Amy Merrick: No self-respecting flower-lover would fill their vases with imported stems. We want seasonal British-grown flowers and foliage
Ahead of British Flowers Week, Amy Merrick meets the floral growers and designers showing at the Garden Museum's exhibition.
For five glorious days, London’s Garden Museum will become a verdant tapestry of early summer flowers, blooming profusely from every corner of the museum's medieval core to celebrate British Flowers Week. The takeover from June 17-21, 2026, comes courtesy of five leading floral designers whose large-scale installations will showcase the beauty and breadth of exclusively British-grown blooms, uniting florists, growers and flower-lovers in an event that has come to mark the start of the summer horticultural calendar. June is the zenith of the botanical year.
This year’s installations will take inspiration from the painter and plantsman Cedric Morris and his wild, bohemian garden at Benton End, which is also the subject of the Garden Museum’s summer exhibition, Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint.
At last years Garden Museum British Flowers Week activation, Rollo Skinner created a central installation themed around the 'Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party' exhibition.
The Garden Museum’s festivities align with the annual British Flowers Week campaign, founded by Flowers From the Farm, a pioneering trade association made up of more than 1,000 British growers that promotes a sustainable cut-flower industry.
British flowers account for only 20% of cut flowers sold in Britain, though this number is on the steady rise thanks to the efforts of British Flowers Week and the designers and consumers who champion seasonal blooms. As a country of gardeners, though, we can do better.
Buying imported flowers supports an industry with a large carbon footprint and completely unregulated chemical usage. Bouquets can carry up to 1,000 times more chemical concentrations than is allowed on food, increasing the likelihood of cancers and birth defects for growers, florists and their children. No self-respecting flower-lover would fill their vases with them, let alone dream of burying their faces in a bunch and inhaling deeply.
Andy Monaghan is a dancer with Sir Matthew Bourne's company, as well as a flower grower and designer.
The Garden Museum’s upcoming efforts are a true celebration of British blooms, artfully arranged for your sensorial pleasure by five designers: botanical artist and researcher Cynthia Fan, Vervain Floral Design, naturalist and grower Nate Moss, Elder & Iris and dancer-turned-grower Andy Monaghan. Each installation celebrates the bounty of a British summer in its own way and take loose inspiration from an aspect of Cedric Morris’s work; the Vervain installation, for example, will be a chromatic painters palette of lush flowers, each hue filling corten steel bowls to mimic the texture of paint on a canvas. Long gone are the days of the crumbly green styrofoam bricks that once were omnipresent in all large scale flower arrangements — Vervain’s design has been grown by then and arranged using sustainable mechanics such as flower frogs.
Cynthia Fan’s museum installation will speak to the art and science of botanical hybridisation, magnifying plant structures that naturally occur in the wild, without human interference, in order for people to better appreciate them. By assembling felled logs from wild places around London, her work seeks to create a microcosm of seasonality and is a powerfully moving portrait of finding beauty in the subtleties of nature. In her hands, every branch and leaf is honoured as much as the blousiest bloom.
India and Christopher Vervain are iris specialists and the founders of Vervain Floral Design. They describe their work (below) as 'floral chaos, orchestrated by nature.'
Nate Moss’s work is intrinsically linked to the ecology of native species and their exchange with pollinators, wildlife and the landscape as a whole, and rather than planting in advance, he lets the seasons dictate what is truly of the moment. His woodland glade installation, carpeted with own-grown and foraged wildflowers, will also feature moths and nightingales.
The tide is, thankfully, turning, and every year growers report dramatically increased demand for their wares. In the last five years, the value of imported stems has fallen by nearly 10%. Britain has spoken and we want more fragrant, wild and natural, vital and characterful, sun-kissed, rain-soaked, beautiful and seasonal flowers.
