In our Guest Blog this week we loved hearing from Carole Patilla about Farewell Flower’s success at Chelsea this year, and her mission to encourage environmentally friendly practices in funeral floristry.
This May saw an historic first at RHS Chelsea Flower Show when our Farewell Flowers Directory display of funeral flowers was awarded a coveted RHS gold medal. Our churchyard scene, complete with a coffin and gravestones, was created with seasonal, British-grown flowers and foliage and without any plastic floral foam or single-use plastic. We wanted to take funeral flowers to Chelsea to lift the curtain which too often segregates funeral flowers from the floristry mainstream.
The Farewell Flowers Directory is a new online listing service for florists co-founded by myself and Gill Hodgson MBE, of Fieldhouse Flowers in Yorkshire in May 2024. It’s a not-for-profit online directory which aims to get the plastic out of funeral flowers and to make it easy for people to find compostable and foam free floral tributes when they need them.
Gill and I wanted to encourage more florists to offer funeral arrangements which don’t contain any wire or plastic. We want our Directory to be part of the solution to the problem of plastic waste faced in crematoriums and churchyards across the country. Why leave behind a legacy of plastic waste when we can choose to avoid it?
As well as showcasing creative and eco-friendly techniques at Chelsea we also wanted to open up public discussions at the show relating to both sustainability and wider funeral choices. We thought that if visitors could be encouraged to overcome any initial reticence to engage with these topics, they’d have a multitude of questions and ideas to share about what makes a fitting send off. And it turns out we were right.
We used flowers as a gentle way to start this bigger conversation and asked people to write their funeral wishes on colourful labels and to tie them onto the perimeter rope of our stand. By the end of the week, 1000 people had shared their thoughts about funerals. It was wonderful to see how the labels became an attraction in themselves as people browsed to see what others had written, and were moved, entertained and informed by the very personal words that they read there.
Everyone who was part of the Farewell Flowers Directory team was really proud to have facilitated such amazing conversations and a unique public space where memories and funeral experiences could be openly shared. It was really special, not least because we live in a society which encourages us to shut such things away and not to talk about them, especially not in public. We plan to share the ideas collected on the labels in future installations and exbibitions, as well as with our industry sponsors, The Institute of Crematorium and Cemetery Management who are really interested in them as a piece of social research.
Personalisation in funerals and funeral flowers
Many of the floral arrangements created by our team were intended to have a life after the funeral service, such as a basket filled with jars of posies which could be reused at a wake or shared with friends and family; a living wreath of small, perennial plants which could be enjoyed in a garden as a memory for years to come, and a casket spray in a reusable wooden frame with several removable vases of flowers at its heart. We want people to know that you don’t have to leave flowers behind at the crematorium – they can have an afterlife beyond the service and be enjoyed simply as arrangements of lovely flowers.
Our hopes for funeral flowers beyond the Chelsea Flower Show
We want the impact of recent discussions around sustainable funeral flowers to continue beyond Chelsea and to build on the interest in our work that the show has generated.
We will be staging futher displays of funeral floristry at RHS Wentworth Woodhouse in July and florist members like Aizel Finch of Yalham Hayes Flower Farm will be creating their own exhibits to put funeral flowers into the spotlight at regional flower shows such as The Taunton Flower Show in August.
Ultimately, our aim is to make plastic-free funeral flowers a mainstream choice which are routinely offered for any funeral. We want to reach a point where our awareness-raising activities and advocacy for eco-friendly choices in funeral flowers is no longer needed.
Thank you Carole and congratulations on your success at Chelsea!
If you would like to find out more, please visit Tuckshop Flowers and The Farewell Flowers Directory.
Header photo credit: Andrea Gilpin