Reporter Annette Rizzo visits a group of friends who met some twenty years ago on a flower arranging course...
 Most of the group - (L to R) Jane, Julia, Evelyn, Doreen, Helen, Margaret |
Twenty years ago a group of ten or so ladies from around Somerset and Wiltshire met on a flower-arranging course. At the end of it they found they had formed such a close bond with each other than they were reluctant to let the group drift off their separate ways. So since then they've been meeting up.
It all began with Jane giving Julia a lift to the class. "I had never met Julia, but I picked her up every Wednesday for three years, and we became great chums". They really enjoyed the course, and at the end decided they would meet at each other's houses once a month. Since their meetings began three of the women have been widowed, and have found the support of the group invaluable.
Julia fell into floristry having decided that she and her husband's pub wasn't going to make enough money to retire on. She had won a few awards for arrangements she had done, and decided to consolidate her natural ability with a City and Guilds qualification. She eventually decided to actually go into the floristry business.
Another lady was already a long-standing member of a flower club, and her desire to know more prompted her to take up the course. She recalls "It was so lovely. Everyone gelled. We were all strangers to start with, but we all somehow had the same sense of humour. Our awful mistakes at the beginning made us laugh. I think that's why it's endured really, because we don't take it too seriously. We're funny old ladies now, it's a giggle all the time. The companionship is absolutely wonderful, it really is. It changed my life absolutely, or I'd have been a crabby old lady...instead of having lots of fun". She admits that it took a long while for her husband to get used to it.
One of the others explains that what has kept the group going is a terrific interest in flowers that has developed into a terrific interest in each other. "We share troubles, and delights and everything". Apart from the support they have given those who have become widowed, they also share the joys of grandchildren. They have over 30 grandchildren between them, who have been enthusiastically welcomed.
They have each become known in the group for their different characters. Julia's flower arranging, for example, is always 'big and bold', whilst Nellie does the 'neat, tidy, fiddly things'. Eileen, meanwhile, was very good at doing pressed flowers and pictures, so they each excel at different things. Having given each other various plants and flower cuttings on occasion over the years, it seems fitting that they now have bits of each other's gardens in their own gardens.
