Meet the young star of the Chelsea Flower Show
Lucy Vail, 31, is transforming the floral display scene with her theatrical installations and locally grown blooms
Visitors to this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show will be treated to a truly immersive sensory experience when they pass through the main gate archway, moving beneath a sea of foxgloves, sweet peas, roses, stocks and lace flowers, with a carpet of ranunculus beneath. The spectacular display is the work of the 31-year-old Lucy Vail, who hopes that visitors will feel “completely encompassed by beauty”. And all this extravagant beauty has been grown in the UK, with many of the 8,000 stems on show from Vail’s family farm, Floriston in Suffolk.
Vail, who last year became the youngest florist to be invited to create the floral archway at the show’s Bull Ring Gate entrance, is celebrated for her oversized arrangements and botanical wonderland visions. She trained in Florence with one of the world’s best florists, Tuscany Flowers, whose portfolio includes the flowers for George Clooney and Kim Kardashian’s weddings. But it is Floriston, the two-acre family garden — tended first by Vail’s passionate garden-designer granny Anne and then by her parents, Dominic and Amanda — where she finds her inspiration. “Living at Floriston, being constantly surrounded by the colour and scent, has always made me think beyond a vase of flowers on a table. I look at a whole space.”
Vail’s commitment to using only British-grown flowers was cemented during the pandemic. “I had been living in London but I came back to visit Mum and Dad, and I saw the insane colours of the incredible dahlias in the garden — literally double the size of my face. I realised how much beauty was growing right in front of us.”
They family hatched a plan to start a flower farm on the 1.5 acres surrounding Floriston, including a walled garden that had once been used by the 17th-century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper to grow herbs and lavender. “So we knew we had good soil,” Amanda says. “We used the garden as a template to see what jewels we could grow for Lucy to use in her arrangements.”
In just two years former photographer Amanda has become “one of the best growers in the business”, Vail says. “Mum has become a complete nerd, growing varieties of tulips, garden roses and dahlias you can’t get anywhere else.” Vail also uses suppliers such as Marlston Farmgirl in Berkshire, another flower farm established in the pandemic, and Stokesay in Shropshire. “I always look for flowers with a mixed tone, never one straight colour, with a bit of a wonkiness to the stem, and heady with scent.”
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The garden and flower farm at Floriston is open to the public only a few times a year: “We want it to feel special, like a secret garden,” Vail explains. The family’s ambition is that Floriston will create a legacy, championing the variety, quality and ethereal beauty of British flowers. “People want to see flowers dance out of the vase and across the table, not to be bunched up tightly,” Vail says. “It’s that ‘wow’ reaction that keeps me going.”
lucyvailfloristry.com, rhs.org.uk, floristonflowerfarm.com