Fresh flower tips ?

I would love my GGD to do floristry. As well as being an art, it's educational and you have the umpteen varieties of flowers and their names, worldwide. It's a guaranteed job as people will always want/need flowers for whatever occasion.

I wish there were the amount of flower-arranging programmes as there are cookery ones. In fact there aren't any flower programmes come to think of it. I haven't seen any.

I must try and coax my GGD to take up flower arranging. It's something I would have loved, but took up nursing, where I arranged flowers on the wards when they were allowed as the first thing I learned when doing it was never to put red and white flowers together in the same vase.

How true EllanVanin my Grandma was a nurse and never red and white as represented blood and bandages.

I too wonder where I would have ended up if I had accepted a place at floristry college in Haverford west when I was 16 - but was too much of a wimp to leave home.

There are floristry courses such as City and Guilds and local flower clubs are always looking for new members. I know someone who joined a flower club and within a year compleated a course, set herself up online doing wedding flowers and now is opening a shop.

Good luck with GGD ?

When I studied horticulture at a local Ag and Hort college they ran a floristry course which was so popular it was always over subscribed. We'd watch them 'harvesting' flowers from the window and our lecturer would be hopping mad because they wouldn't stay in the cutting garden which we took care of but sneak off and denude shrubs and destroy topiary in the formal garden - which was also down to us.

Once a week they'd join us for a botany lesson and we'd go all superior on them calling them flower arrangers!

When I retired I thought I'd sign up for the floristry course but it's been scrapped.