Carol's Garden

I am just a bit obsessed with flowers. My compulsion extends to well over 500 varieties (we stopped counting years ago, it became a bit embarrassing) Mainly garden and wildflowers rather than the usual florist imports - we'll try anything, see how it grows here, how it combines with other flowers, how it copes in a vase or a bouquet, what it feels like. That absolute intimacy informs how we work with flowers, handling and arranging them. That intimacy that you can only get from sowing a seed, watching it grow, and flower, deciding when to pick it, how to treat it. Imported flowers are like strangers to me - somehow starched, characterless.  We are all about flowers. Respect for flowers. Here at Carol's Garden, we embrace our locality - the soil, the wildlife, and the climate, and we grow plants that can thrive in these conditions. No hot-housing - they live in soil and have to live in harmony with what is already here. We use unheated plastic tunnels to protect the most delicate spring flowers from the worst of the wind and rain and to be sure we have flowers in early spring.