Meet the florists
Leigh Chappell
Leigh Chappell is from a small village on the Gower Peninsula near Swansea in South Wales. Inspired by the local flora and fauna of the coast, she studied Botanical Illustration before moving to London, where she worked in Graphic Design before committing completely to floristry. Leigh has always been passionate about flowers and how utterly captivating and mood lifting they can be, and is always at her happiest either designing with them or drawing them.
Yeon Hee Lee
Yeon Hee trained as a florist in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to London to pursue her passion for floristry in 2013. After six years working at McQueen’s Flowers she had the opportunity to teach at the London Flower School in 2019.
With a background in interior design, Yeon Hee finds inspiration in various crafts and experiments with different materials alongside fresh flowers in her work. In recent years she has been particularly intrigued by working with pressed flowers, with their preserved beauty resulting in unexpected movement, texture, delicacy and magical shadow.
Palais London
Palais is a multidisciplinary creative studio based in Shoreditch, London, founded in 2013 by Emma Weaver. Their practice occupies a space between floral art and set design. With a background in fine art sculpture (Central Saint Martins), fashion, and set design, Emma approaches flowers as a continuation of these practices, often combining them with other materials to create fantastical sets.
Palais love questioning the conventional idea of a flower’s natural form, turning them inside out and often quite literally, upside down. Their work is colour focused, playful and meticulously considered. Each arrangement is an immersive world of its own, juxtaposing play and control.
Arthur Parkinson
Arthur Parkinson is a writer of garden books with the common theme of seeing a garden, no matter how small, as both a place for growing your own cut flowers and also an organic sanctuary for birds, bees and butterflies. He is a passionate cut flower grower, and his style of arranging he terms as ‘plonking’, opting for vintage vases of coloured glass and only working with flowers and foliage he has either grown or foraged through the seasons.
Arthur worked as florist for Sarah Raven, co-founding and hosting the podcast grow-cook-eat. Since this, Arthur has returned more to his childhood love of chickens whilst growing a cottage garden of pots. He rears rare poultry breeds and illustrates them, with a ceramics line in Fortnum & Mason.
Rollo Skinner
Rollo Skinner is a botanical set designer, writer and artist. Based between Dorset and London, he feels most at home amongst the trees in the woods by his family farmhouse, dreaming up stories and new creations with Ben (the family sheepdog who’s terrified of sheep). After spending most of his 20’s feeling lost, reconnecting with nature has been fundamental in finding his way again. He realised that by creating things, he was recreating the self that he had lost along the way – his mission is to inspire others to do the same.
He founded Studio Rollo in the spring of 2021, a creative studio inspired by his love of all things nature. His previous clients include: Gucci, Tim Walker, Harris Reed, Barbour, Soho House, S.S.Daley, ELLE Decoration and Chateau Orlando. His first book, Queer By Nature, an illustrated fable, will be published in Germany by Harper Collins later this year.
Wild at Heart
For 25 years, Wild at Heart has defined luxury botanical artistry under Nikki Tibble’s visionary guidance. Their signature style – opulent and boldly creative – has attracted A-list clientele and prestigious brands worldwide.
Wild at Heart are distinguished by their storytelling through nature. From concept to final petal, thy transform dreams into immersive realities where no detail is overlooked. They can be found at Liberty London’s entrance and their original Notting Hill boutique.
From field to florist
Uniting florists, flower growers and flower lovers, British Flowers Week was founded in 2013 by New Covent Garden Market, the UK’s premier flower supplier. This year the mantle of managing the campaign has been handed to Flowers from the Farm, the industry body promoting small-scale growers of local, seasonal, British cut flowers. Flowers from the Farm, with a membership of more than 1000 flower businesses across the UK, is uniquely placed to lead the industry-wide campaign to increase the share of the UK market occupied by flowers grown in this country.
The florists taking part in the Garden Museum’s exhibition will bring their designs to life by sourcing seasonal blooms grown by suppliers in the Flowers From the Farm network, championing the whole of the British flower supply chain from field to florist.
