Emely van Heesch-Smith: Florist with a sustainable edge turns over new leaf

Mail & Guardian

09-05-2025

Guardian of environmental impact: Emely van Heesch-Smith. Photo: Ricardo de Leca
With over 30 years of experience in floristry, Emely van Heesch-Smith turned over a new leaf during the Covid pandemic, becoming a sustainable floral décor artist for a new age.
After the whole industry shut down, she decided to find a workable solution for making floristry a sustainable practice, using the dried flowers that she had saved up for her Christmas decorations. This gave way to her first sculptural work using dried flowers and also opened up a whole new way for her to look at flowers.
After working as an apprentice to the internationally acclaimed florist Zita Elze, Emely learnt how to let the flowers do the talking by celebrating the subtle art of nature, while also achieving her National Certificate in Floristry from the City and Guilds NPTC in London. After gaining experience working with various clients, she began her work as a consultant to Four Seasons Hotel The Westcliff in 2013 while building her brand and team along the way.
'I felt that I needed to guide my clients, to be guardians of the environmental impact that the flowers have,' she begins. 'That's why I changed the way we do flowers and the way we put flowers into the hotel. And I also try to ask every time I buy something, where does it come from? Can I reuse it? What can I recycle? I'm trying to educate my clients but at the same time I'm teaching my children about our impact on the environment.'
Working out of her home-based studio in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, allows Emely the opportunity to be closer and more connected to her husband and two children, despite her frenetic and often last-minute work schedule. And while her fast-paced work schedule gives way to an organised workspace, Emely's home garden is something of an antithesis.
'My garden is very wild, and I spend most mornings in it,' she begins. 'It's got pathways that I can just wander through, but the beds are all wild. It's like a woodland garden. It's got lots of trees, birdlife, and wildflowers.'
It's that time spent in her garden that no doubt fuels her creativity to fashion the works commissioned by her clients. 'I love coming up with ideas. I work on the client's theme or seasonal event and go to the flower market and try to pull the concept together from what I can find,' she explains.
'That's the most exciting part for me. I also have wild ideas sometimes, and then trying to figure out how I'm going to create them is very thrilling.'
Emely is constantly seeking out new ways of being nature conscious.
'My first question is always how long can the flowers last?' she begins. 'Will they dry? Are they locally grown? And how can I incorporate this into my design?'
In 2022, Emely became a certified biomimicry practitioner (a field where you learn from and mimic the strategies found in nature to solve human challenges) to educate herself and her clients on the impact the floral industry has on the environment.
Her endeavours have faced challenges, with many people not releasing the impact that the farming and importing of flowers has on the environment, let alone the huge amount of water, pesticides and herbicides that are being used.
'I think they say that to grow one rose you use ten litres of water. So if I do Valentine's Day work, I do something where I don't incorporate a single rose,' she says.
One of her side projects is attempting to find a sustainable solution to the widely used oasis foam brick.
'That foam is basically a plastic, and just about any florist around the world uses it to stick their flowers in. It's the most awful form of plastic because it becomes microplastic and dissolves into a foam. I've been trying to find ways of creating something similar that is completely locally made and fully biodegradable from natural products,' she declares.
In the hands of a sustainable-minded person like Emely, South African floristry is blooming.