This year our store windows, celebrating the magic of Christmas are pared back with sophisticated natural installations and flower arrangements created by floral artist Hannah Brook of Aelisabet Flowers. These beautiful and graceful structures feature sprays of green fir, nordic spruce, dried grapes and pine cones, with dried limes, white asparagus fern and sea lavender.
Planned earlier in the year, Hannah has been gathering the ingredients to make these arrangements throughout the autumn months and recently visited all six stores to put each one carefully in place. Almost immediately we had some very positive feedback from customers and passers by who stopped to take in the displays. We love them because they are so simple, proving that nature is often all that is needed to inspire that festive, excited feeling of anticipation everyone so enjoys as Christmas approaches.
Over the years I have found that Christmas is perhaps all the more rewarding and better for the soul when pared back away from some of the usual excess and over indulgence and refined to simpler and more sustainable qualities, like those found in Hannah’s floral arrangements.
This festive season is a perfect time to slow down the pace of living. Walking in nature with those we care about and seeing the landscape’s own magic revealed through the cold, wet, frozen, or if we are lucky snowy weather, is a great way to reset and look forward. Bringing the outside in at this time of year, a few bright rosehips and holly berries, boughs of fir and bay, sprigs of aromatic rosemary or pine cones gathered from the forest floor is all very grounding. It’s a simple way of taking pleasure from the natural beauty of our surroundings so often missed in the darker days of the year and seeing up close with new eyes, it is easier to appreciate the fleeting beauty of nature.
Decorate your home with twigs, leaves, pine cones, oranges, make a wreath from found fauna, or a simple arrangement in a vase or a wooden bowl of pine cones by the fire, anything you can collect from nature and the fragrances from them will enhance the natural spirit of Christmas this year.
Be inspired by Hannah’s stunning Christmas wreath – full of texture and seasonal gathering, mixing fresh and dried ingredients such as everlasting dried flowers, seed pods and grasses or fragrant, fresh winter foliage, berries, amaranthus and dried fruit. Simply stunning.
You can find Hannah Brook of Aelisabet Flowers online at www.aelisabetflowers.co.uk or you can follow her story on Instagram @aelisabetflowers, where you can be inspired by her floral creations.
