The answer changes by month, and sometimes by week.

How a monthly flower subscription actually works, month to month

Last October, a grower I work with in the Wye Valley called three days before the cut-off to say her dahlias had gone over early — the warm September had pushed them too fast, and by the time the October boxes were due, the heads would be loose and dropping. That call is the reality of running a flower subscription, and it happens more often than the tidy version of this business suggests. What follows is an honest account of how the Simple Willow Works monthly subscription actually runs: how a brief gets made, how the palette shifts across twelve months, and what the process looks like when, as it often does, something falls through.

Dried flowers: which stems hold and which do not

The question that comes up most often in the workroom at Simple Willow Works is not about colour or composition — it is about whether a particular stem will survive drying at all. Most guidance on the subject is vague to the point of uselessness, advising readers to "hang stems upside down in a dry place" without addressing the material differences that determine success or failure. This guide works through the stems that appear most regularly in our dried arrangements, describing what each one does during the drying process and why. The honest answer is that roughly half of what sells as fresh cut flowers will not hold its form once moisture leaves, and knowing which half matters before the stems are cut.