A vase between the Princess and the Vice-Chancellor
Glass of champagne in one hand, watching HRH The Princess Royal take to the stage beside the Vice-Chancellor and a vase of our flowers between them - this was the highlight of my flower farming year.
It was the 125th anniversary celebration at Harper Adams University and by far the biggest event I've ever supplied flowers for.
The story starts a few months earlier, in Newport. A woman from the university's events team came up to the stand of a fellow grower, Sarah Jackson of Farm Lane Flowers, and asked if she could supply cut flowers for a major anniversary event.
Sarah and I have only known each other for only a year. As new growers we found lots of common ground and have been on quite a journey, so when Sarah asked me to help, I said yes.
Harper Adams University gave Sarah a near perfect brief: a natural, wild and bountiful feel that incorporated wheat grown on the university's own land.
We went with dahlias, strawflowers, zinnias and achillea, dressed in foliage running through dark blackberry purples, raspberry pinks and sunset yellows. We added dried poppy heads, teasels, hops and grasses to push that end-of-summer feeling a little further, and the wheat tied it all back to the land – and to the institution that was being celebrated.
As the sun was starting to set on Tuesday 22nd September, we were out cutting and conditioning. That timing does the flowers no end of good for the vase life we needed over the following days.
On Wednesday we drove the few short miles to Harper Adams University, took over a bar in the Students' Union, and got to work. By four o'clock the arrangements were in place and, with a small army of students waiting to reclaim their watering hole, we packed up, and headed home for an early night.
Thursday arrived, and the University had been kind enough to include us on the guest list. We put our smart clothes on, joined some 250 others from across the agricultural and horticultural sectors, and spent the day celebrating 125 years of the institution.
The room was packed with everything you'd expect – historic farming implements beside cutting edge technology – and our flowers, wild and slightly unruly in the best way, sitting among them all. A strange and lovely juxtaposition, and I'll admit I looked at them more than once.
Among the guests was Felicity Finch, known to most of us as Ruth Archer from BBC Radio 4's The Archers and members of Hawkstone Choir.
But the moment that stayed with me most was the one I described at the start: the Princess on stage, the Vice-Chancellor beside her, and there, in the middle, our flowers.
I'm grateful to Sarah for thinking of me, and to Harper Adams' events team for recognising the value and beauty of locally grown cut flowers. Sarah and I are both relatively new in this trade, and an day like that is the kind of thing you remember for a long time.
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