Discovering a new passion

My journey in to floral design, growing flowers and embracing being an artist.

A spring arrangement, featuring tulips, geums, camelia and flowering current.

I was recently asked at a panel event, ‘How would you describe yourself and what you do?’ There have been a few iterations, all intertwined and supporting each other in various way, but I thought if I’m sharing work on here, it’d probably be a good idea to figure it out in a more structured way...

I started working as a dancer in 2012, and through some grit, determination and luck have been fortunate to have a full and varied career, whether that be touring on stage or dancing on film.

In Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, photo courtesy of CTG/Ahmanson Theatre

When the pandemic hit in 2020, theatre took a really long time to come back. Whilst the company that I danced for couldn’t offer us financial support due to us all being self employed contractors, a generous donor stepped forward and offered bursaries for us to go and retrain in something else. I was running in Regent’s Park a lot at the time, trying to keep fit and grateful for my one hour allowed outside as relief from my lovely but small studio flat I shared with my partner Will. It would always be a joy to run through Queen Mary’s Rose Garden and to finish up at St John’s Lodge Garden - a garden paradise, much looser in its design than your usual park garden, its entrance a tunnel covered with cascading wisteria and honeysuckle. I initially thought about horticulture - I’d always loved being outside, and whenever we were on an international tour I’d drag any willing friends with me to the nearest national park, often hiking up mountains, totally ill-prepared, some of them wearing flip-flops and floral skirts, but loving it none the less. My mum was also an excellent gardener, with a keen eye for colour, loving dark and rich dahlias and tulips, so it seemed a good fit. I began researching courses, debating applying for something academic in garden design, or maybe an RHS level 2, but neither felt like the right thing, and I realised without being able to dance I was yearning to do something creative.

We’d also started having a twice a month delivery of Freddie’s Flowers, and I noticed it brightened my spirits. This seemed to point to studying floral design, combining my appreciation for plants with a new found joy of arranging cut flowers. I approached two ex-ballet dancers via Will, Stephen Wicks and Mark Welford who ran Bloomsbury Flowers in Covent Garden, asking if I could join them for some work experience to see if I could test out if this was a path worth following. They were incredibly supportive, but said that I’d need to go and take a course so I at least had some base knowledge before coming in to a busy flower shop, and they suggested a couple of schools to look at. One of these was London Flower School, a place heavily influenced by the work of Constance Spry, where they matched floral design with creative expression. Everything was approached as an artistic exercise, so rather than learn how to do a traditional flower arch, they led us in a creation of one inspired by Dante’s Inferno, using paintings and art as visual stimulus, forming it out of branches, moss, trees and rocks. I was hooked, and 4 blissful weeks later I graduated from their career course.

The archway project at LFS

At the same time through the wonders of Instagram, I’d begun to discover the slow flower movement, both in the US and the UK, and it blew my mind that anyone with some outside space could grow cut flowers and use them creatively. They made it look idyllic without shying away from the truth of what it took to grow such beauty, and I read all the second hand books I could find, with the works of Erin Benzakein, Sarah Raven and Milli Proust becoming bibles, obsessively reading and rereading their books and blogs to learn about seasonality, growing from seed, successional planting and conditioning flowers.

To match this passion for growing with what I’d learnt creatively at LFS became my quest. I started to volunteer and then work on flower farms in and around London, whilst continuing to learn as much as I could about floral design working as a freelance florist on events, seeing how to work at scale from masters of sustainable floral designer - whether that be a wedding at Soho Farmhouse, or a dinner at the V & A, seeing these artists create and their process from sketch to reality was really inspiring.

As the passion grew, Will and I started to visit more and more gardens. He’d grown up with horticulture being the family business, his parents running a plant nursery in Swansea, Wales, so although his base knowledge was already excellent from being around it all the time, it was lovely to see him rediscover this part of his life and upbringing, but this time together as more of a shared interest. Seeing the jungle of garden rooms with the tallest fennel I’d ever seen and walls covered in cascading clematis at Great Dixter, or the rose gardens at Sissinghurst with their arching stems dripping with blooms and foxglove spires piercing through for the first time were life changing, and I began to study the writings of Christopher Lloyd, Beth Chatto and Dan Pearson - garden designers and authors who wrote about plants and places with such expression and clarity.

The borders in spring at Great Dixter

Will at the entrance to Sissinghurst

Throughout all of this, my mum was battling ovarian cancer, and it felt special to have my new obsession join with her existing passion, sharing something that celebrated life and all that’s beautiful in the world offering as a distraction whilst she was plugged in having chemo, whilst also bringing to the forefront the cycle of life and its fragility, seeing from seed to bloom to death within one season. Her council was always welcomed and valuable, being the first person I’d share news with or ask for advice, not knowing what I’d get back but knowing it was what I needed, delivered with a big dose of wit and a lot of love.

My wonderful mum at Perch Hill

My mum died in the summer of 2022, the grief feeling all consuming and at times pretty immobilising. I went back to work in hindsight sooner than I should have, and ended up with two big injuries back to back which meant I had to leave the tour I was on. Desperate for a shift in place, I went to the US to volunteer at Saipua, now Worlds End Farm with Sarah Ryhanen, a pioneering florist, flower grower and farmer, working at their farm in upstate New York, assisting on their floral residences along with normal farm duties. Being away helped feel like I had some room to think, and feel my way through to find the next right step. Never one to do things by halves, when I returned home I started a three pronged approach to begin healing with three incredible women. Every Thursday I would have physiotherapy, grief counselling, and sports psychology sessions, returning home exhausted but knowing that hitting the physical, mental and emotional aspects of what had happened, I was starting to process the events of the last year to be able to figure out what I could do next.

After a good year and a half of rehab, dancing came back in a greater way than I imagined, so in breaks between contracts I’d juggle friends weddings and bouquets for the Opera House, either working out of our living room or the garden studio, being very grateful to Will for his patience with the buckets and buckets of flowers which would dominate our flat. I also carried on taking classes and freelancing with designers whose work I adored - Jess and Ally at Aesme, Shane Connolly, Frida Kim and Wagner Kreusch - still now I can’t believe that I worked for, and still sometimes do, for these floral megastars. Seeing their styles up close and their tenacious work ethics left a mark, so that when I started to get larger jobs of my own, I felt equipped to handle them and knew they were always at the end of the phone for advice and guidance if needed.

Creating a woodland installation for one of my first weddings, St John restaurant, London.

A big part of the journey has been embracing my own style and trying to not get side tracked by thoughts of ‘should I be doing something this way or that way’ and trying to lean in to my natural romanticism (I’m a sucker for the blousiest of flowers), and valuing the skills I already have. For me with floral design, being able to bring my dance background and knowledge of space to my work is an aspect of it I really love, but it took time to feel confident to share it, thinking that if I told clients about my other career they wouldn’t take me seriously as a designer. Of course, its been this aspect of my work that people find most interesting and how I’ve got a lot of my jobs, but realising that bringing all of myself to the work took time and a lot of practise. I think my background in dance pulls me to explore different parts of design - how to create movement within an arrangement or how to use negative space to frame a particularly exquisitely shaped stem. This is one of the reasons I love to use flowers I’ve either grown myself or from another local grower, as you get so much variation, whether that’s in shape due to relaxed staking or a flower twisting, reaching for the light, the discolouration of a leaf that’s been bleached by the sun or shaded out by it’s neighbour, or even using something that’s on the tipping point of going over and dying - that’s when I think you can get the most beautiful, blendable colours, and it’s only as I spend more time with the plants and watch them grow that I see the vast variation in how they can be used.

An April arrangement, balancing movement with colour and texture. The early Sorbaria foliage being a new favourite, with it’s multitude of colours within one leaf.

As the scale and frequency of the design work grew, I realised that I needed to try and find a bigger space of my own and take the plunge and try to grow more flowers. The link to that story is here, but to bring it back to the initial question of ‘how would you describe yourself and what you do?’, I think the common theme throughout it all has been creative expression, whether that’s been on stage, in the garden or in the vase, so I think now I would proudly say that I’m an artist.