AESME SCHOOL OF FLOWERS specialises in NATURALISTIC floral design with a focus on SEASONALITY
We are the only London flower school teaching a practical knowledge of horticulture through the medium of floral design. It is this direct connection to the garden that makes our courses unique.
There is so much more to an arrangement of flowers than meets the eye. After gardening, making flower arrangements is perhaps the closest many of us will come to a tactile, intimate experience of the natural world. At the 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.
Growing our own produce for the school allows us to arrange flowers with a gardener's sensibility, in rhythm with the seasons and respectful of the natural life cycle of plants. 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 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.
Our courses are for enthusiastic beginners, those trained in another style or exploring a transition from another background entirely. We welcome flower arrangers from all over the world - professional, amateur and aspiring - owners and employees of flower shops and studios, wedding designers and flower farmers. You certainly don’t have to be a florist - previous students have included lawyers and doctors, cooks and artists, gardeners, photographers, scientists and psychologists, and have gone on to make arrangements in hotels and restaurants, to photograph or paint flowers or to study garden design.
Many are home arrangers for whom time with flowers is an essential personal practice. This was (and remains) the case for head teacher Ally, whose love of flower arranging at home led to the creation of AESME STUDIO in 2015, together with sister Jess. For the past decade the studio has designed arrangements for hundreds of events and creative projects in London, across the UK and abroad, gradually becoming self-sufficient through the creation of an extensive cut flower garden in the Hampshire countryside.
A profound love of garden flowers and the seemingly effortless beauty of naturalistic garden design sowed the seeds for our studio philosophy and 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 - arrangements are carefully planned and edited, and at the same time encouraged to go a little wild around the edges. In both the garden and the vase, it’s where the unexpected entanglements are that the magic creeps in.
Born out of a desire to share an alternative and nature-led way of working with flowers, our courses celebrate the artistry of arranging flowers. Every arrangement is an expression of its maker, a personal exploration and to this end, an exercise in individuality. But flower arranging is also the expression of shared values and the conduit to a wider conversation.
By studying at the AESME SCHOOL OF FLOWERS you will equip yourself with the tools to approach your design work and creative practice with integrity, depth and direction. You will learn about:
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 works 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
“you taught me more than you might know and showed me how to look at the world in a different way”
leith
OUR COURSES
To practise naturalistic floral design is to honour your materials above all else. By doing so you sustain the fragile threads between your arrangement and the plants, soil, insects and the season. This creative process celebrates and respects the natural world and our place in its complex, miraculous structure.
This intensive two week course is devoted to the art of arranging flowers in a naturalistic way. In the first week we focus on the essential techniques of making arrangements, moving on to advanced design in the second week, taking cues from nature with regards to colour, shape, form and proportion. You will discover a wide range of seasonal plant material, learning about the broader process of working with garden-grown flowers from conditioning to composting, making arrangements using considerate and sustainable mechanics.
☞ find out more
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 vital and holistic part of your creative practice.
These workshops run for two days and include four design sessions. In each session you’ll learn how to study natural materials from the garden - flowers, leaves, twigs, seedheads, fruits, vegetables, grasses and weeds - and to arrange them in a way that references how they grow. We’ll examine what it means to take a nature-led and garden-inspired approach to designs, creating arrangements that evoke the style and character of different gardens from the prairie planting scheme and abundant perennial border to the cottage and kitchen garden.
☞ find out more
In this intensive course we lift the veil on designing enchanting arrangements and installations for weddings and events.This course is for you if you are interested in learning tried-and-tested sustainable techniques and foam-free methods, as well as how to showcase the very best seasonal ingredients.
Over three days we cover a wide range of designs including bridal bouquets and buttonholes, table flowers, urn arrangements and a large scale botanical installation. During an open Q&A session we will discuss ideas and experiences, answering your questions on anything from sales, social media and creating proposals to the logistics of packing for events. This course is for beginners and up - you may be looking to brush up existing skills, refine your style or want to focus on a particular element of design.
☞ dates coming
“from the moment i stepped in the aesme studio, I could tell that this was about much more than arranging flowers…”
alarie
AESME STUDIO was started by sisters Jess and Ally Lister in 2015. The studio is in a converted railway arch in Shepherd’s Bush, West London.
You can also study with us online through our extensive digital library of unique flower-focused films and tutorials
☞ FIND OUT MORE
Whenever you choose to join us, you will be surrounded by extraordinary natural materials - blossoming and decadent, wild and weedy, edible, medicinal and scented.
connecting PLANTS and PEOPLE, our teaching draws a thread between the GARDEN and the VASE
“our half-acre plot is a place of supply, and of learning. To allow for limitless creations, the garden houses a vast range of colours and textures throughout the seasons, layers of bulbs, annuals and perennials nurtured through organic practices; it serves as both a source of inspiration and a biodiverse habitat. This naturalistic approach translates directly into the vase…”
from our book NATURALISTIC FLOWERS
At the AESME SCHOOL OF FLOWERS every student has the opportunity to experience the beauty and variety of garden flowers through their organic forms, textures and colours, to learn about the plants our flowers come from and to reject hierarchy, making arrangements with everything from weeds and wildflowers to fruits and vegetables. Whenever you choose to join us, you will be surrounded by extraordinary natural materials - blossoming and decadent, wild and weedy, edible, medicinal and scented.
school of flowers manifesto
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 and decorate, how we dispose of things, how we feel about ourselves and others and the world at large. How we deal with stress and even how we reconcile our own mortality.
The following five principles are 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.
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.
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!
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.