Welcome to the
GARDEN TO VASE WORKSHOPS
Our popular garden-to-vase workshops take place in spring, summer and autumn, celebrating a particular moment in the year.
Explore the ways in which seasonal, locally-grown and foraged materials can become a holistic part of your creative practice.
AESME SCHOOL
OF FLOWERS
NATURALISTIC FLORAL DESIGN
An immersive two week course dedicated to the art of arranging seasonal flowers in a naturalistic way.
Master the essential techniques of making arrangements and hone your advanced design skills in colour, shape and texture.
ETHEREAL EVENT FLOWERS
Over three days we lift the veil on designing enchanting arrangements and installations for weddings and events.
For beginners and up, in this intensive course you will learn sustainable and foam-free techniques for creating ethereal floral designs.
Based in Shepherd’s Bush, London the AESME SCHOOL OF FLOWERS specialises in naturalistic floral design.
Strictly seasonal and taught with a gardener's sensibility, our courses are imbued with a practical knowledge of horticulture and a passion for plants. If you are taking the first steps on your journey arranging flowers, or you’ve reached a crossroads, we can provide a path to learning about them differently.
"inspiring, empowering and beautiful"
We are the only flower school in London exclusively using produce harvested from our own garden. Learn to design in rhythm with the seasons and in tune with the natural life cycle of your materials.
A love of garden flowers and naturalistic garden design sowed the seeds for our studio philosophy and unique school curriculum. Intelligently planted and maintained, in naturalistic gardens Nature is allowed to show her face rather than being completely tamed. We translate this ethos into our craft. While each arrangement is carefully planned and edited, the arranger is gently encouraged to experiment, to go a little wild around the edges. In both the garden and the vase, it’s in the unexpected entanglements where the magic creeps in.
Study with the AESME SCHOOL OF FLOWERS and discover
☞ The unique qualities and characteristics of an extensive range of plants from herbaceous perennials, shrubs and vines to flowering bulbs, fruits, vegetables, wildflowers and weeds
☞ The importance of careful cutting, conditioning and editing
☞ How to create ‘recipes’ for arrangements from organic, wild and garden-grown materials
☞ Sustainable floristry techniques including twine-tied bouquets, kenzans, chicken wire and structural natural materials in small and large scale designs
☞ The symbiotic and historical relationship between naturalistic garden and floral design and the work and writings of influential figures including gardener William Robinson and floral decorator Constance Spry
☞ How to experiment playfully and effectively with the fundamental elements of design
☞ Where to find inspiration for your designs in gardens and the wider landscape
All our courses are taught at the studio in West London, a converted Victorian railway arch just north of Shepherd’s Bush Market. Despite their cosmopolitan location, through the flowers our lessons are firmly rooted in the garden, connecting students directly to the weather and the season outside. A tranquil oasis amongst the noise of the city, visitors are surrounded by an extraordinary array of materials, harvested weekly from the garden. Everything is returned to the garden for composting, nourishing the soil for future flowers.
We welcome flower arrangers from around the world - professional, amateur and aspiring. Our courses are for enthusiastic beginners, those trained in another style or exploring a transition from another background entirely. Employees and owners of flower shops and studios, wedding designers, flower farmers, florists and gardeners. Previous students have included cooks and artists, lawyers and doctors, photographers, scientists and psychologists, and have gone on to make arrangements in hotels and restaurants, to photograph or paint flowers, to study garden design or set up their own flower studios.
Many are home arrangers for whom time with flowers is an essential personal practice. This was (and remains) the case for our founder Ally Lister, whose love of flower arranging at home led to the creation of AESME STUDIO in 2015 with her sister Jess. For over a decade the studio has designed arrangements for hundreds of events and creative projects in London, across the UK and abroad.
After gardening, making a flower arrangement is perhaps the closest many of us will come to a tactile, intimate experience of the natural world.
There is so much more to an arrangement of flowers than meets the eye. In our school, with Nature quite literally at our fingertips, horticulture is embedded in every lesson. Our teaching draws on the learned experiences of nurturing and curating a special collection of plants for arranging.
We encourage students to be curious about their materials, to dig a little deeper. Where did this plant originate from? In what conditions does it grow? Which insects does it sustain? Is it edible? Medicinal? A beautiful botanical world is waiting to be discovered.
The Lister sisters photographed by Kristin Perers. Jess and Ally founded AESME STUDIO in 2015.
AESME was born out of a desire to share a nature-led way of arranging flowers with others.
Flower arrangement is an ancient art form, a human practice woven into our very existence on this earth. In a rapidly modernising world people have become disengaged with where flowers come from, how they are grown, harvested, which season they belong to. In many ways we have lost the very reason for arranging them - as a bridge to the natural world. This is prevalent in all aspects of floriculture in large scale production of flowers throughout the entire education system and across the events industry.
For the past decade our studio has striven to distance itself from a wider floral culture at odds with nature, seeking new ways of practising the arrangement of flowers. Our aim through the AESME SCHOOL OF FLOWERS is to offer an educational alternative for those looking to do the same. We have created a School that offers much more than simply an education in floristry. Infinite care is taken, from the selection of seasonal ingredients to the colour palettes and recipes, the music playing, the sequence, pace and flow of each session, right down to the ceramic vessels we’ve designed for every shape and size of arrangement.
We believe that learning about flowers and plants has the power to affect momentous change in our lives. How we think about the world around us, what we notice, the way we eat, how we shop and consume, how we garden, decorate and dispose of things, how we feel about ourselves and others and the world at large, how we deal with stress and perhaps even how we reconcile mortality.
This is what AESME stands for.
artistry
The artistic composition of flowers is a highly skilled craft involving trained handwork and precision, study of the natural world and the constant handling and editing of plant material over many years to become fluent. This blend of technique, design theory, imagination and individual instinct through the medium of flower arrangement makes it a uniquely rewarding creative practice.
ecology
Working in a naturalistic way with an emphasis on sustainability means looking closely at the plants we take our materials from and all the elements that affect them – the season, the weather, the soil, the insect life and biodiversity. The arrangements that result from this care and knowledge have a meaningful and evocative quality that speaks of that particular time of the year, the land they come from and the wider environment.
seasonality
Sourcing locally and seasonally is nothing new. It’s the most ancient way of sourcing our food - and our flowers, too. In our work we acknowledge that natural materials are not ‘a given’ at any time of the year; they have their moment and then they are gone. In the UK we have distinctly different seasons, our ingredients changing daily, weekly, monthly, and our arrangements reflect this in the vase, celebrating the natural world that we’re privileged to be a part of.
materials
The provenance and quality of our produce is of paramount importance. We foster a deep respect, a sense of reverence and responsibility, for the materials we are lucky enough to use in our work. Organically grown with skill and passion, untainted by chemicals, our flowers are hard-won, and we appreciate them all the more for it. They are the crux, the reason, the endgame. These ingredients are fragrant, surprising and nuanced, safe to handle and to sniff!
expression
We believe in prioritising a dynamic creative process over the end product. Spirit over style. It is the active creation of an arrangement that provides the opportunity for self expression, a way to evoke emotion and ideas, inner thoughts and beliefs. In the composition of a flower arrangement is the means for reflection, healing, meditation, self care and ritual.