Marvellous March

Where is the time going? It’s March already! Hard to believe the Chelsea Flower Show is only 2 months away now. If you haven’t booked your tickets yet try and get on-line to order yours before they sell out. I’ll be there once again this year working on the NFU stand in the Great Pavilion and also for the Chelsea Florist of the Year Competition. I’ll be able to tell you a bit more about that in next month’s issue as it’s all still very secret squirrel right now. I do hope all you ladies enjoyed your Valentines flowers last month. It was great to see all the husbands, partners and boyfriends popping in for their bouquets. The Freedom Rose certainly was the most popular item and they looked stunning once again this year. My growers really didn’t disappoint going by the feedback we’ve had to date. One lady even managed to keep hers going for over two and a half weeks, she now holds the  record until next year. Well done Sylvia! Later this month we  celebrate Mothering Sunday on March the 30th. It all started in the sixteenth century when people returned to their ‘mother church’, the main church or cathedral of the area, for a service to be held on Laetare Sunday. This was either a large local church, or more often the nearest Cathedral. Anyone who did this was commonly said to have gone "a-mothering", but whether this term preceded the observance of Mothering Sunday is unclear. In later times, this Mothering Sunday became a day when all domestic servants were given a day off to visit their mother church, usually with their own  mothers and other family members. It was often the only time that whole families could gather together, since on other days they were prevented by the conflicting working hours, and servants were not given free days on other occasions. Eventually, the religious tradition evolved into the Mothering Sunday that we know today with the secular tradition of giving gifts to mothers. Here in the UK we started celebrating Mother's Day on the same day that Mothering Sunday was celebrated, the fourth Sunday in Lent.