Day 4, everything has to be finished and part of the team worked until 11pm last night, rumour has it that the bottle of port helped! This morning I just concentrated on the background, thousands of camomile heads. The photo below shows the use of various leaves to form part of the hills in the centrepiece and then primulas picked from gardens to create the folds in the gown.
This evening it was time to put up all the well dressings, however just as the tractor was loaded, it broke down and the heavens opened, not only with rain but hail. Would the boards survive once raised vertically?
The pictures really do not do justice to the nailbitting agonising as we watched the men lift the 5 sections into place. Stephen was up the tree with ropes and the others were either on the ground or in the trailer. Fingers inevitably squashed various bits of clay and this wasn’t helped by the hail which unfortunately caused further saturation and meant that some of the petals & leaves slipped. When we create the dressings we work from bottom to top, so that the petals are rather like feathers on a bird and any rain will just run down the petals & drip off, but if the boards are flat when it rains then it just soaks in. Using spare flowers we filled the gaps and stood back in the near darkness and proudly admired our painstaking work.
Don’t forget the Well Dressings are open from tomorrow, with the blessing commencing at 11am.
PARWICH.ORG 
Congratulations!
Jane a brilliant series, now we just need the photos of the Blessing (and some sunny weather).
Thank you Jane. What an outstanding series. Both the words and the pictures create an excellent contemporary record of this important local tradition.
Like all good stories, it reaches a nail (hail?) biting climax!
What a great website. It’s so nice to see our work at Tissington appreciated. May I say what a pleasure it was to work with you, “Mrs Bennett” and I look forward to you working with us next year.