Still reeling from winning a gold medal at The Chelsea Flower Show

- or when all the aspects of a long career come together in one big event

The Farewell Flowers Directory Chelsea Funeral Flowers exhibit team.

Left to Right Gill Hodgson MBE, Carole Patilla, yours truly, Nicola Smith...

Sitting now in the sitooterie outside the studio - just me and the birds and Teacake snoring in her basket, the rush of Chelsea feels as though it can’t have been. Proof lies in the many photographs, and the head whirring which I don’t like. The relief of being able to outpoor and clear the head to make space for tomorrow is fantastic. I’m so glad Substack is here for this stuff.

This time last week I was just waving off a lovely client. She’d ordered seventeen mixed buckets of flowers for her daughter’s wedding (grown and cut by me with a top up from my nearby colleagues The South West Grower Collective (because my head was full of Chelsea and I admitted for once I can’t do it ALL,) collected by my client Thursday 15 May so she could get ahead doing the church flowers) and then I made the bride’s bouquet, bridesmaid’s posy, and nine buttonholes on the morning of Friday 16th. Luckily the weather full on fantasy English spring shiny, and the calm experience that is creating bridal party flowers very early in the morning as the birds deafen and the sun slowly warms the back was everything I like about my job.

9.30am client arrived and all carefully tucked into her car. Oddly we talked about funeral flowers - but that was because beneath the calm exterior of this experienced flower farmer/florist doing the job she’s been enjoying for the past fifteen years, I was feeling the whirr caused by being about to fill the car and head off to London, where I would be helping build the first funeral flowers exhibit to be shown at The Chelsea Flower Show in its 113 year history.

You know how it is when you calmly wave off one person, take a deep breath, and then whizz! You turn into a machine of organisation. The trusty trolley into which I harvest my flowers was taken apart so that it would fit in the back of the car. Then tucked around it went a selection of straw hats from the second hand shop from which the team could choose one to play a part in our display, the good Hawes watering can (for its long spout,) a box of shallow jam jars (for tucking into the wild flower sward ‘planted’ with more buttercups and ox eye daisies,) apron (obviously,) three pairs of snips, a hori hori, hairbrush, paper, pen, jute string, raffia string (you never know), steel toe capped boots, hi-vis waistcoat, not to mention actual luggage with actual smart clothes for the judges’ dinner, press day, judging Chelsea in Bloom - I forgot pyjamas, toothpaste, and took too few pairs of pants so ended up buying emergency stocks from Marks and Spencer in Kensington High Street.

Then into the car and heading to London town. For the first time I had a permit to park opposite the Chelsea Flower Show grounds in the Burton Court car park - well worth the bother THANK YOU Gill for organising this. What happens is you drive along Royal Hospital Road towards the London Gate of the show and suddenly, just yards away from the show ground, you turn left into what feels like the parking of an open-once-a-year-for-the-NGS country house. A friendly lady points you to a good place to pop your car under a tree which will shed pollen and sticky gloop all over it for the next few days, and you drive past kids having tennis lessons on one side and being taught to bowl on the other, before pulling up next to someone else tieing on their steel toe caps and remembering they won’t be allowed into the show ground without their hi-vis.

Half an hour of fiddling about with the trolley to get it usable again, and filling it with my odd collection of essentials, saw me ready to march round to the entrance and into the show. Only I didn’t have my pass yet and I had to go to the Bullring Gate (the entrance by the river) to get hold of this. Here’s a thing about Chelsea Flower Show: you walk a lot. Bon, pass retrieved at last I was inside and now to find the stand where our funeral flowers build would take place. Not difficult to find the stand, but a little bit to get there: you have to get past trucks and loaders, fork lifts, and big normal size rubbish lorries, people cutting stone with huge slicers (noisy - very noisy right up until 7am on Monday,) people pulling and pushing and delivering and taking away and putting up partitions and sign posts and sizal mesh for hiding, people watering and brushing and sweeping and clearing, and me with my now clearly dinky little trolley trying to edge my way through.

Eventually I found the Farewell Flowers Directory team and our empty plinth beginning to fill: first with the birch trestles on which our willow coffin would stand, then the garden bench out of the back of the van Gill and her husband had driven that morning down from Yorkshire. We couldn’t put the bench on the stand until the grass had gone down. The grass had been delivered on a selection of pallets (trip hazard anyone?) and had been popped down next to the tap and was boxed in by trolleys of ferns belonging to our neighbours at Chelsea Wilde Kells Bay Gardens. So we cut up enough grass (glad I brought the hori hori) to go under the bench and round the snuggled ‘war memorial’ made by Gill out of cardboard. Because otherwise where would we put him, we added the wire sculpture of the mourning man who was there to give our installation perspective. Made by Yorkshire artist Susan Nichols our man came with a dog, Alan, who sat companionably on the bench with him until we had time to tell him benches are no place for a dog to sit. Then out came the stepladders and we started filling the coffin with sturdy vases of water so that we could build the structure into which the biggest arrangement would be made ready for adding the foliage the next day. Clubbers, see the chat for very fine, high end, drawing of our mechanics.

As you know I think floristry mechanics do not have to be complicated, and if you think about what you want to achieve there’s always a way to work out how to do it sustainably. Here we had vases of water and willow stakes worked between them to give us a structure to support the tall stems we planned to use in our installation. For extra height we added moss wrapped glass jars which we tied with jute string between four stems of willow to make high teepees which could be added to the mix and then tied with more string to the lower structure for stability. These teepees could hold two or three jars each to give us a versatile structure for floristry.

Having filled the coffin and made our structure, wrapped a few boxes of jars with moss for the next day, and decided on most of the layout, we headed off to our various berths for the night ready for a long day on Saturday. Here I was as ever grateful for the warm welcome of Katie James, my artist friend, who lives in leafy cosiness across the river and further west, in a garden which feels very country after central London. So Friday was an up-by-5am, back-to-supper by 7pm day.

Day two we agreed to meet at 7.30 in the exhibitor’s cafe where they have a bar where you can help yourself to free tea and coffee all day. Well done the RHS fuelling all these exibitors brilliantly - thank you! Goodness I can drink a lot of tea when needs must.

Waiting for The Godalming Flower Company to deliver her van full of foliage we made space. You spend a lot of time during a Chelsea Flower Show build making space. The pallets we’d taken the grass off were put to one side for the recycling rubbish collectors to take away. The buckets of flowers and foliage that we’d brought with us were put to one side. There was fox poo under our prep table which I removed before we all started treading it all over the place: it felt apt that a visiting city fox had poohed by our beginning-to-be-built graveyard. Foxes love a graveyard.

We set out the compost buckets and ping! There was Caroline, pulled up as close as she could get to the nearest door to the Grand Pavillion. Now the trolleys really got to work. She’d brought full sized dustbins full of copper beech, as well as Dutch buckets of hazel, not to mention my favourite, black currant foliage hanging with developing berries. Now we could get going.

Not a branch was put into the arrangement before the leaves being checked for holes or damage - you don’t get a gold medal just shoving material into vases any old how. Each stem had to be perfect. And slowly our arrangement took shape, copper beech for depth of field, hazel because it’s structurally interesting, philadelphus in full flower because it would scent the whole marquee, long arabesques of rose foliage covered in buds.

Before we went home that night we greened up all our arrangements: I kokedama style wrapped small veg plants in moss and made a plantable, edible wreath on a Common Farm Flowers willow base with peas curling round strawberries, pansies with their edible flowers, thyme, kale, dark red pak choi. The greens for the sheaf were tied together, green posies made for an arrangement of small posies that could be given to mourners, and Gill greened up the coffin top she was making to go beside the headstone she’d made from a pattern taken from her own parents’ gravestone. Back to leafy Barnes and I can’t remember supper - I do remember a bath and bed by 9pm.

The actual Chelsea prep had begun the previous Monday, 12th May, when, just two days after our annual village Common Good Plant Sale (an event after which one usually indulges in at least one day off!) I jumped in the car and drove off to Godalming to introduce my fellow Farewell Flowers Directory florists to The Godalming Flower Company so that we could choose ingredients. The highlight of our whole stand was made by the Soft Salmon Saucer peonies grown there, not to mention the whole rows of orlaya grandiflora Caroline brought us.

The team met for breakfast again on Sunday morning. But there was no time to sit about. Soon that van full of flowers was ready for unloading and I found myself standing pronouncing to any passers by, interested or otherwise, ‘LOOK! LOOK AT THESE BRITISH FLOWERS! WHO SAYS WE DON’T GROW ENOUGH FLOWERS IN THIS COUNTRY? THE PERSON WHO DOESN’T ORDER LOCALLY GROWN FLOWERS FOR THEIR EVENT HASN’T DONE THEIR RESEARCH!’ All of which now going nicely viral on Instagram. The BBC, who’d said the day before that they couldn’t find time to include our story as part of the Chelsea Flower Show coverage liked the flowers so much they filmed us marching them in bucket by bucket - and it’s all right, we got plenty of coverage thankyou, my favourite being by Susannah Jowitt writing in the Spectator.

Now the pressure was on: to flower up the contents of the coffin, and check it over for flaws before laying the rest of the grass so that we could put the gravestones in place and finish the flower arrangements that would be put in front of each grave. Tick tock tick tock. We had to finish and then clear up too because you can’t expect the judges to appear on Monday morning and have to fight their way through heaps of finished-with pallets on which the grass had been delivered, through heaps of buckets which Caroline would collect when she delivered a refresh for the exhibit mid week, through my trolley which had nearly been lost forever that afternoon when a group working for the UBS garden next door decided it was free to a good home and half-inched it for their own purposes causing me, when I found them cheerfully using it to transport heavy tubs of compost around, to point accusingly and shout, ‘THAT’S MY TROLLEY! GIVE ME BACK MY TROLLEY!’ at them so loudly I felt obliged to apologise after I’d taken it back. So we worked to a timetable: finish the coffin by 2pm. Get the grass down and gravestones in place and put the arrangements by each by 4pm. That gave us two hours to clear up and get most of our stuff out of the way. Eventually I trundled back to my car, still happily parked close by, and took the trolley apart again and rammed it and twenty of my buckets into it any old how. Then I took my luggage in to the judges’ office because it was time to change for the Judges’ dinner.

Time to clear up before the Judges’ dinner

Rachel de Thame - you’ve no idea how hard the presenters work over Chelsea week and yet she still found time to come and sit on our stand and be photographed AND mention us on the telly box as one of her favourite exhibits.

Now before you all point furiously and say how can you be both judge and judged let me explain. I am an RHS judge, but I know a conflict of interest and so do they when we see one. I was down to judge Chelsea in Bloom on Tuesday, well away from the marquee and our own exhibit. Phew! The Judges’ dinner always fun because people are happy tired having finished any exhibiting they’re involved in, and looking forward to seeing more of the show the next day. I had seen nothing yet other than one side of Jo Thompson’s garden as I marched back and forth each day. Even if I’d had time to stand and stare some exhibits were still very much wrapped up: viz Monty Don’s garden surrounded in a wall of hessian sacking until the very last minute - I think to keep the sun off it - not a bad idea. Dressed in a clean shirt but not having found anywhere to be able to change into cream trousers so still in muddy jeans I plomped myself down in the bar and tucked into two large glasses of white wine in succession and then, mildly pissed and really very hungry, massively fangirled Fergus Garrett when I was introduced to him. Poor man he stood looking at me like a rabbit caught in the headlights. I was tired, emotional, and really needed to go home.

Sunday night and Monday night I got a place in the Holiday Inn off Kensington High St (Thankyou RHS,) with lots of other judges so after dinner we all stuffed ourselves into a black cab with our luggage and headed back to sleep.

Sleep? By now four glasses of wine, a very good dinner, wired as a transistor radio, pheet phizzing as they only can after two twelve hour days in steel toe capped boots, no, I didn’t sleep much. Instead I gave up trying at 5.30am on Press Day (we are now Monday 19th May,) and headed out into the sunshine in my good Chelsea Flower Show Press Day striped Jasper Conran dress - now into it’s fourth summer I think I’m down to about £7 per wear, so very much worth the initial, slightly eye-watering investment.

In my best bib and tucker for Press Day

No steel toe caps now, no hi-vis jackets. Now we swished into the show - but still, note 6am. Why so early? Why snips in the posh pocket? Because no self-respecting exhibit will win gold unless it’s had a going over before the judges come round at 7. Yes, a couple of stems of orlaya needed snipping out. Yes, a spritz does give an exhibit a dewy fresh look. Yes, it was worth the early arrival. And yes, then it was time to walk round and look at the show leaving the judges working the Grand Pavillion to get on with their jobs. Highlights? Jo Thompson’s lush, rosy planting, Jonathan Sheppard’s cosmos stand. Sweet potting shed by florists Pinstripes and Peonies, beautiful floristry by Sarah Hinchliffe of North and Flower and the Ginkgo biloba cushion in the Boodles Raindance Garden. Who needs a tree when you can have a cushion I say? Other cushions I admired were copper beech rounds in both

Jo Thompson

and Monty Don’s gardens.

This Press Day was less mooching the busier the show got. Once I was sure the judges had finished with us I went back to help encourage celebrities to come and look at our stand. I realise if you get the celebrities to come then the public will follow them. Accordingly I literally grabbed Joanna Lumley by the hand and dragged her over to look at what we’d done. The single nicest lady in the land she didn’t seem to mind a bit and was perfectly happy to play along. Ditto Kirsty Alsopp and the king of gardeners Alan Titchmarsh (not grabbed and pulled by me but friendlily agreed to come and say hello.) Jo Brand the only person, perhaps by now I was a little over the top with my enthusiasm, not actually grinning ear to ear when asked to come and have a look, though she did, and thank you for that Ms Brand. Press Day always passes by as a blurr: Fabrizio turned up in his good Chelsea Flower Show Press Day suit and bought me a large glass of pink wine which went straight to my head. Another highlight dear Arthur Parkinson who I’ve only met to talk to since coming over to Substack suddenly appeared covered in butterflies and how lovely to meet him in real life.

At 3pm ish we all get chucked out because the royal family make a state visit. I went back to the Kensington High Street and bought pants, and lay prostrate for an hour trying to nap before going back for the charity gala evening for some very high end people watching. Back at the show ground the charity gala guests were kettled in their smart clothes, shuffling in their uncomfortable party shoes not good for standing still in, with a brass jazz band to stop them revolting in the yard between the London Gate and the entrance to the show, while the King and Queen finished talking to individual exhibitors. The guests seemed to be a heady blend of City of London finance types and the occasional person really interested in the show. Allowed in at last I grabbed a glass of fizz on my way to our stand and then stood and chatted to people who dropped by to admire, or say hello - hello those real life friends who did! - the best line I heard that evening from one of two hearty chaps marching past in shiny black shoes and navy blue suits, eyes only on the futures rather than the plants, their well fed embonpoints leading, a line so good I made a note:

‘If he does that it’s going to have to come out of his fucking back end,’ roared the fellow, reaching for another glass. I’m glad I never worked in finance - although to be fair the following day, one coming along with our team judging Chelsea in Bloom snorted joyfully at us as we talked of plants being turgid and flaccid, so I guess it takes all sorts.

Ok so it’s not over yet. You ready for more? The gala evening was rounded up by Austin Design Works (yes, I do call people by their instagram handle,) and I nipping over to the Boodles stand where they indulged us and let us try on enormous diamonds. Really, the kindest, friendliest, most understanding of two very tired ladies who’d had a couple of glasses of fizz each just enjoying the moment. Of course there are plenty of security to make sure we wouldn’t nick any big rocks, but goodness they were kind. I really was never going to buy that ring but how I did love to try it on.

Then back to the Holiday Inn for another night too wired to sleep.

Tuesday 20th May dawned bright and sunny again - perfect weather for Chelsea - dry, not too hot, London at her most sparkling and enticing, like the opening scene of a film featuring Hugh Grant as a grizzled fop and some elegant American woman proving herself feistier than she’d thought she could be. This time I headed for Sloane Square to meet the team with whom I’d judge half the Chelsea in Bloom installations.

And while I waited the Farewell Flowers team rang from inside the show - we’d won a gold medal! I rang my mother. We both cried. I wished my grandmother was still alive. Tant pis. Messaging, messaging, ping ping ping went the phone but look! The Chelsea in Bloom team are here and onwards we pushed.

Chelsea in Bloom is a brilliant idea: shops, hotels, restaurants and other businesses throughout the Cadogan Estates in a great swathe from Knightsbridge down to the King’s Road and all along right until World’s End deck themselves out in flowers for Chelsea Flower Show week. And the effort! Strict rules (eg disqualification for use of floral foam) applied as well as strict RHS judging criteria. We were two RHS judges, Sarah Hills Ingyon and me, judging too the hardest working content creator I’ve ever met, Josieldn accompanied by her husband Charlie Irons, and we were moderated by the indefatigable and incredibly good humoured under pressure Caroline of Cadogan Estates. Yes, we spent five hours bustling from Sloane Square to World’s End judging something like sixty installations, all according to strict RHS rules. Meanwhile another team judged the other sixty entered in the competition. Chelsea in Bloom is WELL worth a visit, never mind the flower show. And it’s free to all comers. Imaginitive, fun, often with a seat or, as in the case of the Ivy, a bale of straw for you to sit on, sometimes handing out goodies as Me+em were handing out bunches of flowers to people queueing down the street for them. The atmosphere is pure fun in a world where we are allowed to escape bad news for an hour or so and just plain enjoy ourselves. Twelve thousand steps later and we finally made it to lunch in Pavillion Road where you would have thought we were all thoroughly exhausted and would just give in to whoever said firmly enough that a particular installation should win the overall prize. But NO! A lively discussion took an hour to pick the best overall, which was created by Scarlet and Violet Lace in Nature design in front of Jessica McCormack’s diamonds.

And so at last I was done. Still phizzing from the gold medal win I was rescued from the striped seat outside Ralph Lauren in Sloane Square where Katie James and my colleague and right hand woman Nicola found me slumped over my ping ping pinging phone. They put me in a cab and took me to the Chelsea Arts Club where phones are not allowed - and anyway mine had run out of juice. There we sat in that oasis garden and talked to Clare Francis about sailing holidays in Turkey and just breathed for a while.

The next morning I woke to rain clattering onto dry leaves in leafy Barnes. Habit has me waking early, but sometimes one is forced to slow down. I couldn’t find the keys to my car, still tucked under its tree in Burton Court. I rang the hotel I’d stayed at: no sign. I watsapped my Farewell Flowers colleagues who could look under the funeral flowers stand: no sign. I have learned in life not to panic, so instead I made a coffee and rang home to see if Fabrizio had the spare car keys. He was off to do the school run. Kid 1 had an A level to do, he’d ring me back in a minute. And the home domesticity was more reassuring than the worry about losing the keys. I walked down Katie’s garden photographing a relieved rain loving robin resting on the bench. And when I went in again I looked through the luggage one more time and there were the keys. And breathe.

Driving home in a pollen fuzzed car, my trolley rattling in the back, rain gently washing away the insects on my windscreen I stopped twice for espressos. Bone tired. Exhilarated. Loving the rain. Wanting home. Discombobulated. In that gap between focusing on now now now and readjusting to a life and a job with short, medium and long term objectives which can be tackled in the kind of rhythmic way a few days at Chelsea Flower Show does not allow. The relief of getting home to a place where there’s time to write. The necessity of downloading the few days in a scribble into the journal and then with hopefully more sense here. Happy to have won the medal. Still enjoying the compliment of having been asked to contribute both to the Farewell Flowers install and as a Judge for Chelsea in Bloom.

Now, surrounded by seedlings needing planting out, plants from our Common Good Plant sale only two weeks ago needing planting out, Teacake snoring under the table, the birds doing their wonderful deafening shouting, cool air, a touch of rain... It was great to do Chelsea. Thrilling. And thank God for quiet home.

GOLD!