I have to admit that my idea of flower arranging is to bring in a stem I’ve accidentally snapped off in the garden and plonk it into a posy vase on the kitchen windowsill – more with sorrow rather than joy. But Judith Blacklock is a flower arranger par excellence, the editor of the N.A.F.A.S (National Association of Flower Arranging Societies) magazine and flower school owner.

She has a new book which will appeal to thousands of people in the Oxfordshire area. It’s called Church Flowers and part of the proceeds are going towards Bowel Cancer UK. It’s full of practical advice for flower arrangers everywhere and the pictures are genuine arrangements taken in churches. They include arches, floral pedestals, floral carpets and curtains for every area of the church.

Flower arrangers give a lot of pleasure to other people. They also influence gardening although they look at plants in an entirely different way to a gardener. The cookery writer and arranger Constance Spry (1886-1960 ), who decorated Westminster Abbey for the Coronation in 1953, collected and grew old-fashioned roses to cut and arrange at Winkfield Place, near Windsor. She enjoyed their softer shapes and she inspired a very young Graham Stuart Thomas (1909-2003) to become a rosarian. He in turn brought them to a new generation of gardeners – ensuring their popularity and survival today.

Flower arrangers instinctively use pure-white with green and this elegant mixture formed the basis of last year’s award-winning Chelsea gardens. They combine round flowers with spikes and spires and often them with frothy flowers woven through. This is a good border recipe used with lots of foliage. A good way to plan a border is to arrange flowers in a vase to see if they go together.

They understand colour better than gardeners do too. There are three primary colours (red, yellow and blue) and these blend to form orange, green and purple This gives six sections commonly arranged in a colour wheel of yellow, orange, red, purple, blue and green. So far so good. Basically a blend of one to three adjacent shades (like orange, yellow and red) is easy on the eye. However colours on opposite sides (blue with orange for instance) create drama and both colours will appear more vibrant. The brave souls who use all the colours together need to be able to segregate cool and warm colours to avoid horrible clashes. Pinks are a minefield – whether in garden or vase.

The best gardeners restrict colours in this way. The late Lanning Roper (1912-1983) was a famous American landscape architect who worked on Broughton Castle in the 1960s and at Highgrove House in 1981. Roper would never allow blue and pink in the same border and he thought that blue should always be used with white and yellow. His colour schemes still dominate the long borders at Broughton Castle.

N.A.F.A.S celebrate their 50th birthday this year at Westminster Abbey from today until Saturday. There are 56 clubs in the Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire N.A.F.A.S. group and they include those at Bladon, Didcot, Oxford, Wallingford, Witney, Abingdon and Chadlington. (For more N.A.F.A.S info on clubs tel 0118 9473006/ secretary@bbando.org.uk) n Church Flowers by Judith Blacklock is published by The Flower Press at £35.