As Autumn Approaches…
As Autumn Approaches…
You may have seen on my Instagram that I’ve been getting back into floristry recently. I’m a creative person at heart, and there’s something about working with flowers, foliage and natural materials that I absolutely love.
At the salon, we’re lucky enough to have four magnificent windows. The building dates back to the 1700s, and the windows themselves are listed — they’re full of character and one of my favourite features of the salon.
For spring, I created some beautiful floral arrangements for them (if I do say so myself!), but autumn is the season I’ve really been looking forward to.
I love everything about autumn: the colours, the cosiness, the warmer food and that feeling of beginning to hunker down for winter. But unlike the depths of winter, we can still have those beautiful bright, warm days and lighter evenings. It feels like the best of both worlds.
It’s those colours and the changing landscape that have inspired this year’s autumn windows.
Rather than creating four matching displays, I’ve decided to give each window its own character and story. I’ve been gathering inspiration and creating a mood board for each one, with four different interpretations of autumn:
Window 1 — A French Autumn: L’Automne à Paris
Romantic, sculptural and slightly faded, with burgundy hydrangeas, deep red foliage, trailing amaranthus, faded roses and dramatic branches arranged in an oversized stone urn.
Window 2 — An English Autumn
A celebration of the English countryside and hedgerows — abundant, wild and full of colour, with dried hydrangeas, bracken, rosehips, crab apples, grasses, teasels, dahlias, brambles and berries.
Window 3 — The Harvest
A more pared-back, high-fashion take on harvest season. Huge sheaves of wheat, oats and grasses mixed with dried fennel, honesty and teasels, in shades of gold, straw and tobacco with just tiny flashes of deeper autumn colour.
Window 4 — Into Salem Woods
The wildest of the four. Inspired by an autumn woodland with a slightly magical Salem feel — twisted branches, moss, bracken, dried hydrangeas, seed heads and fiery orange leaves, creating the feeling of a tree growing up into a suspended canopy.
Now, I should add that I am not a trained florist, so anything could happen!
The finished windows may end up venturing away from these mood boards as I start putting everything together, but that’s part of the fun. I want them to feel creative, slightly unexpected and completely different from one another, while still working together as an autumn collection.
I’ll be sharing the whole process — what I buy, where I source everything from, how I construct the displays and, inevitably, anything that doesn’t quite go according to plan.
Let me know which window is your favourite — and if you have any floristry tips for me, I’m all ears!