A Peony Rose by Any Other Name...

All kinds of things can inspire a writer.  A snippet of overheard conversation, the note of a song, a flickering memory of a dream, a person’s name.

The series I’m writing right now, each story has found inspiration in a flower.

 

The first book is set in Vallemont - a make-believe principality in Europe somewhere.

Writing one day the Palace of Vallemont cast a rosy hue when the sun hit it just so. From this came the country’s official colours of pink and rose gold. A wedding is set to take place in the story.  Much excitement has gripped the land.  Peony petals are tossed in the air with abandon and now cover the village streets.

 

Yes, peonies.

Since my muse tossed them into the story in a seemingly random way, I have become obsessed.  Googling images till my vision turns dusty pink. Getting a little heart flutter every time my laptop turns on and the abundant loveliness of my peony wallpaper hits my eyes. Are they not the most soft, pretty, elegant, flower there is?  Lush (with all those softly curving petals) yet vulnerable too. Easily bruised.

 

They are now seriously nudging at gardenias (my wedding flower) for the number one spot in my exclusive list of favourites.

Now onto the next book in the series; set in the rural central coast of Australia. The first lines of the book my heroine stepped out of her shack and blinked sleepily towards the sunrise casting a misty glow over the acres of wild lavender carpeting the hillside.

 

Lavender. 

 

Not my favourite flower.  As someone with a strong sense of smell I struggle with lavender.  But oh, that field outside the heroine’s front door. When the wind creates waving tracks in the weave, it looks like a single living thing.  And my muse is a happy fellow.

 

These things aren’t often planned. Not for me. They happen organically.  Arriving like a speck of glitter thrown by my muse.

Yet that speck can inform so much of the story.

 

From the peony petals stomped into a mud puddle when the royal wedding doesn’t go as planned, to the heroine despairing that the field of lavender outside her front door will be lost if the land development goes ahead.

 

Those small details can give a story colour, life, scent, earthiness, grounding.

 

As for the author?  She gets to google pictures of pretty flowers and call it research.

 

Do you have a favourite flower?  Is there a story behind how it came to be so?



Scents, Perfumes and Inspiration for a Story - Annie West

I grew up with the scent of flowers. The place we lived, as well as having a remnant rainforest gully running through it, had the most amazing garden. The people who'd built it had grown flowers commercially. Plus my mother was a florist. By the time I came along she wasn't going out to a shop to work, but often on Saturday mornings our back room would be filled with the marvellous scents of flowers. I used to sit and watch my mother working with incredibly nimble fingers, adding wire to individual flowers then turning them into amazing wedding bouquets, buttonholes and corsages.

Flowers in the market in Nice

So it wasn't surprising that I eventually wrote a heroine who was a florist. (If you're interested that's Arden in 'The Desert King's Secret Heir'). That story has a theme of flowers running through it, even though most of it is set in a desert kingdom. When I wrote the follow up story, set in the neighbouring kingdom ('The Desert King's Captive Bride') it seemed only natural to build on that theme. The heroine in that story is a chemical engineer, but did you know, as well as being employed in pharmaceutical production, waste water management, electricity production etc, chemical engineers can be involved in making perfumes? Romantic, eh? I loved the idea of a heroine trying to restart the centuries-old perfume industry in her country.

One of the hill towns of Provence

And for once the timing of this story was perfect because I didn't have to rely solely on book and internet research. Last year I travelled to Provence in the south east of France and one of the things I specifically wanted to see was one of the traditional perfumeries. The area is known for its flower and perfume production so this was a perfect place to do a little digging about what's involved in perfume making.

Most of my research didn't make it onto the pages of the story, but it helped me to write the book and that's what counts. But it does mean I've got some photos I referred to as I wrote. I thought you might like to see a few. These were mainly taken at the Fragonard Perfumery.

Part of the old distilling machinery at Fragonard

An illustration showing some of the perfume ingredients and their source

Huge bottles of perfume essences

Vats used during distillation

An old photo showing workers putting individual jasmine flowers in racks

A specialised desk where a 'Nose', a professional perfume blender works

Wild irises in the mountains

This last photo isn't very good. I was too lazy to walk across the rocky landscape to get a close up of the irises. But I noted that they can used in perfume making. That led to further research on what flowers might bloom in Ghizlan's mountainous middle eastern country which could be used for perfume.

I love nice scents though most of the time I forget to burn those special candles I have, or I hoard the gorgeously perfumed soap. Well, I did. Recently I've been making an effort to use the soaps I've carefully put away and burn the scented candles. I'm also splashing out, not waiting for special occasions to wear the lovely perfumes I've been given - Paloma Picasso's 'Paloma', Elizabeth Arden's 'Green Tea', Bottega Veneto's 'Knot' and, until the bottle dropped and shattered (sigh), 'Un Jardin Sur Le Nil' by Hermes.

Are you a fan of perfume? Do you have a favourite scent you always wear? Or maybe there's a smell that you find very evocative - something that takes you straight back to another time and place? I'd love to hear!

Gardening, Anyone?

with Bronwyn Jameson

Are you a keen gardener?  I would like to be, and at least four times a year (once per season sounds about right...or perhaps never in winter and twice every spring) I throw myself into gardening with keen enthusiasm.  I enjoy being outside when the weather is Just So.  I love the damp-earth smell, the satisfaction of new buds on something I've planted, of nipping out from the kitchen to collect herbs when I'm cooking.  Which is my preferred domestic activity on a more regular basis than gardening.

But it is spring and so I'm on a gardening jag.  This week, at least.  There are weeds to pull, and annuals to plant and others to be replaced, the ones which didn't make it though the winter of my neglect.  This makes me sad and regretful and, as I dig and plant and water and mulch, I vow to do better with the replacements.

One of my replenishment tasks is a bed of irises -- tall and bearded, which sounds fashionably hipster --  many of which were planted by my mum.  She dug them up before leaving the farm where she raised us.  She called them hardy.  She believed even I couldn't kill them.

She was wrong.

This past weekend I visited an iris farm and chose my replacements.  With hundreds to choose from this was quite a task.  My garden is largely white and blue...or various shades of lilac and lavender and purple.  I managed to stick with this palette despite the lure of bright gold and salmon pink and rich burgundy.

I took many, MANY photos to keep track of those I chose versus those I wanted to choose but which didn't make the final cut.   They will be dug and sent in March and this time next spring I will know if I did, indeed, choose these.  There may be a few surprises, but that will be fun, right?

Arctic Express

Queen's Circle

Fair Dinkum

Tia Rose

Momentum

Fiesta in Blue

Got the Blues

Triple Delight

Swing Dancing

Rippling River

Stygian Night

What have you been planning or planting in your garden?

Do you have a favourite flower, or perhaps a planting which has special meaning?

Release Day for Bidding on Her Boss

Tuesday is the 1st of September, and the release day for my second Hawke Brothers book, Bidding on Her Boss. 

And what's the most appropriate way to celebrate the release of a book about a florist? Why, a bunch of flowers of course! So my plan on Tuesday is to duck out and buy myself a lovely flower arrangement. 

But that begs a question: when you receive a bunch of flowers, either from the shop or handpicked, do you stuff them in a vase, or do you rearrange?

I'm a chronic rearranger. Though, if it's clearly an artistic arrangement in the first place, I try to make as few changes as possible and really only move them around a little to match the vase shape (after trimming the bottom of the stalks, naturally).

When I was researching Bidding on Her Boss, I watched a lot of clips on Youtube. (Well, I told myself it was important research. It might have been a little bit of me indulging a hobby...)

My heroine, Faith, is a florist who works in one of the Hawkes Blooms stores. Dylan Hawke is one of the three brothers who run the company, and Dylan's area of responsibility is the retail arm - the florist stores. So, you see, with all that flower action there was a very real need for me to keep watching these videos...

And it's possible that now I'm a little addicted to flower arrangement clips...

Of course now that Dylan and Faith's book is done and will be out in the world tomorrow (and the third brother's book, His 24-Hour Wife, will be out in October), I don't really have an excuse to keep watching them. Perhaps I need to write a new series about florists...

How about you - do you plop your flowers in the nearest jar of water, or do you have an urge to play? And most importantly, do you have any flower arrangement tips for me? I'd love to hear them! 

Florist Faith Crawford has a brilliant plan—win her company's CEO at a bachelor auction and use their "date" to show him her designs. But her plan backfires when the focus of their meeting shifts from flowers to a floor-tilting kiss. 

For Dylan Hawke, it's time for damage control. Promoting the talented Faith is a no-brainer, but fraternizing with her is strictly forbidden. Dylan must remain professional—the fate of his business rests in the balance. Too bad Dylan won't rest until he gets another kiss…

The Beauty of Black on White by Natalie Anderson

There’s something about black on white designs that really draw me in. I love the simplicity, the clarity – and, being bookish, I tend to think of ink on a page.

Now as you probably all know, I live in Christchurch and recently I’ve been really quiet on the blog (and everywhere in Internetville) as we’ve been ‘between homes’ for a while and working out some issues in our shattered city. And I appreciate how fortunate my family and I have really been compared to so many others – my heart just aches for those in Turkey currently dealing with that horrendous quake there and the utter devastation.

For me, recent weeks have really been a time for stopping and appreciating the small things in our lives and city. In the face of much destruction and loss, we’ve needed to look for little bits of lovely.

Daffodil picture by Graeme Weatherston
www.freedigitalphotos.net

And let me tell you, nothing lifted my heart more than a few weeks ago when early Spring hit and all the daffodils flowered – they’d been through earthquakes, liquefaction, snow and floods – and still they grew – en mass, tall and beautiful.

Such inspiration.

And this weekend we finally moved back into our own home. We’ve been incredibly fortunate in that our house is pretty okay. And it’s wonderful to come back to these old wooden walls – I brought four babies home from the hospital to this house. It has such amazing memories associated with it, and we’re so lucky and thrilled to be back.

We have a teeny tiny creek that crosses the front of our section. On the ‘far side’, across the stepping stones, is a mini-bushland that at the moment is completely overgrown and in the high winds the other night half a tree fell right through the middle of it! So it REALLY needs a tidy. Out the back we grow veggies – I’ve generally had a preference for ‘useful’ plants – but inspired by those little bits of lovely, I’ve been ‘pretty garden plotting’ for the front. And this is where my fancy for black and white comes in.

White gardens are nothing new – I think it was the inimitable Vita Sackville West who created one of the most famous white gardens – check out the link here – don’t you just adore the Elizabethan tower? What a wonderful writing room!

But I really am intrigued by the impossible in nature – the black flower! The idea of black flowers may be a touch Gothic – but I also think they’re wonderfully romantic and dramatic! And of course, there’s really no such thing – they’re actually very deep, deep purple. It’s the pursuit of impossible perfection! Kind of like writing itself– given we strive to make words perfect and of course that can pretty much be impossible... fortunately so much of the pleasure is in the pursuit itself…

Black Velvet

I’ve had a couple of irises in pots for a while – waiting our return home. And I’d surfed around looking at other kinds of black flowers. So you can imagine my delight when I read about a new breed of petunia called Black Velvet. It was mentioned in an article I read online in a UK newspaper. So it must have been kismet that saw me in a garden centre the next day and the first display in the outside area was… yes, the Black Velvet petunia! Isn’t she gorgeous?

I also like this little viola – Zorro – and I’ve some grasses and near black sweet peas. Next bulb planting time I’ll put in some tulips. I think some of my family think I’m a little crazy to want only black and white flowers in that particular part of the garden, but to me it makes perfect sense!

Zorro

My second ever story for Mills & Boon (His Mistress by Arrangement) featured an artist who loved flowers and in the story she was illustrating a book about ‘floriography’ – the language of flowers – the meanings of some flowers were pretty relevant in some scenes! But I’m not sure how the Victorians would have defined black petunias!

Anyway – are you a flowers person or a growing herbs/veggies person? Do you like to keep fresh blooms in a vase or are you the type who forgets to put the old ones in the compost and ends up with a shrivelled sort of science experiment?!


What little bits of lovely are you inspired by?!

p.s. I did think there was the most gorgeous display of black on white on Sunday night when the magnificent All Blacks beat the white clad French to win the Rugby World Cup – fabulous! ;)