Sania Pell

back to your roots

January 23, 2012  in flowers

A few years ago I bought a basic glass hyacinth bulb holder which I use every year, placing it on my mantlepiece. Since then I have collected a couple more and always love the way the roots grow in the water and the interesting patterns they form before the plant has flowered. The bulb simply sits in the neck of the water-filled vase, acting as a stopper so the water rarely needs topping up.

This year I bought a bag of bulbs at my local B&Q garden centre which contained many more bulbs than I had traditional vases for. I began thinking, what could I use as alternative vessels to sit the bulbs in? I love seeing the roots growing and it is important that the bulb rests on the water and not in it, so I scoured my cupboards and placed bulbs in the necks of milk bottles, on tea light candle holders, old jam jars and vintage glass and waited to see what would happen. I included one of my bulb root experiments in a shot for Heart Home magazine where I placed a bulb in the neck of a piece of chemistry equipment I had bought at my local car boot fair – a tall glass measuring cylinder where the numbers had long since rubbed off.

In these photos some of the bulbs had grown roots for a few weeks and others were freshly placed bulbs with no root growth at that time. I like clustering the vases together in a group for extra visual impact.

Most of the hyacinths bloomed, although I don’t really mind if they don’t as the visual patterns the roots create make me happy. My plants are usually a little stunted and not tall like the ones I would buy at the florists but I still think they are beautiful. I’m sure there is a way of making them grow taller but I haven’t discovered the technique yet.

After the first batch have flowered you can begin again, placing a new bulb in fresh water and plant the others in the garden for the following year. I have just started on my second batch and next year I might experiment with different flower types too and see what happens.

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floral bauble decorations

December 16, 2011  in diy craft projects, flowers, interior styling

Why not turn simple clear glass baubles into mini vases and display beautiful little clippings of flora and fauna?

Here is Part 2 of my recent collaboration with talented photographer Uli Schade. We removed the metal tops from these Paperchase baubles by gently squeezing and pulling them off then added some water and pushed in the pretty and appropriate, pale green Christmas Rose flower (Helleborus niger) and a little Spruce fir tree cutting. We added just a touch of water so as not to make the baubles too heavy and used tweezers to position the foliage and ensure the flower faced upwards.

Natural string is used as ties and little offcuts of orange ribbon from VV Rouleaux add a vibrant pop of colour. You can add more water as it dries out or replace the flowers if they deteriorate. When packing the baubles away, remove the metal hangers, tip the water away and use tweezers to remove the foliage. Then rinse, leave to dry then replace the top and pack away for another year.

Another simple idea to make your Christmas decorations something different this year.

Pop back for part 3 in the next few days.

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winter blues

November 23, 2011  in flowers

After the lovely comments on my Fluro Flora post I thought I would post a couple more images that I took while I was in the mood for experimenting with paint. As a contrast to the fluorescent I had also tried a powder blue, just a tester pot of emulsion I had in the shed. I picked a dead head of a climbing Hydrangea that grows up the fence in my garden and thought the blues would go well against the neutral browns of the dried flowers.

I played with scale again, using a miniature dolls house place setting with an old recipe book cover as a table. The book belonged to my husband’s grandmother and is called ‘Radiation Cooking’ which sounds rather worrying but it was first published in 1927 and is just recipes for oven cookers with automatic heat controllers which were the new fangled technology of the time.

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a rose to remember

November 13, 2011  in flowers, my london

This morning we hopped in the car and headed over to East London to one of my favourite places, Columbia Road, for the weekly flower market. I don’t think I’ve been since my daughter was born so it was a treat to visit. It was a beautifully crisp, sunny November morning perfect for wandering with the family, bantering with the market traders and looking in all the arty, handmade and vintage shops and stalls that line the road and the streets around it.

There are so many independent, creative, quirky shops over there it’s always a pleasure to visit. I bumped into lovely Emily Chalmers of Caravan, popped into Rob Ryan‘s shop, nipped round the corner to Ally Capellino, Luna & Curious and Leila’s Shop then on to SCP on Curtain Road.

Among my fresh, floral purchases I couldn’t resist a bunch of my favourite roses – Amnesia. I love its delicate, dusky pink with tones of green and brown coming through. Just gorgeous with a vintage but stylish feel.

Columbia Road flower market is every Sunday from 8am to 3pm, though get there early as it gets very busy.

I couldn’t resist taking a few photos when I got home. A perfect Sunday outing.

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playing with scale

October 31, 2011  in flowers, news

I was playing around with scale and visual relationships between objects when I took this photo. I love that at first glance you think this is a full size pumpkin and the toy must be bigger, but then you realise it’s on a page from an old novel which means it must be small and it suddenly doesn’t make sense. What size is everything?

It’s a mini pumpkin, the size of an orange, and the horse is the size of your thumbnail!

Happy Halloween everyone!

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fluro flora

October 25, 2011  in flowers

I use my camera for sketching ideas like I do with pencil and paper. Just playing and experimenting with objects and visuals that have popped into my head and thoughts for future ideas and projects in my work. These pictures were sparked off by my previous post where I had stitched fluorescent berries onto my embroidered design. It gave me the idea to play games with nature and add neon colour pops to real sprigs of berries and hydrangeas picked from the garden, just to see how it looked. I thought I would share my photo sketches with you as they are the beginning of ideas that will undoubtedly be developed and taken in new directions.

I don’t think I would want to do this to a whole bunch of bought flowers at home but the flowers and berries I used were straight from my small London garden – it is amazing what you can find once you start looking. A small sprig treated in this way would be perfect for a dinner party, with a small arrangement by each place setting, or on wedding tables as decoration. It adds an unusual little surprise and warrants closer inspection. I used acrylic paint and a small paintbrush to add the colour and glued pink leaves cut from felt. Painting is easiest on pale flowers like the white hydrangea but darker coloured flowers and berries work too, they just need a couple of coats of paint.

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