Bouquets, buttonholes & Valentines all to order…
Bouquets, buttonholes & Valentines all to order…
St Valentines Day is fast
approaching so Doreen
Errington will be checking
her diary and preparing for
an extra rush of orders to her
workshop on a Bedfordshire
farm. Ann Rogers went to
Toddington to meet her
HAVE buckets, will travel, quips Doreen Errington referring to the floristry enterprise she runs from Herne Manor Farm, Todding-ton, Beds and the fact that she will travel long distances to fulfil orders for wedding flowers – bouquets, buttonholes, church and reception decorations.
Doreen has been supplying customers with arrangements and bouquets for years, but it was a request to supply all the flowers for a wedding that spurred her into getting professional training.
"And I did do that wedding," she says, "with a friends help." But she also undertook a two-year course at Barnfield College, Luton to learn professional techniques and gain City & Guilds NVC qualifications at levels one and two.
Her father had wanted her to study floristry when she left school, recognising her natural talent from the way in which she used to raid his garden to make presentation bouquets for friends, but Doreen chose to take up a secretarial career instead.
But now, besides running her own busy floristry enterprise from the 890ha (2200-acre) holding where her farm manager husband John grows combinable crops, Doreen helps others to become fully fledged florists by working at Barnfield College twice a week. Here one of her tasks is to assess students shop skills.
* No browsers
She doesnt have a florists shop herself. She doesnt expect customers to come to her to browse. They are welcome to come along to collect orders and when a wedding is being planned she will invite brides and their mothers, friends or grooms into her home in the evening to sit down and discuss requirements. Alternatively she will visit them, but the bulk of her orders come by post or phone.
She is concentrating her efforts on producing baskets of flowers to order and sending them by courier for next day delivery to any address on the UK mainland.
Orders also accumulate through the diary service she offers "for the busy man or woman". At clients requests she will record their special dates, such as anniversaries and birthdays, and requests for Mothers day, St Valentines day, Easter or Christmas gifts. A week or so in advance of a recorded date she contacts the client to confirm the order and arrange for payment and then sends out a basket to arrive on the appropriate day.
* Smell important
Scent is as important as colour to Doreen when she chooses flowers for a basket. She wants recipients to be thrilled by both when they lift the lid of the sturdy cardboard boxes to discover the flower-filled, handleless-baskets secured inside with plastic coated wires and set in nests of white tissue paper.
"Freesias and jonquils – something like that with a lovely smell," is what she likes to work with, explains Doreen who wires the flowers for her basket arrangements. "Chrysanthemums and carnations are out, unless a client particularly requests them and I never use lilies as many people dont like them. I always include roses or orchids," adds Doreen who enhances the perfume of the flowers by including herbs.
Basket prices start at £25 plus a delivery charge of £6.50. Her flower choices include chincherinees, anemones, tulips and grape hyacinths for spring, and nigella, pinks, scabious and jasmin for summer, but she is happy to discuss customers personal choices.
She buys her flowers from a local wholesaler or visits a nearby nursery and makes up her orders in a small workshop in the corner of a barn. She ranges buckets of flowers out of the draught in the manger of a redundant feed-rack and has wrapped a dried hop bine around the hayrack edge to remind herself not to knock her head on it.
Here, between phone calls and with a radio to keep her company, she will be particularly busy at the end of this week preparing orders for St Valentines day.
Inquiries: (01525-873833) fax (01525-876404).
Left:Florist Doreen Errington with some of the basket arrangements she despatches by courier.
Above: A redundant feedrack is a feature of her farm-based workshop.