And it’s GOLD for sustainable funeral flowers at Chelsea!
Carole Patilla, Co-founder of The Farewell Flowers Directory reflects on a hectic week at Chelsea Flower Show - and it’s not over yet!
The churchyard scene we created to showcase funeral flowers - the first time they’ve ever been exhibited at the show.
We’re so delighted that we did the thing people told us we couldn’t do: we took funeral flowers and a coffin to RHS Chelsea and won Gold! Our display shows that flowers, thoughtfully and sustainably designed, can move people; they can reflect and celebrate a life; and they can tread lightly on the planet. We hope that our Gold medal exhibit will raise awareness of sustainable funeral flowers and help bring about change in the industry.
Our Chelsea team: Directory co-founders Gill Hodgson and Carole Patilla, with Georgie Newbery of Common Farm Flowers and Nicola Hill of Gentle Blooms.
You may have heard about it all in the national press and TV news already - it’s just that our feet have only just touched the ground to update our blog here! Queen Camilla visited us on Press Day and we’ve welcomed horticultural and floristry royalty and celebrities to our stand across the week also.
So many people told us that we couldn’t take funeral flowers to Chelsea, so we’d like to say a huge thank you to those who have believed in us and supported us from the outset, namely the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea team and our sponsors, the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM), Green Funeral Flowers Online Course by Tuckshop Flowers, New Covent Garden Flower Market and Workplace Bereavement. It was lovely to welcome their representatives to the stand on Tuesday evening to celebrate our gold medal in which they had played such a crucial role.
Julie Dunk, retired CEO of the Institute for Cemetery and Crematorium Management offers her congratulations on our RHS Gold medal.
Starting conversations
We’re delighted to see that the colourful yellow tags we created have really opened up conversations around our display. They’ve encouraged people to talk about what their wishes for their own funeral might be. Alan Titchmarsh was amongst the first Press Day visitors to write his thoughts on colourful tags that read “I’d like my funeral to be...” and tie them on to the show’s perimeter rope - I chuckled when I read his tag after telling him that we’d named our wire dog ‘Alan’ in his honour. It’s been amazing to think that for some of these show visitors, it might be the first time that they’ve ever considered sharing their wishes with those close to them. Some people have even taken a label away with them to fill in and to file with their wills.
Let’s change funeral flowers
We can see from the response our display of plastic-free funeral flowers has elicited from visitors, the press and florists alike that the appetite for change in funeral floristry is real. By making funeral flowers visible in such a high profile forum, we hope that we’ve started a public dialogue which will continue after long the show.
We’ve proved that you don’t have to sacrifice beauty for sustainability, that you CAN talk about funerals and funeral flowers without bringing misery and pain, and that you shouldn’t listen when people tell you that you can’t take funeral flowers to Chelsea 🤣.