Flower Market Visit

So yesterday I had to go down to the flower market to pick up some flowers for Jenny's wedding this weekend. I'm not a good morning person - I can't even string together a proper sentence before 10am, so as much as I love the flower markets, I never actually look forward to waking up early for a visit.

Here is how a typical market morning goes:

4am - (yes that is right! 4am!!!) alarm goes off. My poor husband gets woken up so I have to try to be very quiet so that he can roll over and go back to sleep.

I wash my face and my teeth and throw on some clothes. I usually don't like to leave the house with no makeup on but seriously at 4am - I don't care how I look.

You would think that at that time of the morning it would be freezing cold. But funnily enough it's not so cold........ yet.

4.15am - get in the car and because I am so aware of how quiet it is at that time of the morning, I try to start my car quietly (seriously how do you do that)? Then I start the long drive to Flemington, turn some music on and try to find a song I can sing along to and wake me up a bit.

5.25am - arrive at market and pay for my parking. Then I have to fight for a carpark amongst all of the big Sydney florist vans. By this time the sun has come up and as soon as I get out of the car, I notice how much colder it is.

I don't know why, but market actually makes me feel a little intimidated. The place is just buzzing, there are people everywhere and there are many trolleys that you have to dodge to save yourself from injury.

The flower market is one massive warehouse. Every grower has a stall and they are set up in rows. It's fun to go around to each stall and see if something new has come into season.

By about 6am, some of the growers start packing up so all of a sudden you feel the pressure to stop looking and just buy what you need.

Yesterday I had to buy some freesias for Jenny's wedding bouquets, and some white oriental lilies for a friend who is making her table arrangements. The flower growers were shockingly still going with their Mother's Day pricing so I wasn't very happy with the price of the lilies. Oh well - not much you can do about it.

6.30am - get in my car full of flowers and start the trip home. It smells beautiful.

7.40am - just as everyone else seems to be waking up, I get home and unpack the car. You might think that I would jump straight back into bed by this stage. But the work isn't done yet. For every flower stem, I have to strip half of the leaves from it and recut the stem and then place it into clean, fresh water.

By the time I finish doing that, my husband is usually awake and I get to sit with him for breakfast and a cuppa before he goes to work. I can't go back to sleep so I have a shower to freshen up and then just lie on the couch for the rest of the day in a dopey daze.

So Jenny's wedding flowers are in my studio making my house smell gorgeous. I had to get some flowers early as you can see they are mostly still in buds and need time to open. They take a while to open in the cold weather. I'll take another trip to market on Friday morning to pick up the remainder of the flowers I need and I'll make sure I post some photos of how they turn out.