Carol's Garden at Harthill ...

Carol Siddorn started her business Carol's Garden 6 years ago, on her smallholding just over the hill in Harthill! It is land that was formerly farmland, part of the old moss, so is reasonably fertile, although initially full of farmland weeds.

It started with her growing flowers and vegetables and selling them in Farmers Markets and the Country Market in Tattenhall.

Her creative skills and wonderful sense of colour showed in her unusual bouquets, she quickly developed her business in providing flowers for weddings, and local florists.

Her unusual combinations of garden flowers, wild flowers and shrubs, using them in a much more natural less 'flower arranged' style captured a more modern approach.

British cut flowers are very different to those provided traditionally by florists, who have to buy their flowers from the markets in Holland. Flowers sold have to manage being transported to and from Holland, restricting the variety of flowers. With British cut flowers sold locally, flowers can be softer, more ephemeral, and scented.

Another part of her business is running courses, making bunches of flowers picked from the garden, and teaching people to learn how to grow flowers for cutting.

Six years on, her business has 'grown'!

40% of her work is providing flowers for weddings, either doing the whole thing, or a variety of options from just bouquets and button holes, to providing buckets of flowers for DIY weddings. She has decorated stately homes like Dorfold Hall, Norton Priory, and Combermere Abbey, as well as Abbeywood, Chester Town Hall and village halls and marquees.

50% of the work is providing flowers for florists from South Lancs, Manchester, Yorkshire, East Cheshire, they are either delivered or flowers are picked up from the nursery.

10% of the work is running a number of different courses: growing cut flowers for both beginners and advanced people already in the business who want to learn more, making arrangements using flowers picked from the garden, developing a sense of different flowers, colours, texture combinations. She is planning to develop this side of her business and will be publishing her list of new courses for the autumn in the next few months.

That is as well as growing all the plants! She grows lots of different varieties of flowers in small numbers, both wild and garden flowers, which she can use in her work, buds, flowers and seed heads, are all material for use.

She is drying flowers for use in winter, and for Christmas arrangements. They have planted more shrubs and trees so she has a wider selection of greenery and flowers in her arrangements and bouquets.

Her support has come from social media! She belongs to a group, Flowers From the Farm which is a not for profit organisation.They support each other among other things through Instagram, this also includes artists, ceramicists and other creative people, who are working collaboratively. Flowers from the Farm have had stands at the Chelsea and Tatton RHS flower shows, promoting British cut flowers, and Carol has helped with both.

Currently she has two other workers, but is looking to expand the business and will be looking to employ someone to work alongside her, to learn the business, but also to concentrate on the growing side, to free her up to use her more creative skills.

She has a website. For more information click on this link Carol's Garden.