Volunteer Day - Halstead Flower Festival

On Thursday 7 July, I took a dive way out of my comfort zone and into my Birkett Long-approved Volunteer Day!

I normally spend the months of March to July in a marketing and advertising frenzy for the Halstead Flower Festival each year, boring everyone I know talking about other people’s amazing flower arrangements (with accompanying photos). This year I added Instagram to our marketing mix – it’s been a daily task of making sure we’ve got reels, posts and boosted content going out. I can see flowers on the backs of my eyelids.

Early on, we were struggling for flower arrangers, so when Birkett Long announced a new initiative that allowed staff to volunteer for a good cause for a day, I thought it would be a good idea to sign up to be a flower arranger. I’m not sure what possessed me. I’ve never arranged a flower in a public setting before. I’m creative, but not at all in that way. I knew a traditional pedestal arrangement was out of my league, so whatever I did would have to be a bit off the wall to allow for a good margin for error…so I chose my song (all the arrangements are based on hymns or worship songs) and got planning and experimenting.

The day arrived and I headed down to St Andrew’s Church in my lime green Birkett Long polo shirt, with a bag full of kit that was slightly alien to me – secateurs, floral Parafilm tape, fishing wire, and a box full of multi-coloured origami birds!

As I have been describing my flower arrangement plans to people, there has been one common reaction – raised eyebrows.

I’m used to this kind of thing – even my primary school reports used to describe me as ‘overly ambitious in her creativity’. I remember one space project; classmates made tennis-ball sized planets while my best friend and I made a rocket that was too tall for the classroom and an astronaut that stood 4 and a half feet tall. In Textiles at secondary school, we had to make sweet-themed soft furnishings. Most people made the obligatory Liquorice Allsort cushion. Not me! I fashioned a 5 feet tall Sherbet Fountain that can still be found, with its cardboard carpet tube at its centre (mainly because it’s too heavy to move too often), at my parents’ house. My dad had to drop it off at the school gate when I had Textiles because I couldn't carry it.

This is how it came to pass one Thursday in July, that I would spend 5 hours attaching flowers and origami birds to wires (over, and over, and over, again). I then watched, holding my breath, as it was hoisted 5 meters into the air by my friend, a retired London Fireman who has no fear of high ladders. There were only 2 small disasters as the display went up – one of the hanging wires (there are 11 suspended wires hanging from the main horizontal wire) wasn’t tied quite tightly enough and had slid along, and so despite my judicious measuring it was no longer evenly spaced. Did I mention I hate maths – this involved SO MUCH MATHS. Luckily, with yet another ladder and a very long stick we managed to coax it back into position. One of the flowers had also slipped slightly – perhaps where it dragged on the floor while we were trying to get airborne – never mind!

I’ve learned a lot doing this – I felt like I was on Bake Off most of the day. Really obvious things I’d thought through carefully I kept forgetting. Everything took about 20 minutes longer than it was supposed to. Even though I’d planned everything, I still had to rework and remeasure it all on the fly – the measurements were all slightly off because I didn’t really know how wide the ceiling space was until I had the suspension wires in front of me (like I said, SO MUCH MATHS). Despite this sounding quite adventurous, I actually scaled it back on the day – the original plan was for three horizontal wires! – so it was a good lesson in being ambitious, but also being flexible and knowing your limitations.

This display is my representation of the song There is a Day, by Nathan Fellingham, which is a song I lead regularly with our worship band at a monthly service at St Andrew’s. The chorus features the lyrics ‘we will meet Him in the air’, so the display really had to be in the air didn’t it? I had no choice!

I’m really grateful to Birkett Long for allowing me the time to get involved in the festival in a more practical way than I would normally. I don’t usually get to spend time with the flower arrangers – I just produce the marketing materials, sometimes see the mountains of flowers arrive in buckets and then suddenly they all become incredible displays. It was so nice to see the process they all go through (and go through a little bit of it myself!) so I can talk about it in a more meaningful way when I’m promoting it. They work so hard to put on a great show and I hope as many people as possible visit – we usually get at least 1000 visitors, so I hope this year beats the record!

You can follow the festival on Instagram or Facebook.