The inspiration behind our Chelsea display
Carole Patilla, co-founder of The Farewell Flowers Directory, reveals more about our journey to the world’s most prestigious flower show and the inspiration behind our churchyard scene.
And so it begins….
Today's the day we start building our RHS Chelsea Flower Show display. I'm on the train to London with a suitcase full of jars, snips, a high vis jacket and steel toe capped boots (later to be filled with flowers of course!). All the props for our churchyard scene are in Gill’s hired van, making their way from Fieldhouse Flowers in Yorkshire down the M1 to the Royal Hospital Showground in London. Nicola of Gentle Blooms is super-organised and arrived in London with her collections of flower and props last night, and Georgie of Common Farm Flowers in on her way up from Devon right after flowering up a big wedding this morning. I call that dedication to the cause!
It’s been quite a journey to get to this point. Chelsea displays don’t come together overnight - in fact we started hatching this plan very soon after our fledgling directory launched to the public in May last year. No-one can accuse us of not aiming high! As far as Gill and I were always concerned, it was always going to be Chelsea or bust.
Why Chelsea?
Gill and I both know from previous experience with Flowers from the Farm, that a successful display at RHS Chelsea Flower Show can be a game-changing experience and has enormous power to amplify campaigning messages. We want to get the plastic out of funeral flowers and and we want to bring plastic-free floral tributes into the mainstream, so where better to start than at the most famous flower show in the world? We didn't want to wait and build up to this effort slowly: Gill and I are both closer to retirement than to the start of our careers, so felt there was no time like the present to take funeral flowers straight to the top.
Gill Hodgson, our Co-Founder, came up with the idea for our Chelsea design.
About our design
Our churchyard scene, complete with gravestones and a seated figure of a man and his dog was already in Gill’s head she first suggested Chelsea - I think it's inspired partly by the beautiful country churchyard which she tends in the Yorkshire village where she lives. She’d obviously been thinking about Chelsea secretly for ages, because even before we’d decided to pitch the idea to the RHS, she’d already worked out how she could ingeniously manufacture headstones, an obelisk and other graveyard features using only her creativity and some recycled cardboard! Each of the gravestones is based on the design of those which exist in Gill's beloved local churchyard, and one is based on the headstone which remembers her parents.
Four silver birch branches act as figurative pall bearers, holding aloft our woven willow coffin. They have climbing plants gently clinging to their bark to soften and connect them with the churchyard scene beyond. The coffin they carry erupts with the most glorious flowers and foliage of the season - in the run up to Chelsea I think it's fair to say that every member of the team has become slightly obssessed with foxgloves! We wanted the plants and grass in the churchyard to be very naturalistic and reflect what you might find in such a spot in real life.
We want the coffin to have a really joyful wow factor which draws visitors into the exhibit with its exuberance rather than scaring them away any whiff of solemnity or sadness.
The old man and his dog seated on a wooden bench, visiting the churchyard are there to add human interest and a personal element to the tableau. These lovely wirework scupltures have been created especially for us by Yorkshire artist Susan Nichols and the team have already christened the dog 'Alan' after a certain gardening show presenter.
We’ve chosen species rich wildlife turf to clothe the ground, to reflect the meadowy grass that you might find in a typical country churchyard. To add colour, we'll inject some additional buttercup plants to bring in The Farewell Flowers Directory’s cheery bright yellow brand colour. In March, I had a wry smile to find myself potting up roots of creeping buttercup, one of my most troublesome perennial weeds to add to supplies for Chelsea. These humble allotment weeds are going to get a rather bizarre moment to shine!
Dealing with the taboo around death and dying
Both Gill and I have worked in the funeral space for over a decade and experience has helped us develop a certain degree of ease around the topic of funerals and the associated issues of death and dying. Sometimes perhaps, that makes us forget how, in general, UK society is very much more tentative and uncomfortable in addressing these topics.
“Funeral flowers? At Chelsea?…. Is that a good idea?” was a question we often had to field when we first voiced our intentions. “Why not? They’re only flowers” was our reply.
“That will take some careful handling” muttered one sceptical observer on Instagram when we went public with our plans. “But they’re just flowers like any others and can be joyful, exuberant and amazing - there’s nothing shocking about them” we countered.
“You can’t take a COFFIN to Chelsea!” said others, recoiling from the idea in horror. “Yes we can - Gill’s got one in her garage and we can fit it in her car”. That was probably the easiest one to answer!
On a more serious note, the slightly horrifed opposition we faced proved helpful in making us think carefully about how we could make a display with a coffin at its heart less unsettling for people who might feel apprehensive about coming face-to-face with the subject of funerals.
Our Eureka! moment was when we came up with idea of using the coffin without its lid as a kind of giant window box to hold an exuberant and joyous floral display. We hit upon this as a way to resolve the unsettling question
"Who or what on earth is in that coffin?"
and it proved to be a massive breakthrough in unlocking our thinking, and from there momentum built quickly.
Starting conversations
We want the display to be thought provoking and to widen horizons about what 'funeral flowers' are or can be. We want to show that at their best, they're just lovely flowers that can be enjoyed even after the funeral by family members and friends. Moving and meaningful when made with just one special person in mind, we'll prove that they can be designed to echo a unique life and its loves without creating a picture or writing a name on a base of plastic-derived floral foam. We want to change notions of what funeral flowers can be and build on our campaign to bring foam-free flowers that leave no legacy of waste into the mainstream - we see them as an option for any type of funeral and don't want them to be considered only for natural burial sites. There is no reason why they can’t grace crematoriums and ceremonies across the UK - they're just beautiful flowers after all.
As funeral florists, we find that if people can be encouraged to get over their inital reaction to run away from the sight of anything vaguely funereal, once they start talking about ideas, they find that they have so much to say about their feelings on the topic!
We think it's important that views about funeral wishes are shared at a time when funerals are only a hypothetical future event as it's so much easier to discuss them when they are not an approaching reality. Knowing that you're giving someone the send off they wanted takes a lot of stress out of funeral planning. It removes any nagging doubt that your family and friends might have that they’re doing things that you wouldn't have liked - so make sure you tell people what you want!
Our display encourages visitors to talk openly about funerals
We want to encourage people to talk more easily about funerals and to be aware of the full range of options they have available to them. That's why we've chosen to include our buttercup yellow luggage labels for people to write their funeral wishes and tie them on to the perimeter of our stand. After the show, we're going to pass the ideas we gather onto our sponsors, The Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, to help them better understand the concerns, wishes and experience which people would like the funeral space to embrace.
We are determined to change the funeral landscape for the better and we hope that you'll join and support us on this journey.
Keep in touch with our work
If you’d like to see what we’re up to after the show follow us on our social media:
Help us to change the world of funeral flowers
See RHS Chelsea Flower Show coverage
Find full coverage of the show on BBC iplayer