Irish light changes in September. It lowers, softens, and loses its edge, and rooms that looked flat all summer begin to hold shadow. It is the most flattering light of the year, and the shortest-lived.
Autumn here is not a garden season. It is an interior one. Which makes the question less about which flowers are in season, and more about which room you are dressing, and how the light falls in it.
The entrance
A hall is the one room composed entirely for other people. It is also, in most Irish houses, the darkest: north-facing, narrow, lit from a single door.
Colour has to carry there. Fleurs Autumn is built for it: red and orange roses with cerise carnations and sunflowers, drawn together with solidago, statice, pistachio leaves and red quercus. It is the most saturated arrangement in the collection, and in low light saturation is what survives.
Presented in a Parisian hatbox, it needs no arranging and no vessel. It arrives composed.
Rooms lit by lamplight
From September, a sitting room is lit more by lamps than by daylight. Warm light does something specific to colour: it deepens red, softens orange, and turns purple almost velvet.
Maple Rêve is made for that hour. Orange roses and purple carnations, with nutan, thistles, statice and oak leaves. Quieter than Fleurs Autumn, and more textural. The oak and thistle carry the season rather than the colour does. Available as a hatbox or a basket, the basket for a room with the space to give it.
Restraint, for rooms that are already considered
Where a room is pale, with white walls, oak, linen and plaster, strong colour competes rather than warms. The more elegant answer is form.
The newest arrangements in the collection are composed for exactly that: astilbe, hypericum berries, snapdragon and eucalyptus, with pampas grass in one. Berries and grasses read as autumn without announcing it, and they hold their line long after flowers have softened.
This is the collection's most restrained register, and the one to choose when the room is doing the talking.
Sending to a house you have not seen
Sent flowers almost always arrive in a hall, and are almost always judged there. Which argues for the hatbox: composed, self-contained, requiring nothing of the person receiving it at the moment they receive it.
Autumn is also the most considered moment in the year to send flowers, precisely because nothing is being marked. Nobody expects them. That is the whole of their effect.
Delivered nationwide across Ireland, arranged by hand.
Explore the Autumn Collection →
