If there’s one thing that the last year has taught me, it’s that life is precious and fleeting. The things we used to take for granted, and which seemed reassuringly permanent have proved to be anything but. So I’ve decided to stop worrying about the things I can’t control, accept what I can, and be grateful for what I have.
Over the last 6 months, life for me and my husband has been both worrying and upsetting, culminating in the death a family member, and a longstanding friend. For all of us, it’s been a traumatic year that has changed our lives dramatically; making us question whether the things we thought were important actually were.
I do flowers. It’s what I’ve done for 32 years, and what I hope to do until I retire, because I love what I do. For anyone who doesn’t work in the world of flowers, it’s hard for them to understand that I work in an industry based entirely on emotion. It’s a strange concept to grasp, but in the simplest terms, flowers make people happy.
Of course florists have known for years that flowers are life enhancing, we’ve already got that sussed! Their symbolic language has been recognised for centuries, where almost every sentiment imaginable can be expressed with flowers. So at a time when many of us are reevaluating how we live our lives, and how what we do impacts on others; I’m dismayed that the world I love so much is now in the firing line for not being WOKE enough!
Before I go any further, I should make one thing clear; like Miriam Margoyles on the Graham Norton show - I don’t do political correctness, and I certainly don’t do WOKE. I’m far too old and comfortable in my own skin to tiptoe around anyone else’s sensibilities; because as a gay, white florist, no-one’s EVER bothered to tiptoe around mine! From being the school poof in rural Cornwall, to experiencing black homophobia in London, I’ve heard it all - but I’m still here.
The irony of the entire business of flowers being called out for not being “diverse” enough hasn’t escaped me. We aren’t talking scaffolding or heavy industry, we’re talking flowers and an industry based on nature, which brings joy to millions. How many sectors can actually claim that?
If you are going to “call out” the industry as a whole, then study the industry as a whole before making sweeping statements. Ask the people in it why they’re in it, how they got into it, how it works and how it’s changed.
This is how it works, and this is how it’s changed. The wholesale supply of flowers is dominated by men, the business of floristry is dominated by women. Complaints that there are too many men in the flower markets don’t take into consideration the physicality of the job, or the anti social hours. Would you rather spend your working life flowering weddings and events, or lifting and shifting from 2am to 10am in an artificially chilled wholesale market?
The business of flowers that I came into in 1989 bears absolutely no resemblance to what exists today. Instagram and Pinterest hadn’t made floristry a fashionable or enviable career choice. Floristry was something that either 16 year old girls did before they got married, because they were too common to do anything else; or bored housewives went back to after their children had grown up.
My first boss in Plymouth was a hard task master, but a brilliant business woman, which is why she drove around in a Rolls Royce. A world away from the type of shops I later worked in in London, she never tried to push the boundaries, and only sold what what she knew would sell.
I once made the mistake of asking why we couldn’t have some more unusual flowers in the shop. Her reply was swift and withering. “Plymothians are too thick to appreciate anything else”.
I made my escape and moved to London in 1994, thinking the streets would be strewn with rose petals…..they weren’t. My provincial training hadn’t prepared me for a work life filled with chaos in a Notting Hill flower shop. The owner loved referring to all the staff as “waifs and strays”; and the manageress regularly screamed at us, “you’re all a bunch of fucking wankers”, but not when Damon Albarn came in and dropped £50 notes all over the floor.
Image by Naomi Kenton
Fast forward 25 years, and If you work in retail floristry the business is still largely staffed by women, because the pay is crap. If you’re a man and you have a family and a mortgage, you aren’t going to work in a flower shop, unless you own it. I spent 15 years in retail floristry, and all the male florists I worked with were gay. If they’d had family responsibilities, they couldn’t have survived.
Social media has changed floristry completely, for better and worse. It has inspired us to become creative in ways we could never have imagined. We’ve made new connections and friendships, we’ve pushed the boundaries of design more than ever before; and the concept that you only buy flowers for births, marriages or deaths is a distant memory. The down side is that it’s made floristry a fashionable career, and fashionable careers often rely on smoke and mirrors; or as I like to call it FLORAL WANK.
It’s a term I came up with years ago, after a very high profile florist exclaimed on their website that they “sometimes work themselves into a creational vortex”. A bit Dr Who I know, but many others have followed in those wanky footsteps, but as Alex Polizzi would say “it’s all bollocks darling”.
My entry into floristry was very old school. I went to college and got a formal qualification. It served me well, and kick started the career I had in London, but hardly anyone I’ve ever worked with did the same. In London it seemed to be more of a hindrance than a help.
In the 90’s, the rise of glamorous and enticing flower schools in the Capital spawned an industry in itself, which continues to flourish today. Many of their students have gone on to have very successful careers, but many fell by the wayside with the realisation that they were never going to earn as much in a flower shop as they did in an investment bank.
Those with any nouse knew that for a lot of the time, floristry is a bloody hard slog.
Floristry courses don’t tell you that there’ll days when you wonder why the hell you chose to be a florist. They don’t prepare you for getting up at 4am to do office contracts on Monday mornings, when it’s pissing with rain, and you’re having to empty vases full of stinking water that have been festering in overheated offices for a week. They don’t tell you that there’ll be days when you’re trying to load your van at market, and there’s a queue for the lifts because 2 out of 3 are out of order, and none of the ticket machines in the car park are working. They don’t prepare you for the day when the parchment coloured roses that you’ve promised faithfully for that fashion shoot don’t turn up, and all your wholesaler says is, “sorry love, I couldn’t get them”.
Talking of the market, I couldn’t care less about how rude/vulgar/sexist/whatever the language is. Like a certain Chinese restaurant in Soho which is famed for the rudeness of its staff, and thrives because of it; market banter is part of the fabric of this rich floral tapestry. I roared when a 70 something nun didn’t flinch when asked if the intensity of her orgasms decreased with age. Quick as a flash she came back with, “Well I wouldn’t know about that, but my Yorkshire puddings aren’t what they used to be.” Sister Mary was wise. Twenty somethings, be more like sister Mary.
The day to day realities of being a florist are anything but glamorous, but if you choose to make it your career, I promise you that you’ll look back at it with pride. In all your dealings, be kind, be fair, be gracious, be rude, laugh a lot, swear a lot and don’t make mountains out of non existent molehills.
Just remember, you can do anything you set your mind to, but it takes action, perseverance, and facing your fears - Benjamin Disraeli.
