WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Gardeners want to grow flowers but I want to arrange them. Such is my pre-Christmas slogan but it also has deeper roots. For years I have enjoyed cutting flowers from the garden and stuffing them into whatever vase I can find. The results have sometimes been handsome and I have a feeling, familiar to gardeners, that if I studied flower arranging I might be rather good. Recently I studied the displays in the flower arrangers’ tent at Chelsea Flower Show but was left cold by what I saw. They were in the styles I hate most: stiff, thin, strongly wired and composed from rarefied florists’ flowers. I wanted to dump the lot of them.
What I need is a personal flower trainer with roots in English flower gardening and a sense of humour. In time for Christmas I have found one: the flower arranger who is run off her feet with parties for top businesses, hotels, friends and memorial services.
I first came across Kitty Arden when she was working on the flowers for Princess Beatrice’s 18th birthday party at Windsor Castle. I knew she was what I needed when we discussed that self-appointed queen of debutante taste in the 1950s, Constance Spry. I have Spry’s books on the subject and even visited her London shop. I wondered, reading closely, how much arranging the great lady really did herself. Kitty believed she still had two white vases, wedding presents to her mother from a Constance Spry catalogue. We agreed to meet and compete, each using one of the vases and working with flowers which Kitty would choose and have on site.
Even in a recession, it is not every day that an Oxford tutor takes a tutorial from the lady who designed the flowers for Paul McCartney’s wedding to Heather Mills. Obliquely I gleaned a few details about that riveting occasion. We discussed my favourite autumn flowers, the dahlia and the chrysanthemum, and Kitty pleased me by observing that nowadays arrangers queue to buy dahlias at the flower markets in London, whereas nobody wanted to use them 15 years ago. As for chrysanths, she thinks they are “very 1960s”. I wondered why, so she told me that Sir Paul and Heather had gone away from their reception in a boat whose roof she had covered totally with white chrysanths. It looked like Sir Paul’s Beatles era, she told me, and then recounted how the boat landed on the far bank and Heather “stumped uphill into a helicopter”. The image will float on to next autumn’s chrysanths in my garden.
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| Robin Lane Fox shows off his flower-arranging efforts |
After a cup of coffee, the Constance Spry vases appeared from the attic of Kitty’s workplace. Whatever were our mothers up to in the 1950s? The vases were 9 ins high by 20 ins wide, big handles included, and were made in off-white of something solid enough to buckle a side-table. I would have failed to make more than two bits of laurestinus stand steady in them if Kitty had not generously prepared mine with the essential Oasis foam-holder. I would never have put such a big block of it into the vase, even above the level of the rim. My first lesson is to be much more generous with Oasis and use it to bring the level of an arrangement up to a vases’s upper edge.
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| Kitty Arden with her flower arrangement |
I asked Kitty for some more tricks. She was wary, as befits an expert who works on the ultimate displays, the flowers for the Christian Dior fashion shows in Paris. She insists that the most important two tips are to prepare flowers properly by soaking the stems in big jugs of water for a full day after buying them from a market. She never bothers with cut-flower food or preservatives. Above all, she matches the scale of vase and arrangement to the position in which it has to stand. Ill-matched size is one of the most frequent failings of arrangements she sees in private homes.
Will she use floral tape, criss-crossed across a vase’s open neck? She uses it only occasionally for heavy arrangements that might over-balance from the essential blocks of Oasis. At Christmas she happily uses silver and gold Oasis Floral Spray even on glaucous eucalyptus leaves. In general she limits colours in an arrangement, avoiding yellow and pink together unless a nearby painting contains them and can be picked up. Yellow, blue and white or pink, red and purple are mainstays. I suggested red and white, which I much like in gardens. “You cannot,” she retorted. “They are blood and bandages.”
We set to work, promising not to look at each other’s masterpieces. Kitty had chosen a red theme, teaching me that limited colour in adjoining shades has more impact, especially if used with plenty of shiny green leaves. I thought of my Magnolia Grandiflora at home, which badly needs stripping, and she quivered to get her hands on it as its leaves are scarce in the trade. I decided to start by shaping the Constance Spry monstrosities with a firm framework of red amaryllis, the heavy Hippeastrums. Here the problems began.
I defy you to poke the thick, soft stem of an amaryllis into Oasis without crushing it so that it collapses. After I had cross-ploughed the Oasis, Kitty came just this once to the rescue, showing me how to break short bits of stem off camellia branches and make props to hold the heavy amaryllis up. I then soared away, building up with dark red spray Rose Tomango, plenty of camellia greenery and airy, hairy sprays of something the marketeers call Waxy Bush. The sidelines started to expand prettily but I needed a heavy centre. As a gardener I refuse to use anything sprayed gold, so I fell back on obedient red roses of the Grand Prix variety and made a passable sort of lovers’ bouquet with nobody to send it to.
Not bad, I told myself. I even remembered a chilling recent FT column by Luke Johnson telling us that entrepreneurs who lose their jobs should not moan but should set up as window cleaners. I have a fall-back now. I will become a flower arranger for the next time Heather Mills has a dance.
I then looked sideways at Kitty’s vase. She had packed in so much more so neatly and tightly and when I told her she needed one more bit of gold in the upper right she simply said “No”. She was polite about my effort, especially the see-through style at the lower stem level, but basically it was mean and wispy. I think it has male sweep and scale, whereas hers is crammed in feminine close-up. The truth is that I could never have done what she did using twice my range of stems. For the moment it is back to my career in ancient Greek history.
Kitty Arden arranges flowers and offers lessons for groups of up to 10. Tel: +44 (0)20-7351 3331 or kitty@kittyarden.com
