Why I’m sponsoring The Farewell Flowers Directory display at RHS Chelsea
by Carole Patilla of Tuckshop Flowers, author of the Green Funeral Flowers Online Course
Turning funeral flowers teaching into an online course was a Lockdown project for Tuckshop Flowers.
Sponsoring the Chelsea exhibit as Green Funeral Flowers is a great opportunity to support The Farewell Flowers Directory’s campaigning work to get the plastic out of funeral flowers. As a working florist and floristry teacher who shares this mission, I wanted, in essence to ‘put my money where my mouth is’ and help to make this Chelsea display of sustainable funeral flowers a reality.
I hope that the exhibit will play a significant part in changing the way that farewell flowers are routinely made and perceived.
I’m one of the founders of The Farewell Flowers Directory along with Gill Hodgson of Fieldhouse Flowers and I’m also part of the team working on Chelsea Flower Show. I feel so strongly about getting more sustainable funeral flowers into the mainstream that I couldn’t do anything other than sponsor this display!
The team effort of The Farewell Flowers Directory’s florists makes it possible to get funeral flowers into Chelsea’s Grand Pavilion for the first time – a truly high profile platform for our plastic-free message. This wouldn’t be possible for me as Tuckshop Flowers, a one-woman-band, because of the time, energy and costs involved.
It’s great to be part of a team with other florists in the The Farewell Flowers Directory! Here I’m waving a non-slip flower mat at a Farewell Flowers Directory photoshoot with Gill Hodgson, (left) and Kate Hurst of Camomile and Cornflowers in the background. Photo: Andrea Gilpin Photography.
Another way in which I’m trying to encourage more florists to create compostable funeral arrangements is through my Green Funeral Flowers Online Course. This also aims to raise the profile of sustainable funeral flowers and to make it easier for people to find florists who can provide them in their local area. The course provides the foundations to help more florists offer and market sustainable designs, and The Farewell Flowers Directory helps them to get found. Fostering an appetite for change in the world of funeral flowers is important, though it’s clear that funeral directors still largely hold the key to making this change happen more quickly. If you’re a funeral director visiting the show, we’d love to talk to you!
About the course
As Tuckshop Flowers, I’d been teaching fellow florists my plastic-free funeral flower techniques in workshops for over a decade by the time the COVID lockdown hit in 2020. The hiatus it created in my wedding work and overall business model gave me the time and opportunity to turn my in-person funeral flowers workshop into a longer form, online course – something I’d been wanting to do for ages as I realised that it wasn’t always convenient for people to travel to my base in Birmingham to learn face to face.
I love welcoming florists to my workshops in Birmingham. Here, Farewell Flowers florist Jade of Hookheath Flower Farm, Surrey, learns how to construct a casket spray made entirely of tied bouquets at my home studio in Birmingham.
Green Funeral Flowers launched online in August 2020 and since then, students from all over the UK and beyond have learned about making, marketing and selling more eco-friendly choices for personalised funerals. I’m delighted because that means there are now more florists worldwide who can amplify the message about doing funeral flowers differently.
I hope that my course makes florists more confident about coming up with their own creative, foam-free floral tributes. It also places a strong emphasis on the need to talk about funeral work in fresh and interesting ways on social media and websites because I believe it’s crucial that every sustainable florist learns to be an educator in this way if we want to change funeral flowers for the better.
The starting point for change, in my view, is making funeral flowers visible and that’s exactly what The Farewell Flowers Directory display at Chelsea Flower Show will do.
Let’s spark change with Chelsea
I hope that the Directory’s beautiful display at Chelsea will accelerate the move away from plastic in funeral flowers and ignite discussion beyond the showground around the topic of funeral flowers - probably the largest sector of the floristry industry to remain steadfastly underpinned by plastic-derived floral foam.
I think one reasons for the glacial pace of change in funeral floristry (and also in the wider funeral industry) is its direct connection with the taboo subject of death and dying. Social queasiness around discussion of these topics plays a big part in the general reluctance to talk about or tackle how we approach funerals. I think, as a society, it’s time for us to engage with the topic of dying as something that’s natural, inevitable and will happen to us all, and also to engage with the environmental challenges we face.
Flowers are just one tiny part of a conversation around end of life wishes, but they’re a way in to thinking and talking about funerals and what kind of legacy we want to leave behind. They’re also a tiny part of the environmental challenge which lies ahead but if we take the small steps that we can, hopefully our legacy might be something that’s a lot kinder to the planet than landfill and plastic.
