Sweet peas. Don’t forget will you? Sweet peas.

Grandma was telling me for the hundredth time that we must have sweet peas at her funeral, as they’re her favourite flower.

When I found them growing wild in my garden the year she passed an obsession with flowers begun.

Certain flowers take us back to moments in time and even make us feel close to those we can’t see.

We can express our care for someone through flowers and our wonder for the natural world by growing and arranging them with reverence.

Sadly, so much of modern floristry and flower farming is actually damaging to the environment that produces such natural beauty.

Flowers are often grown using peat, depleting a crucial ecosystem, and weeds are kept down with miles of plastic fabric or litres of harmful chemicals.

Once the flowers have been shipped halfway across the world to our local florists they are arranged using bricks of microplastics to keep them hydrated.

I believe flowers should be grown with love and care for the environment they exist in and the creatures we share our world with.

Local flowers capture the light and mood of the season, creating the most striking visual and sensorial impact.

Humans have been arranging flowers for over 4,000 years, so hopefully the last 80 years of floral foam will soon be left in the past, as there is a natural way to produce any floral arrangement or installation.

The cutting garden here is always humming with bees and hoverflies, the soil is covered with plants not tarps, and I constantly experiment to find plants that thrive in this soil with the least possible fertiliser and irrigation.

Grandma passed in the winter, when sweet peas were long gone, but every year they clamber and drape over our fences and trees and I fall in love with them as she did.