Strawberry Hill House Flower Festival
Last month I took my dried flowers to London to participate in the fourth annual Strawberry Hill House Flower Festival. It was a fantastic learning experience for me and really inspiring to see so much imagination on display, and I wanted to share it with you.
Strawberry Hill House is a gothic revival building that was created by Horace Walpole in the 18th century and underwent restoration beginning in 2006 (find out more about the history here). The house itself is gleaming white on the outside with rooms inside decorated in so many different beautiful colours from pale lilac to warm and vibrant red to stunning blue, reflecting the style choices of its previous inhabitants.
For the three-day flower festival weekend, florists are invited by curators Janne Ford and Leigh Chappell to transform the historic house into a flowery paradise, showcasing floral creativity using sustainable designs and seasonal and dried flowers. This year’s festival was planned in partnership with Flowers From the Farm to ensure that every stem was UK-grown. The florists were also committed to using design practices free of floral foam and single use plastics so that everything could either be re-used or composted at the end of the festival.
Strawberry Hill House
I was offered the Green Closet which is a small room decorated in green wallpaper that was used by Walpole as a dressing room and a writing room. Because of the artwork in the room, the humidity in the Green Closet needs to be kept to a minimum, so this space can only be decorated with dried flowers. For my design I decided to create a series of linear meadow arrangements that would feature shimmering honesty seed heads and other white flowers that would stand out against the deep green walls. A gradation of dried florals in other colours would run through the white meadow, leading to an urn holding a rainbow of flowers.
Flower urn next to the meadow displays (Photo by Janne Ford)
To create my meadow bases, I gathered some large branches that we’d pruned from sycamore maples in our garden earlier in the year, and drilled hundreds of small holes to hold the flower stems. It worked out really well as a low-cost, foam-free solution for dried materials. I’ll be re-using some of the branches and putting the rest out in the garden so insects can find homes in all those holes. The urn is quite deep so I filled the base with paper (to stop stems from dropping too far) and then topped it with a layer of crumpled up chicken wire to hold stems in place. Chicken wire works just as well for dried flowers as for fresh and can be re-used many times.
I created the urn design in advance rather than on the day and was so glad I did! Setting up the meadow arrangements took me much longer than I expected, and in hind sight, I’d have planned a smaller display. Two very kind people helped me wrap things up when I started running out of time (thank you Abi and Sian). In the end I was really pleased with how it turned out.
The Green Closet, decorated with dried flowers (photo by Janne Ford)
My urn of dried flowers (photo by Janne Ford)
The other rooms in the house were decorated with some truly stunning designs including room-sized installations and single-vessel arrangements. I attended the private view on the evening before opening day and again the next morning, and it was amazing how the lighting at different times of day changed the appearances of the designs. Have a look through the photo gallery below to see some of the magical creations, though in some cases, photography doesn’t quite capture the feeling of beholding a large-scale installation in real life (florist(s) acknowledged in the captions).
Every florist had a beautiful name sign to credit their work. These were made by calligraphy artist Jane John (@janelettersink on Instagram) using walnut ink. I love mine - what a great memento.
If you’d like to see more of the festival, have a look at this video by Rona Wheeldon and read more about the florists and flower farmers on the Flowers From the Farm blog. If you have the chance to visit the festival in person in future, I highly recommend it.
