Our British Flowers Week exhibition is open now until Monday 10 June! Five floral designers have filled the museum with immersive floral installations, created using seasonal British-grown flowers and foliage.
Take a closer look at the installations and discover the florists’ inspirations in their own words:
Debrah J Flowers: The Garden of Eden
Jennifer Debrah
The Garden of Eden represents an idyllic paradise, a place of perfection and tranquility. A spot, presence, and pleasant atmosphere. My installation draws inspiration from the Bible, aiming to reimagine its serene beauty and profound symbolism.
It embodies themes of purity, harmony, and the lush abundance of nature. The Garden of Eden is not just a story of origin but also a reminder of God’s initial intention for creation. This piece has been meticulously designed to evoke the enchanting essence of Eden. It features the finest of flowers and greenery arranged to create a sense of depth and natural flow. Each element is carefully positioned to guide the viewer’s eye and create a feeling of stepping into a pleasant atmosphere to give a little glimpse of Heaven on Earth.
In line with this year’s theme, ‘Reimagine’, I couldn’t have chosen a more fitting design. The Garden of Eden itself embodies sustainability. We have used reusable chicken wire and natural moss to provide structure and support. Additionally, water-efficient techniques have been applied to maintain the freshness of the flowers through the exhibition. All flowers and plants used in this installation have been sourced from local British growers (Bloom and Green, and Wychwood Gardens). This installation invites viewers to reflect on the original purity of nature and encourages a collective effort towards ecological preservation.
Hamish Powell: Bouquet
To some on the outside, floristry seems to be a narrow profession, just ‘someone who arranges flowers’. But to those within, it is the most varied world.
We are sculptors, designers, and early risers. We are stylists and botanists and teachers and a million other things. So why is it when I tell people I am a florist, their first question is: ‘So, do you make bouquets?’ A myriad of skills is boiled down to the expectation of some stems wrapped in paper.
This installation reimagines the bouquet. Each unexpected skill of a florist has been used, from foraging to growing to welding, each coming together to create a new perspective on a humble familiar.
Perspective is what affords floristry its underestimation. Only when you consider all the work that is involved, only when you look from the right angle, will you see the ability of those hands holding the bouquet.
The ‘flowers’ of the bouquet are locally grown plants from farms in Suffolk and our land in Somerset. Their soil and roots have been wrapped in moss using a Japanese technique called kokedama. The ‘stems’ of the bouquet are foraged branches from Somerset, while the ‘wrapping’ is pieces of cardboard upcycled from flower delivery boxes.
Lunaria
Deborah Bain
The work comprises three parts: curtain, mobile, bed: each created as an abstract representation of now long forgotten forms and sensory experiences. There is a layered audio piece to further evoke the reimagining of early life.
The Curtain: reimagining a lightweight fabric blowing at the window. The shapes come naturally from the Lepidium. The twisted stems seen here, grown in Deborah’s polytunnel, remain when dried. The Miscanthus was harvested and dried upright so as to achieve full heads and curled leaves.
This additional connection to the materials she grows is something endlessly inspiring for Deborah. Her cutting garden increasingly shapes her work. It provides a close connection to the microseasons of British flowers, as well as an otherwise unnatainable level of control over the growing and harvesting of these special materials.
The Bed: a cocooning nest bringing together fresh and dried stems and living plants. Cloud-like textures are used to create a sculpted garden inspired form, punctuated with highlights that can catch a breeze. All surrounding a swathe of cotton onto a mattress of fine bark, a medium used as a mulch in the cutting garden.
Milli Proust of Alma Proust Studio: From Bloom to Seed
There are no flowers without seeds. A seed holds within it all the potential hope of beauty. As small-scale flower farmers and gardeners alike, we can select varieties that are best suited to our growing conditions by controlling the seeds we use. Thus yielding better blooms and happier, healthier flowers. The varieties we flower farmers choose to keep and sow again are often driven by trends dictated by florists and consumers; we would love to reimagine a world in which open pollinated seed and small-scale, seasonal farming drives the trends in floristry.
Seed sovereignty plays a key role in promoting biodiversity and resilience within the cut flower industry. By cultivating a diverse range of seeds, us farmers can better adapt to changing environmental conditions and combat the impacts of climate change. This not only benefits the farmers themselves, but also contributes to the overall health of ecosystems and the sustainability of the industry as a whole.
We have re-imagined our seed garden in West Sussex, where we grow, tend to, and collect seed for our small-scale seed business, here in the corridors of the Garden Museum. There are wilder corners, to show how we create habitats as little invitations to creatures that help with pest control. There’s water in a little pond for our bees and other pollinators to come and take a drink from, encouraging them to turn the flowers to seeds.
We favour plant diversity for the healthiest crop, and we use local materials that support the plants and make a beautiful space- like coppiced Hazel by our favourite local coppicer Rosie Rendall. We have hand stitched some ‘seed balloons’ from silk, in a reimagining of how we isolate, capture, hang, and dry our seeds.
Swallows & Damsons: Back to the Garden
Anna Potter
From an early age, I was fascinated with dirt, death and decay. Burying dead birds, collecting wild animal bones, digging out dens in huge, stinking compost heaps. I’d seek out poisonous plants and fungi, rotting petals and insects: what may be considered the darker side of nature.
With adulthood, that childlike simplicity and innate understanding got left behind. It’s been all too easy to stray from the fleeting and fragile impermanent transience of life, from the dirt and darkness. Even, dare I say, fear these things. This piece is a celebration of both light and dark, from new life, full bloom, to decay and death. The family of all things where at every stage, there’s beauty, acceptance, and wiggly imperfections. Where beauty and terror coexist harmoniously in life’s mysterious paradox. I invite the viewers to look beyond our preconceptions of how flowers should last and stay fresh.
I hope that the ingredients will be accessible and familiar, and not just the finest and most fashionable blooms that money can buy. There are foraged ‘weeds’ such as valerian and old man’s beard, there are wildflowers of cow parsley, buttercups, grasses and lunaria. And there are fresh seasonal garden flowers grown by the Real Flower Company, highly fragrant sweet peas and Margaret Merrill roses.
The steel frame was forged in my hometown of Sheffield and is adorned with a mix of chicken wire, Kenzans and aluminium wires, twine and British wool. Lastly, there are reusable containers and tubes that hold water.
—
British Flowers Week is open until Monday 10 June: book your visit
Photos by Rona Wheeldon