Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

…to displaying flowers and foliage in a vase, but that art could be anything from utilising learned floristry techniques to basically plonking them in a receptacle. Perhaps after plonking we might then rearrange them slightly to achieve something we see as more satisfactory, without necessarily recognising why we want to tweak things, or perhaps we might place them a stem at a time to achieve some perceived kind of balance, without having any formal or even informal training in floristry.

For IAVOM, however, none of this matters as we are creating the vases for our own pleasure, to bring elements of our gardens inside so we can enjoy them at closer quarters – and, to be honest, the blooms are invariably an art form in themselves and a single stem in a vase or jam jar is a work of art. That is certainly the case with today’s dahlias, Dahlia