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.’
Georgie wants us to talk about death, not scurry past it. ‘My brother died in the same year as five of my friends. I was pregnant with my daughter, so I feel I didn’t really deal with their deaths. When my friend’s daughter died a couple of years ago, we gathered around my table, creating flower arrangements for her coffin, talking about her as we did so, listening to music that she loved, going over the memories that would be polished into funeral speeches. That day was one of the greatest privileges of my life – being involved helped me remember all those other people who I’ve loved and have died. That sense of storytelling is such a simple but powerful way to grieve.’
There is a willow casket filled with flowers you’d see in British hedgerows, held by birch branches
‘So much about funerals has become a production line,’ says Gill Hodgson, who started the Farewell Flowers Directory a year ago. ‘Funerals are just part of the death admin, simply going along with traditions of wearing black, buttoning up, getting it over and done with.’ She wants to change that. The company has brought together British florists who offer people planning funerals more than just catalogue flowers.
Part of the reason for her focus on flowers is that Gill worries that we’re losing a connection to death, a sense that it’s natural and inevitable. ‘Funeral directors are usually wonderful, sympathetic people, but too often they just want to shepherd a shell-shocked grieving person through the process as painlessly as possible. This can inadvertently take away from the element of choice, of remembering the uniqueness of the person at the heart of a funeral. We want to give that choice back, restore the feeling that death is natural, that it is a moment to pay homage to that life.’
So are we finally losing our squeamishness about death, our need to cover it up with the anonymity of process? In a recent Co-op survey, 68 per cent of those polled thought that funerals should be a celebration of a person’s life, with tears, music and laughter – not confined to gloom and solemnity.
In a strange way, grief can be joyful. Many of us will recognise Georgie’s story about the death of her friend’s daughter. When done well, grief means talking about a person, what they meant to us, why we loved them. Others have noticed this desire for something more than Victorian stiffness. Poppy’s Funerals in Tooting offers more colourful, sometimes bonkers send-offs. It has organised horses wearing gold unicorn horns, leopardskin hearses, a stuffed pet parrot, a mushroom-shaped coffin, and others made of cardboard, scrawled over with loving messages from those left behind.
‘It’s not about the spectacular,’ says Poppy Mardall, a trained art historian who left Christie’s to bring art and meaning to the monochrome world of death. ‘It’s about giving families the opportunity to have a funeral that is meaningful to them. It’s about having that conversation.’ Which is what the display at the Chelsea Flower Show is about too. We all eventually wilt and die. Death is inevitable and, sometimes, it can also be joyful.
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