The other day, I bade a sad farewell to my colleague Vicky, who is going to work at Vogue. I am going to miss her terribly, but at least I can now leave a cup of tea unattended without her adding brown sauce or some other noxious substance to it behind my back.
Anyway, Vicky got given a lovely bouquet from Jamie Aston, just down the road from the office. But she mentioned in passing that the best flowers she’s ever received (Vicky clearly gets more bunches of flowers than I do) came from Phlox Flowers on the South Bank.
That turned out to be a handy piece of info, as I was on the lookout for some Mother’s Day flowers and Phlox is very near where I live. In fact I walk past it several times a week but had hardly noticed it – there are very few flowers outside.
Inside, though, its a completely different story. Huge buckets of sumptuous flowers fill two walls, waiting to be made into bouquets, and wrapping papers and ribbons in every hue fill another. In the centre is a big table where the bouquets are made up. I bought a bunch of beautiful red ranunculus, and they looked even more stunning once they’d been wrapped in red and green tissue paper and tied with twine.
It turns out that Phlox doesn’t really need to attract passing trade as it gets most of its business from the nearby ITV studios, theatres and magazine companies. Although a few more pots like this one still wouldn’t go amiss outside – things are pretty dreary around the back of the South Bank.