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Days of Dahlia

Working flower farm & garden based in Auldhouse, South Lanarkshire, just outside of Glasgow, Scotland.
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Garden-led contemporary floristry, growing flowers & florists. Learn floristry online with Seasonal Pursuits, a subscription membership community.

28/10/2026

Storms will tell; they can be trusted.

So wrote the New Zealand writer and poet Janet Frame (1924-2004). I have always found a lot of solace in Janet Frame's writing and this phrase always plays in my mind whenever I am weathering any type of storm, internal or external.

What she is saying is that nature's most violent disruptions whether it be storms, winds, flooding, high tides, are honest. Unlike human words or history, which can lie, obscure, or sanitise trauma, a storm leaves behind something that is tangible and undeniable, a truth. She describes this as a trusted reality, records that are left behind on the land, like broken shells, uprooted trees, and debris.

If anything about Storm Boelo's aftermath is to be trusted, it's this: that climate change is real and destructive and a threat to all of us. And that the natural world as an uncompromised truth teller that will always expose human illusion or delusion, ego, and the inevitability of change. This changing season, as the world is enters a new phase where global temperatures are projected to exceed the 1.5 degrees celsius Paris Agreement limit, serve as an honest corrective to human pretense and cruelty and institutional and governmental failure on climate policy.

Another thing that storms will tell, is just how much people care about you, when I shared the images of the devastation we faced after Storm Boelo on Monday, we have been sent 100s of DMs asking if we are ok, to say that they are sorry, to ask if they can help, or just to say how frightful all of this is. We are physically unable to get back to everyone, there are just so many messages which is so kind, but we see you and we love you, and we want to say thank you so much to everyone who has reached out.

We will rebuild our dear green place, slowly, and we will see it looking like it does in these slides once again. Thank you thank you x x x x x

Ps. For a bit of a laugh, according to our insurance provider, polytunnels are only protected against fire under their policy, ever heard of a polytunnel with irrigation going on fire in the wettest part of the world? lol lol lol

12/10/2026

Louisina and I spent the weekend spent flowering the most beautiful private castle, an unbelievable place, a museum, the most beautiful backdrop for flowers, oil paintings, exquisite antique furniture, loch views and mountains all around, the view from every window a perfect postcard, tales of ancient curses, and halls haunted by a loyal "broonie" (a hobgoblin and household spirit in Scottish mythology who sneaks out at night to do chores like sweeping floors and mending tools). I had a wee moment where I felt less lonely knowing a broonie was nearby. I wondered if it was hiding in up the chimney watching me, if it approved of the flowers, and if it would sneakily tidy up the stray stems and fallen leaves left behind after a long day :)

23/09/2026

And they called it Days of Dahlia, and then it became exactly that :)

I was blown away today, spending time with these beautiful flowers, that I can't believe we grew, some of them now 7 feet tall, and producing 100s and 100s of flowers which feels like the most precious gift.

27/08/2026

Some beautiful moments of many beautiful moments on our Flower School Introduction Day. With the last group pf 2026, we assembled in the garden and gave a talk on growing flowers, and the origins and philosophy of our flower school. We then gathered in the studio for three floristry demonstrations. There were tears and laughter, as flowers bring all the high emotions to the fore, and it was a day we will never forget. Thank you to all who joined us! For those who have booked a place on a workshop or course, we can't wait to welcome you back to the world of Days of Dahlia for flower play and creativity :)

26/08/2026

Pillow season: hollyhocks, dahlias, asters :)

18/08/2026

Explorations in flower colour, on the page, on silk.

*Finding the perfect pink rose
*Botanically dyed ribbon ombre made with summer flower pigments
*Test colours
*Trying to name the colour of salvia
*Silk petals
*The many hues of seapinks
*Freshly dyed silks in blue and blush (sky and cheeks)
*The vibrancy of cornflower
*Silk off-cut tangles

Botanical dyeing is a way of making the hidden qualities of flowers visible, it's a bit like unveiling their secrets. A red dahlia can contain purple pigments, a blue cornflower can give pink.

Through the process of extracting pigment, something that is held within the flower becomes colour, the colour becomes recorded in cloth, the flower disappears, but something of it remains.

I find this process so beautiful, creating an archive of the material qualities of a flower. Flowers not simply objects of decoration, but living materials with their own histories and temporalities. Botanical dyeing is a rich exploration of what can be held within a material and what might remain when that material changes, disappears, or is transformed into something else.

Alchemy!
We always joke that we feel a bit like witches at a cauldron :)

16/08/2026

In June, our friend Helen Cross came to spend a morning with us, deep among the flowers. We first met Helen in 2022, when she invited us onto her podcast to talk about growing cut flowers. We’ve been friends and gardening confidantes ever since. Helen is an author, journalist, gardener, and passionate advocate for the many ways gardening can nourish us physically, mentally, creatively.

On this morning in June (which feels like a million years ago now), Helen cut flowers and made an arrangement while we talked about gardening, finding order in chaos, and what flowers mean to us. I filmed little snippets of our conversation and the simple joy of putting flowers in a vase without pressure or overthinking.

It's very fitting that I would share this little film today as Helen is opening her own garden in Netherlee in Glasgow's Southside as part of today, sharing the garden that she has created at home with her family, a place that inspired her first book, and to raise money for .

If you are nearby, Helen’s garden is open today, Sunday 16 August from 2–5pm.

This film is part of The Flower Portraits, a new series of films about people, flowers, gardening, creativity, and the pleasure of making beautiful things together, carefully and slowly.

12/08/2026

Let's talk about this special colour palette; burgundy, blue, pink, purple, green. I am fascinated by flower colours, I love experimenting and playing with different colours, observing their relationships as they grow in the garden, what they look like on a sunny day, an overcast day, in bud, open splendour, fully blown, and even dried.

The colour wheel helps us to understand the relationships between colours, their neighbours, contrasts, complements, oppositions, temperature and depth, but flowers behave differently from anything painted or printed on a page.

A flower's colour is alive. Pigment, petal shape, translucency, age, and light all affect how we see it. Blue flowers look more violet indoors or in shadow, burgundy flowers glow red in sunlight but can look almost black where the petals are most dense in the middle, pink flowers have traces of silver, blue, red, purple, grey, white.

And then there is green. Green might be the backdrop to the garden but it also an active part of the palette. Green makes everything feel more natural, more wild. It changes the way the pinks and burgundies appear, adding contrast, and connecting one colour to another.

I like to refer to the colour wheel, as it gives me a language and a framework to describe relationships and behaviours between colours. The garden gives us so much colour to look at and play with. The real skill is learning to move between the theory and the natural world of colour.

I love thinking about all of this when I am working with flowers, thinking about what we know, but being continually surprised about what we find in front of us, our eyes, the mirror, the camera lens. If you like thinking about flowers this way too, welcome, follow along, grow and arrange with us as we share more seasonal colour studies, observations, and experiments from our flower farm and garden.

09/08/2026

Sunday Series: Week 32 in the flower year

A week of highlights: a special flower drawing class in the studio, the first of many, being invited to decorate the most beautiful Arts & Crafts house with flowers, a wedding in East Sussex in the garden of a 17th century farmhouse, the edge of the world at Derek Jarman's house Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, back home to Days of Dahlia and more dahlias than we could ever have dreamed of. And yes, all of this in one week!

At this time of year, I wonder how we fit it all in, the pace is rapid, sometimes I struggle to keep up, there is no time or place to be idle, flowers come and go, we cut and come again, my feet are sore, we are in the midst of it all, and planning what is to come next. I can't help but begin to think about how much I will miss flowers when we get into November, December, but also how impossible it is to sustain this 12 months of the year, reminders of how the garden teaches us how to pace and rest.

I love this picture I took after our drawing class when my dad came in to see how it had went, and he went straight to sniff a rose, my dad is also called Derek :)

Onwards to flower week 33!

06/08/2026

I finally got the chance to visit the iconic little black house with the yellow windows, on the Kent coast, deep in the Romney Marsh, travelling practically the entire length of the UK, past drought, wildfire, beauty, and strife, on what felt like the edge and the end of the world.

Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage and its garden-come-sculptural-installation has had such a profound effect on my life, even though I had never set eyes on it in the flesh. The garden in the shingle, a garden in the most unlikely of places, growing around and through sculptural formations of rocks, flint, driftwood, and metal, was mostly dried out with only valerian, sea kale, curry plant, and fennel surviving in amongst islands of spiky gorse gnarled by the wind, all plants Derek Jarman has written about and which I have come to associate with him. The health of the curry plant tells me everything I need to know about why I have failed to grow it in this wet, cold place. I was hoping to see some borage (I borage, bring courage) but there was something about the dried husks and skeleton forms of the garden, ghosts, that represented the absence of the gardener and the artist who made this place.

This is a brutal landscape, exposed, hot, with telephone cables interrupting an expanse of blue sky, the detritus of fishing equipment, broken boats, traffic cones, and the Dungeness nuclear power station looming in the background, and yet there is so much beauty here. The sky feels absolutely vast. Derek Jarman himself created such a powerful legacy in the savage societal, cultural, and medical landscape of the 1980s. And yet, this place feels like it represents all the texture and savagery of 2026 too. I understand now what Derek Jarman meant when he wrote "my garden's boundaries are the horizon", something about being pushed to the edge, and discovering the elasticity of your edges, maybe, and that hardship is part of growth.

For any gardener and artist, this place reminds us that we are called to the different creative outlets at different stages in our lives, and that gardens heal, and that they can be decorative, beautiful, abundant, but they can also be sites of grief, broken, bare, paused.

I am writing this at the edge of the sea, looking out towards the white cliffs of Dover with France somewhere out there. Days of Dahlia feels a million miles away but also right here in my pocket with some teasel seeds and a few sprigs of curry plant.

Address

Millhouse Farm Cottage, Strathaven Road
Glasgow
G759DR

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm
Saturday	9am - 5pm

Website

http://www.daysofdahlia.com/, https://www.daysofdahlia.com/about-seasonal-pursuits

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