The Power Of Play

When you run a flower business, the actual hands-on time of creating with flowers can be limited. Other tasks get in the way—clearing the inbox, cleaning the buckets, sowing the seeds, doing the socials. The list feels endless.

So, I try to carve out a couple of times a week to just have a play. I don’t buy in anything special and try not to cut anything fresh from the garden. My aim is to use up the leftover stems in the studio—a way to break up an afternoon of cleaning and resetting the space before I start to fill it with fresh blooms for the next guest.

Doing this has helped me keep developing my style. It forces me to explore new colour combinations, using the flowers that nobody else was drawn to, creating something in the moment.

It also gives me the chance to experiment with new mechanics (the things we use in sustainable floristry to help support our designs). I’m always amazed at what you can do with an old bit of chicken wire and some wet moss.

I recently found myself with a bucket full of bright yellow forsythia in full bloom, destined for the compost heap if I didn’t do something with it soon. Now, I’m a big fan of yellow flowers, but every time I tried to use it in an arrangement or mix it with other colours, it just screamed the loudest and pulled attention. I could never quite get it to work. The only other thing I had on hand that day were some bright yellow daffodils, so that’s what I went with. Yellow on yellow. My vision was a bright explosion of colour to welcome in spring. You can be the judge of whether I achieved that.

The other thing that working this way gives us is time to experiment. I photographed the arrangement as I built it, stem by stem—handy for a quick stop-motion reel for Instagram later, but also a good way to see how it looks on camera. Looking back at the images, I think the daffodils may have been an unnecessary addition, but having been in a bit of a creative slump, the exercise gave me a sense of achievement. Being able to make something from very little.

So whether you’re a florist, a flower enthusiast, or just someone looking for a creative outlet, remember that flowers are a great tool for design. And as I always say, they’re already beautiful—your only job is to arrange them in a way that highlights that.