Latest news with #sustainablefloristry
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Chelsea Flower Show visitors break down in tears over 'moving' funeral display in a festival first
Chelsea Flower Show is usually a happy occasion characterised by peonies, Pimm's and lots of smiling faces. But a new display this year is leaving some visitors in tears. For the first time in the show's 112-year history there is a funeral floristry exhibit showcasing a willow coffin, gravestones and a wire sculpture of a man and his dog. Nestled nearby in the grass are personal flower tributes including walking boots filled with garden-style flowers, a wreath of living plants, a violin holding flowers and a casket arrangement designed to be divided and shared with family and friends. The centrepiece of the installation, created by The Farewell Flowers Directory team, is an arrangement of 'vibrant, wildly natural seasonal garden flowers'. Gill Hodgson, co-founder of the company, said: 'Funeral flowers haven't altered for 50 years. The designs haven't altered and they're based in floral foam which is plastic. 'We want to let people know that they have a choice. 'Funeral flowers don't have to look funeral, they can be whatever you want them to be. 'You can choose to celebrate and reflect a life with fresh, seasonal materials that are natural, beautiful and resonant with meaning. 'And you can choose for your tributes to tread lightly on the planet. There's not a single piece of plastic here – not a plant pot or a cable tie.' The flowers on the display are sitting in glass jugs full of water to help them keep their shape and structure of the design. The team is encouraging people to think – possibly for the first time – what their wishes for their own funeral might be. Among those to shed a tear at the display include florist and TV presenter Simon Lycett. 'So many people have come down and cried,' Ms Hodgson said. 'Simon Lycett came and burst into tears. 'I don't mean to sound rude if I say we don't mind people crying but I think it's nice that people can be moved. 'It's not that they're sad, but they've been moved.' The display was awarded a gold medal by RHS judges this morning – the highest accolade for garden design and execution. 'We had some great feedback from the judges who said all the right things about how we've done exactly what we aimed to do,' Ms Hodgson said. 'We wanted to bring funeral flowers to Chelsea but it no way be macabre or dark.' The display, which located inside the Great Pavilion, is also completely sustainable and plastic-free. The group aims to banish single-used plastic from funeral arrangements, especially plastic floral foam. This is a type of porous material used in flower arranging to provide support and hydration, and is commonly used in floral signs such as 'Mum', 'Dad' or 'Nan'. 'Around 80 per cent of funerals are now cremations and the proportion is going up every year,' Ms Hodgson said. 'And at a cremation the flowers tend to get seen less. At a burial you'd put them on the grave but t the crematorium, those flowers are seen for about 20 minutes. 'Then, after they've been moved outside for a few days they get put in the skip. And it sits there forever. 'Floral foam was invented in 1954 and every bit that's ever been made is still sitting there.' The ground-breaking installation is sponsored by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM). Mathew Crawley, Chief Executive of the ICCM said: 'The Farewell Flowers Directory champions a simple but transformative idea: funeral flowers can be personal, beautiful, and environmentally responsible. 'This exhibit is more than just a showcase of flowers – it's a statement that grief, remembrance and sustainability can exist together in harmony.'
Mail & Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Emely van Heesch-Smith: Florist with a sustainable edge turns over new leaf
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.
