Notes from the cold room: what came back from the Epping market this fortnight, and what has earned a place on your table.
The buckets came back from the Epping wholesale flower market heavier than they have been all year, and the studio has smelled like a cold garden ever since. It is deep winter in Melbourne. The heaters in our Fairfield studio go on at seven, the water in the buckets is sharp enough to make you wince, and the flowers could not be happier about any of it.
Let me say the disagreeable thing first. Everyone saves their sending for spring, when the markets are crowded and half the stems have been hurried into flower before their time. Winter stems open slowly and stay. The cool room barely has to work. What we buy this fortnight will still be standing in ten days, which is not a promise I can make you in November. I have already argued against the dozen red roses this month at some length — consider this dispatch the supporting evidence, bucket by bucket.
June is the best month of the year to buy flowers in this city, and almost nobody believes me.
What's in
Hellebores. The winter rose, though it is not a rose and refuses to behave like one. They nod — that is the whole charm — and they are at their best right now, in whites, dusty pinks and a magenta so deep it reads almost black in low light. A note for anyone who has been burnt by a sulking hellebore before: the trick is maturity. Picked young they wilt in a day; picked once the centre has begun to set, they will outlast nearly everything else in the vase. Ours are picked properly. I will defend the nod to anyone — a flower that looks down is not being rude, it is asking you to come closer.
Stock. The studio smells of it before you reach the door, clove and pepper and something your grandmother grew. The deep plum is the one I keep stealing for my own kitchen table. It is the most generous stem of the winter: scent, height and colour for the price of one.
Ornamental kale. Yes, kale. I am aware of the eyebrows. A rosette of ruffled violet and grey-green that reads as a flower from across the room and a provocation up close — and I will take it over a hurried imported rose every single time. If you think vegetables have no place in an arrangement, I would gently suggest you have not seen kale used well.
Lisianthus. Ruffled, quietly formal, and underrated because it refuses to shout. It does the work people think peonies do, in months peonies would never dare show up for.
And the first jonquils arrived this week, earlier than I was ready to admit it is jonquil season. One bunch by the till and the whole front room smells like late winter — a fortnight ahead of schedule and very welcome.
What's fleeting, what's holding
Fleeting: the magenta hellebores. When they are gone they are gone, and this fortnight's batch is the best colour we have had all season. The deep plum stock will run for a few weeks yet, but the scent is at its peak in the cold — by August it softens.
Holding: the kale, absurdly. It will outlast your interest in it. Lisianthus too — ten days without complaint.
Penny, who did this fortnight's buying, has one rule at the market that I have given up arguing with: she will put back a perfect-looking bunch if the water in the seller's bucket is cloudy. Clean water, honest grower, she says. The stems this week came home with her full approval, which is rarer than you would think.
Most of what is in the buckets goes straight into the week's seasonal designs — the plum stock and the kale are doing their best work in Genoa just now, which is exactly the deep gradient of purples this month deserves. The rest gets decided the way it always does: by what looks best in the bucket on the morning, not by a plan written in an office.
That is the June report. Come past the studio if you want to smell the stock before it is gone — the door is the one propped open onto the cold.
