Susannah Jowitt has narrated this article for you to listen to.
It’s a matter of life and death at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. No murders are planned as far as we know, but there will be gravestones and even a coffin. This is to be a celebration of death.
The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Flower Show will include funeral flowers in the Grand Pavilion for the first time since it moved to Chelsea in 1913. The display is being put together by the Farewell FlowersDirectory and, I’m told, there will be no tightly wired whorls of white carnations spelling out ‘LOVE YOU MUM’.
Instead, passers-by will be left thinking of country churchyards, wild grasses and meadow flowers; species like campions, cornflowers and cow parsley. The display includes a willow casket filled with the kinds of flowers you’d see in British hedgerows, held by upturned birch branches. Everything on the stand will decay naturally: no floral foam, no plastic or imported flowers taped into dishes and wired together, no micro-plastics to go into landfill. Looped along a twine rope will be tags printed with the words: ‘I’d like my funeral to be…’
Many of those involved have had to answer that question for family members. Georgie Newbery, a flower farmer from Somerset, is one of those building the display. She lost her brother to brain cancer 15 years ago. ‘For his funeral, we all brought flowers from our own gardens,’ she says. ‘He is buried in a woodland glade outside Glasgow with flowers from our mother’s garden, his own, mine and his mother-in-law’s planted above him.
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