Our winter wonderland is here, the first ever Winter Flowers Week is open until 11 December! Building on the success of our annual summer British Flowers Week exhibition, we’re bringing you a new winter edition that champions a seasonal and sustainable approach to festive decoration.
Take a closer look at the installations and discover the florists’ inspirations, in their own words, starting with Hazel Gardiner’s immersive grotto in our baptismal font:
Hazel Gardiner: Pathway to Reflection
The winter festive season, with its exuberance and merriment, carries within it a poignant awareness of those departed and a subtle undertone of stress. In response, we have crafted a tranquil immersive grotto, adorned with gifts from the natural world, candlelight and delicate fragrances.
Our inspirations range from the modern grottos to meet Saint Nicholas, to the 18th century cave grottos embellished with shells. These spaces cocoon visitors in a magical, dreamlike ambience, an escape from the ordinary.
We’ve curated a calming winter palette of dried flowers, gently faded by the sun, imbued with scents crafted by perfumer Maya Njie. We find beauty in every stage of a flower’s life, and pay homage to
often-overlooked elements of the season: bare branches, grasses, and winter foliage.
As you navigate the stairs in the baptismal font, consider this both a physical and a mental journey. First, choose a paper leaf from the baskets. Inhale deeply, experience the nuanced notes of each aroma, allow your mind to quieten and find calm. Inscribe a name or a simple inscription on your leaf: a remembrance for a cherished person, a connection with the present, or a hopeful gesture towards a future loved one. Seal these sentiments by affixing your tag to the bare branches in the installation, symbolically returning leaves to the tree.
Shane Connolly: A Shrine to Nature
Humanity relies totally on nature for its very existence. And yet humans have relentlessly exploited and abused nature, neglected and subdued it, almost to the point of no return.
Surely nature deserves better.
In winter, when trees have been stripped of their leaves and gardens seem dead and bare, it can appear especially desolate and vulnerable. But nature still generously gives us many beautiful things during these cold barren months, if only we take the time to stop to look.
We wanted to create a shrine to nature to help us find that time. Time to contemplate and celebrate these fragile winter gifts, the wonder of creation, and the constant renewal of the natural world throughout the year.
Please pause for a moment to reflect and enjoy the delicacy of simple winter flowers, just as our predecessors stopped to pray and find reassurance in this ancient building over many centuries. Study their individual shape and form, wonder at their resilience, inhale their fragrance, and be very grateful. We hope that our shrine somehow helps revive a sense of awe, to remind us that we ourselves are simply a small part of nature. We are not its superior, and we are certainly not its master.
Carly Rogers Flowers: Deconstructed Landscape
My intention was to create a deconstructed and reinvented sculptural winter landscape, a ‘still life’ of mixed seasonal pines and moss that transports you to an imagined natural space.
I was inspired by the age old process of constructing garlands and wreaths of winter foliage to decorate our homes in celebration of the winter season and the act of bringing nature into our homes.
By bringing the ‘landscape’ into the museum space, I hope to play on the relationship between scale, texture and composition, and our inherent emotional connection to natural green spaces
and materials.
I’m always aware of the juxtaposition between creating beautiful natural works and the environmental imprint that they leave behind.
The seasonal foliage used in this piece is all British grown where possible and sourced locally from the New Covent Garden Market. The moss and chicken wire structure will be reworked into future projects.
Tattie Rose Studio: Winter Wild
Winter’s offering is often overshadowed by the abundance of summer’s bounty but I believe it is just as, if not more magical. What it perhaps requires to bring it to life is a little imagination!
My piece is inspired by a story my Grandmother told me of a girl who travelled through the villages of Galloway in Scotland selling her homemade decorations from a sleigh during the weeks before Christmas. The story has gathered and grown like a snowball over time and perhaps is even a myth, but it stirs something in me as much now as when as I first heard it as a child.
I wanted to make something to remind us of the joy of Christmas time as children. We have painted my favourite winter flowers and greenery onto our sleigh: snowdrops, cyclamen, hellebores, wintersweet, winter-flowering honeysuckle, holly and mistletoe.
We have used traditional British Christmas trees which are willowy and much looser than the more popular varieties. The sleigh is filled with wreaths and decorations made from seasonal foliage, with brass and copper embellishments. Mistletoe and Old Man’s Beard are two of my favourite ingredients and are used in abundance here.
The perfect winter atmosphere for me is a little wildness, a flicker of movement, gentle light, comforting scent and a little innocent magic. I hope you will take a moment or two to soak up and enjoy all of these things, before returning to the busy dash of life.
Floribunda Rose: Winter’s Embrace
As we approach the winter equinox, the colour and abundance of summer feel far behind us. There is beauty and colour though, if you know where to find it. ‘Winter’s Embrace’ is a piece
that brings the unexpected joy of winter flowers gathered from across our fair isles within touching distance. The curved structure itself is fluid but resilient. Inspired by natural forms and bird cage pergolas, it is designed to evoke feelings of refuge and comfort, a winter’s embrace.
The cut flowers that we use will be chipped and composted ready to become the growing medium for seeds which will be planted in the spring. The structure itself, once returned to the Floribunda Rose studio, will become a support for the climbing plants that we use for floral installations.
We work with the seasons, and never guarantee any single element in our designs, preferring to work with a palette and be led by nature. At this time of year, a lot of our flower growers close their farm to trade as they prepare for next spring, making the choice of flowers narrower and less predictable. Only days before an event at this time of year will we know exactly what is available to
us.
Winter Flowers Week is open until 11 December: book your visit
Photos by Aloha Bonser-Shaw