In 2025 we started a creative project called Arranging the Garden, an exclusive series for the Flowers on Film Club. The purpose is to explore the creative and deeply personal practice of naturalistic arrangement in an open, experimental format. The premise is simple: we visit and film a garden, paying attention to the unique sense of place of that particular setting, the conditions and plants that are growing there. During this visit we speak to the owner or gardener and at some point we’ll alight upon a question, theme or topic that we’d like to explore and investigate through the arrangement of flowers.

Using carefully chosen plant material either from the garden we are visiting, or from our own plant collection in Hampshire, we continue to discuss these themes together while I make an arrangement evocative of the setting at that very specific moment in the year. We have always valued learning through doing and experimenting outside of a set brief, allowing conversations to develop, allowing for spontaneity. That’s what the Flowers on Film Club is all about: an extra-curricular love of plants, places and people!

This arrangement inspired by Balmoral Cottage was an exercise in restraint, in using materials cut only from this particular place and creating a composition made up entirely of branches and leaves. The variegated foliage provided some interest and contrast, but without colour as the overriding focus the sculptural forms and texture of the ingredients came to the fore.

I used two varieties of willow as the foundational branches, one with soft grey catkins suffused with pink and the other black tipped with raspberry. I was really excited to get my hands on the wire-netting bush (Corokia) which is native to new Zealand and has these extraordinary interlacing wiry stems. The large Japanese spindle grows at the centre of the garden and I found the stems satisfied the urge to soften and provide gentle curves to the parameters of the arrangement. Then I couldn’t not incorporate the boxwood - Charlotte’s favourite, the variegated ‘Elegantissima’ as well as ‘Balearica’ and ‘Rosmarinifolius’. I was surprised by how lovely these were to arrange with and likewise the Italian arum, with its arrow-shaped leaves traced with pale veins, which Charlotte swears by and says is very long-lasting in arrangements.

Jess has been recently been reading Christopher Lloyd’s Foliage Plants and gave me this quote about variegated leaves from Chapter 1, with a brilliant connection drawn between the garden and the vase:

“Variegation has been popularised by the flower arranging movement which has been a notable social and (perhaps we might claim with such modesty we can muster) artistic feature of post-war Britain. Variegated leaves have contributed importantly to the range of material available to the flower arranger, who saw more to them than had been apparent to the gardener, but who has induced the gardener to take another look at them and their role in the garden. Cross-fertilisation between the arts has always been productive.”

Watch the film: Join the Flowers on Film Club to watch the making of this arrangement!