Where It Began

This is the year the house starts. I trained at the Philippa Craddock Academy in London, founded by the designer behind the flowers for the 2018 royal wedding, and worked on live commissions alongside the training.

Bond Street was one of them. A jewellery house, asparagus fern only, in pink and gold, suspended above the glass cases so the whole thing floated over the pieces without ever touching them. Retail taught me restraint faster than anything else did. Nothing in that window was allowed to compete with what was for sale.

The arch is the piece I still measure against. Foliage first and dense, silvered fern and dusty miller worked through so the white roses read as light rather than as flowers, and built to carry all the way to the floor on both legs instead of thinning out at the base the way most arches do.

Then the hedgerow, which shaped how I think now. Antique hydrangea, roses gone soft at the edges, rosehips, pampas and grasses run at floor level in a long low bank, arranged to look found rather than placed.

And a cloud, hung off the studio beams in plum and magenta, open enough to see the roof through.

All fresh. All 2019. Everything since has come from here.