We Had To Make A Harry Potter Bouquet in London
As part of our recurring Bouquet of the Week series, Garden Collage continues to present a weekly inspirational bouquet that incorporates intriguing new elements into the traditional practice of floral design. This week, GC features a “Harry Potter Bouquet” styled according to the colors of each house in Hogwarts. We also put the arrangement in a witch hat– because why not?
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England is a country that is known for its beautiful gardens, and since the advent of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it’s also come to be associated with a different kind of tourist: the one seeking out Harry Potter. In addition to the accents and access to mythic locations like Platform 9 3/4 (which is a real landmark in King’s Cross Train Station), London plays host to several stores and pieces of architecture that makes being a Harry Potter fan come to life.
By way of example, Millennium Bridge– a steel suspension footbridge that crosses the Thames River between the Tate Modern (bankside) and St. Paul’s Cathedral (the city)– has become a notable landmark (it blows up in the opening scene for Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix– a clip that establishes London as the backdrop to Rowling’s mythical world.
In honor of the success that “Harry Potter and The Cursed Child” is currently having during its run at the Palace Theatre in London, we decided to style this week’s Bouquet of the Week to honor “the boy who lived”.
Hamleys, the oldest toy store in the world, has also been in London since 1760, and today their Regent Street location is filled with intriguing new Harry Potter paraphernalia– including a “real life replica” of Hermione Granger’s wand, which we purchased to get in the mood to recreate the Houses of Hogwarts in flower form. Here’s what we came up with:
We chose to break this week’s bouquet into four color schemes: one for each house. For Gryffindor, which is red and gold, we selected dutch peonies (in shades of crimson) and Chinese peonies (a muted gold hue). For Ravenclaw, we went with blue delphinium and silver olive leaf. For Hufflepuff, we used more gold peonies (which we chose not to open in order to create a magical, mysterious “herbology” vibe); and for Slytherin, we incorporated dark black copper beech branches, which look spindly and just “witchy” enough to add sinister undertones to an otherwise primary-colored bouquet.
We arranged all of the flowers in a witch hat and photographed it near Garden Collage founder Daisy Helman’s favorite English garden, the Chelsea Physic, which is encircled by a gorgeous ivy-covered stone wall. Chelsea and the Royal Borough of Kensington are already some of the oldest, most magical neighborhoods in all of London, so we felt like it was a perfect fit. This is about as “Hogwarts” as it gets.
