A therapeutic bunch.

The Arts has always had an important place in the work of Waverley Care. For more than 21 years now we have used the arts as a catalyst to encourage people living with HIV and Hepatitis C to develop new skills, explore their own creativity and engage in activities which help reduce social isolation. Our women’s group Isis, which was formed in 1995, has been using the arts to explore issues affecting them in many different ways. This week they were visited by a floristry coach and discovered the therapeutic value of a bunch of flowers:

This week ISIS had fun playing with flowers with floristry coach Pati Salvo de Oliveira.

We learned how to design and wrap a range of different bouquets and all went away with something that wouldn’t look out of place in a top Edinburgh florists.

We discovered that it’s physically harder work than it looks to produce a high class bunch of flowers, with our hand and arm muscles feeling like they’d had a good work-out by the end of the afternoon. That said, it also felt quite therapeutic to spend a few hours working with leaves and flowers and learning their names and different qualities. And it was a nice feeling to walk away with a beautiful bunch that might make passers-by think we had a secret admirer, but we knew we’d made ourselves!