A day in the life of this flower grower and designer that I will never forget!
What a thrill it was to get a 'phone call asking me to take on a commission to design and create a flower arrangement at Eton College for the Flower Festival being held to celebrate the College Chapel restoration. Each house at the College was represented and I was to base my design on the lives of Horatio Chapple and Sir John Gurdon from Cotton Hall House.
Horatio Chapple was the inspiration behind Horatio's Garden at Odstock Hospital in Salisbury, Horatio volunteered at the Spinal Unit and created a questionnaire to discover what the patients needed and what an amazing space has been created with Cleve West's stunning garden design! When visiting a friend at Odstock, who had tragically broken her back, we used to sit in the car park to have our picnic with her little terrier chasing anything he could find, what a difference it is now to have new life emerging in the garden during the seasons. So therapeutic for patients to escape the ward and be in the fresh air, giving them time and space to come to terms with their injuries, surrounded by the beauty of the garden (rather than the barren tarmac of the car park!!)
How to interpret the incredible achievements of Sir John Gurdon, a Nobel prize winner
in medicine or physiology for
his pioneering work on cloning? I puzzled over this for some while - cloning and DNA - what did I know about them? Thank goodness for the internet! My design evolved - I used a large piece of oak for the base, a symbol of strength and courage, dried allium heads and the wire which flows up to the top linking the base to the flowers (this exploded in my hand when I was about to unwind it and formed a wonderful shape in the mock-up, the only challenge then was to recreate this in the Chapel!)
and this is how it evolved- using a stand that my lovely Mum had had made 30 years before (which was so special for me, as she would have loved to think it was being used here at Eton) the base in place, the foliage in, my structure created and then wonderful British flowers, most of which were grown here on the Plot to finish the design
what a fabulous day I had, doing something I love, 'serenaded' by a wonderful choir, who were rehearsing for the Thursday evening Service and organ music that pulsed through the Chapel when one of the students was having a lesson. It was an emotional experience, representing two talented and inspirational people in this most beautiful Chapel at Eton College.
‘My design, inspired by Sir John Gurdon and Horatio Chapple, grows upwards from the oak base, symbolising strength and courage; scattered stones representing walls built from broken pieces; the tangle of wire from which emerges the complicated processes of nuclear cloning.
The alliums sitting in the wire link Horatio’s Garden and Sir John Gurdon; the dried allium heads conjuring up an image of the structure of part of a DNA double helix and the fresh alliums that were a striking element of Horatio’s Garden on my first visit. The wire winds upwards linking two inventive minds:– both culminating in beauty and hope. If you look closely there may just be a frog there somewhere!’
