You can visit the innovative installations at the newly restored Garden Museum from Monday 18 to Sunday 24 June. This is the first exhibition of floral installations in the history of British Flowers Week.
The judges whittled down over 30 competition entries to choose these six florists to create their installations, and they'll be announcing a final winner later in the week.
Inspired by Fibonacci’s golden spiral and full of nature’s contrasting textures, Helen Chambers of Evolve Flowers has created a woven hay mat, floating from the ground and erupting with flowers, designed to take the observer on a journey through grass meadows, framed by trees, where lilies stand tall and stately.
Festoon Flowers | www.festoonflowers.co.uk
A world of Wonders in One Closet Shut. This delicate cabinet of curiosities is an homage by Charlotte Smithson to the avid plant collecting of John Tradescant, buried in the graveyard of the Garden Museum, with delicately suspended laboratory glassware holding ethereal foraged flowers and foliage.Floribunda Rose | www.floribundarose.com
A box full of gorse, with a vase full of flowers at its heart, this installation is inspired by the unique qualities of British flowers. Inviting curiosity with its stark exterior and hints as to what lies within, visitors will be drawn to discover the floral design inside and feel a sense of the harmony of elements that might at first seem at odds with one another.Harry’s Flowers | www.harrysflowers.co.uk
The arches in the nave of the Garden Museum lend their form to beech and birch branches in this design, which can be looked through, walked through, and guides you to other spaces. The tones and textures compliment the surrounding stonework and are scented at different levels with herbs, stocks and lupins, leading up to foxgloves and fennel, and at the very top the scent of roses and sweet peas fills the air.Veevers Carter | www.veeverscarter.com
The shadow box design created by Veevers Carter is an abstract replica of a curiosity described in George Stirn’s catalogue of the ‘Ark,’ and is inspired by the exceptional life of John Tradescant. An imagining of a woodland view, extraordinary flowers unearthed by Tradescant - phlox, clematis, Tradescantia, and others - form a frame through which the landscape is seen.Wolves Lane Flower Company | www.wolveslaneflowercompany.com
'Plot 2' seeks to celebrate women who grow, focusing on the beauty and chaos of growing flowers, which Camila and Marianne experience in their north London plot. Found objects from their growing sites: a rusty bath, stray crates and buckets, and the metal grid on which they usually propagate seeds, sit alongside fragrant roses, vegetables gone to seed and wild grasses in an homage to the beauty found in disorder.Alongside the exhibition at the Garden Museum, all week there's celebrations of British flowers across the country in flower shops, city centres, markets and stately homes, with pop-up shops, flower farm open days and floristry workshops.
For more information:
British Flowers Week