Requiring vases that worked practically with the requirements for her floral arrangements Spry tasked her art assistant Florence Standfast to develop wide mouthed bowls to allow for an abundance of blooms and foliage. These initial designs were handmade in papier-mâché and coated in varnish or plaster.

By 1935 a more regular supply of vases was required, and Miss Standfast modelled a range of shapes that could be manufactured commercially. Fulham Pottery employed press-moulding techniques to make the range. The matt surface decoration demanded by Spry was replicated by making the vases in white, filter-pressed, Devon earthenware clay.

Whilst Spry didn’t start her business, Flower Decorations Ltd. until 1929 when she was 43 years old, she quickly gathered around her friends, clients and collaborators from the most fashionable artistic circles of the day.

Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton were both regular attendees at Syrie Maugham the interior designer’s glamorous parties and events. Messel celebrated her ability for ‘creating an atmosphere of delicious charm and comfort and the exquisite flower arrangements concocted by Constance Spry for every occasion made their first appearance in her house.’ Spry soon started to develop close friendships and artistic liaisons with the three of them and other leading lights of the day such as Norman Hartnell, Victor Stiebel, Rex Whistler and Norman Wilkinson.

Constance Spry’s American clients in London had in frequently praised the flower decorator’s skills to their visiting friends. High society events such as Nancy Beaton and Sir Hugh Smiley’s wedding in January 1933 and the marriage of Wallis Simpson to the Duke of Windsor in June 1937 had helped spread Spry’s fame to the US.

Researcher Felicity Hall looks at the wider context of Constance Spry’s career in floristry in 1930s Britain:

What’s in a name?

The world of commercial floristry and floral decorations which Constance Spry entered in 1928, with the opening of her first shop in Belgrave Street, was a fairly recent one.  Although flowers had been used for decoration for hundreds of years, it was only in the nineteenth century that flower arrangements became something that could be bought, rather than an activity carried out by the lady of the house or her gardener using flowers from her own garden. The development of British imperial trade with Asia and the Americas from the seventeenth Century onwards had introduced an increasing variety of plants to gardeners at every level of society, which in turn fed into fashions for specific cut flowers.