These are more reliable in difficult conditions because you need much smaller corms to obtain flowers.

She especially loved having flowers in the house as carers would always comment on how cheerful they were and how much they enjoyed visiting Joan and her husband Keith. Thank you to all the readers who have sent supportive messages over the past five years and have been with me on this journey. I hope you’ve enjoyed this whistle-stop tour of my cut flower bouquet-making, even if it is a week late!

Joan recognised these immediately as they had once been grown by her father, and she remembers picking them and arranging them in vases for chapel. The flowers were loosely tied so that Joan could spend a few happy hours arranging them in assorted vases and fill the windowsills with colour. I’ve planted Tete-tete in these and placed them on the potting shed window where I can look at them while I’m working. I started with the galvanised bucket which came from Jonathan Moseley and contained sunflowers last week. Leicester remained in localised lockdown, and the care home where Joan lives with her husband Keith, was within the extended lockdown area.

It’s a very late flowering type with short pedicels, making the flowers fling out and look up at you. I hope you’ve enjoyed viewing these beautiful flowers and have got some ideas for future floristry projects.A highlight of a particularly difficult and stormy day was suddenly finding six long-tailed tits, newly emerged from the nest- all gathered along a hazel branch, at eye level, fluffing up feathers, preening, eager darting eyes. The cuttings will ensure they survive over the winter, as they are not always hardy in my cold wet clay. Snowdrops come from Easton Walled Gardens, Hodsock Priory and National Garden Scheme open garden days.

Cerise red dahlias, possibly Arabian Night, with red salvias which are also having their moment now. They are cut early in the morning and plunged straight into cold fresh water while still out in the field. I bought a white one and a red one several years ago, and together they have produced a seedling baby combining the two colours. Her cake tin -before dementia- was always full of flapjack, coconut chocolate squares, and fruit cake.It’s lovely to be part of such a supportive team and I’ve appreciated the editor’s letters each week summing up our thoughts on the covid crisis and ‘steadying the ship’ with calm and sensible advice. In another arrangement, he used branches of Ballerina roses which looked like bouquets in themselves without any other flowers needed. I keep looking around the garden and feeling rather sad and dismayed at the damage, but there’s always next year to look forward to. Admittedly, these are made from plastic, but I’ve had mine for 6 or 7 years so far, and treated carefully, they will last a long time. The stand-out element of this arrangement is the gorgeous sunflowers grown in the UK by a company which also specialises in growing plants for bird food.