A Great Welcome from the RHS

I arrive at the RHS gardens at Wisley ready to conduct a Christmas flower demonstration for their Plant Centre customers. The staff help me in with all my flowers and manager Nigel fetches me a cup of tea (which it turns out I am too busy to drink). Before I start the demonstration I have a quick wander around to look at all their decorations, gifts and books - quickly falling in love with their reindeer doormats!
As the evening goes on I am kept very busy arranging, talking and answering questions. One lady, who is leafing through my books spots my florist friend Jennifer, and turns to me in amazement. She had known Jennifer forty years ago but they had lost touch, and she had been wondering how to find her again. It is obviously a week for coincidences, as the previous evening I had been running a flower workshop in Cheltenham as a birthday treat for a lady, and one of her friends, Liz, spotted a house she knew in The Flower Shop book. It turns out we have a mutual friend, and further on in the book I was able to show her photographs of her.
Everyone keeps saying it, but it's true - it's a small world.
As a variation on the advent wreath, I place a vase in the centre of my hydrangea and rose hip wreath and add four candles to it.

One of my favourites; a Christmas pudding basin of flowers. Although one lady did ask me, what do I now use for my own Christmas pudding?

(The answer is easy; M&S!)

One final browse around the shop and it is time to go home, although I do spend quite a lot of time lingering over a Father Christmas snow globe. I decide I really am too old for it and don't need it so leave it on the shelf, but I can't help feeling this may have been a mistake!