You can find more information, photos and advice sheets on all the plants and recipes that we talk about in this podcast by heading to the links in the show notes or on our website at sarahraven.com.

Welcome to GrowCook Eat Arrange with me, Arthur Parkinson and Sarah Raven.

On this episode we have a guest. She's one of the UK's most prestigious flourish. She fills venues with flower power, seasonal glamour from London and across the country. She could only be Melissa Richardson of Jamjar Flowers from her peacock yard in London.

Hello Melissa.

Hello, very nice to hear you both.

Well, it's lovely to have you here.

This whole episode, really, we just want to draw out everything about you from where you started,

what your new favourite plants are, what are your favourite things to arrange with.

But I'd love, first of all, for Arthur and I to ask you about your kind of, how you got

into flowers in the first place. Well, I got into flowers by accident, really. I had run a model

agency for 27 years and I decided that I wanted to stop doing that. I'd sort of run out of

juice with that, but I thought I better do something

so that I didn't go mad. And my initial idea was just to do flowers for offices on Monday

mornings from my kitchen table. And I'm not quite sure how it escalated from there, but it did.

Very good. Well, yeah, that's exactly how I started.

So we share that in common.

And how did you come on to the idea of jam jar flowers?

I mean, like, you know, it's such a sort of nice, romantic image of how to use flowers, isn't it?

Well, I think at the time when I started, which was 2009, the fashion for flowers seemed to be

a lot of exotic flowers, a lot of tropical flowers, arranged in enormous martini glasses with big balls of floral foam

and they were incredibly, we kept going to weddings and thinking, oh God, this is horrible.

Yes.

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