Val Bourne gathers some cut-flower display advice

Gardeners and flower arrangers both adore flowers, but they approach arranging flowers in entirely different ways. I grow sweet peas, dahlias and lots of annuals which I cut and plonk — that’s the only word to describe it — into a simple vase. I have friends who arrange church flowers and they arrive with an armoury of props and tools including wire and oasis to produce formal arrangements that set my teeth on edge.

In recent years flower arranging has become more informal however and a new book published by Dorling Kindersley entitled Simple Flower Arranging – Step-by-Step Designs and Techniques by Mark Welford and Stephen Wicks echoes the trend for simplicity. The two authors, former ballet dancers, own an award-winning florists in Bloomsbury so they’re used to producing classy, theatrical arrangrments. There are 60 projects in all, including hand ties, flowers with sea shells and simple gysophila in white vases, all things I can relate to. I loved the section at the front, entitled Maintenance and Tips, all about conditioning, slitting tulip stems and removing lily stamens so that the brown pollen doesn’t stain and so on.

The drive for the perfect cut flower has helped gardeners enormously because nurseries, right up until the First World War, produced cut flowers for local markets. This drove their plant-breeding programmes, particularly in France during the mid-19th century. The grand houses of Paris, so cleverly portrayed in The Hare with the Amber Eyes written by Edmund de Waal, needed to decorate their homes lavishly with cut flowers throughout the year.

Lilac was a particular Parisian favourite and it features on the book cover, arranged with toning delphiniums, cornflowers and alliums. Like all woody stems, they should be split with secateurs to soak up more water, we’re told. The chief breeder of lilacs were the Lemoines from Nancy in France. The founder, Victor (1823- 1911), was a famous plant breeder and the first foreigner to be awarded the prestigious RHS Victoria Medal of Honour. He raised the first double potentilla named Gloire de Nancy (1854), the white Japanese anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ and he worked with fuchsias and begonias. He also bred Hydrangea paniculata ‘Grandiflora’ circa 1862.

Victor Lemoine probably never intended to breed lilacs. However he found himself housebound in the Franco-Prussian War and was unable to leave his home because the town was occupied by Prussian troops. With time on his hands he looked for a diversion and decided to improve a double lilac already growing in his garden — Syringa vulgaris ‘Azurea Plena’. He began crossing this weedy-flowered 1840s introduction with single forms of S. vulgaris and S. oblata.

As he got older, his chosen lilac got taller and taller and he sent his younger, nimbler and sharper-eyed second wife up the ladder armed with paintbrush, tweezers, a needle and scissors. He steadied the bottom of the ladder while she collected the pollen-bearing parts. By 1890 he had produced a superb double-white which he thoughtfully named ‘Madame Lemoine’ and it’s still supreme today.

His equally gifted son Émile (1863-1943) and his grandson Henri (1897-1982) carried on breeding, naming 214 French tree lilac over 71 years. It’s said that only three Lemoine lilacs are extinct even today. The Lemoine family also bred and grew peonies. These are scented and last extremely well in water especially if picked when the flowers are about an inch across. The mid-pink Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ (1906) still remains a great florist’s favourite, although it’s a little weak-stemmed in the garden. Other stunning French-bred peonies are the magenta-flecked cream ‘Festiva Maxima’ (Miellez 1851), the lemon-scented creamy ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ (Calot 1856 ) and the round pink ‘Monsieur Jules Elie’ (Crousse 1888).