by Sue Shephard
Connie devoted a lyrical chapter in her last book Favourite Flowers to the glories of the garden at Ard Daraich. She described looking from her window in late summer and autumn onto a ‘Chinese scene’ of mountain ash, magenta and lilac astilbes, small scarlet berries of Sambucus racemosa, the blues and purples of heather and hydrangea and the deep cerulean of gentians. ‘What with mountains and mists, benign and lovely colours, the smell of peat smoke, an autumn day here is filled with pleasure.’
Apart from Ard Daraich, Connie’s other favoured sanctuary was Ireland. Whenever time allowed she took the steamer to Dun Laoghaire and travelled around the country giving talks and demonstrations or judging decorative classes at RHS shows. The moment she arrived in Dublin, all her worries and tensions fell away. She always stayed with her old friend Lady Phyllis Moore at her home at Rathfarnham. Lectures would be interspersed with lively lunch parties, visits to friends’ gardens, the renewing of old friendships and revisiting old childhood haunts. Connie never forgot Ireland, where she was always welcomed home.
TWELVE
Never Be Funny
with Flowers
1950–1953
Early one glorious Saturday morning in June 1950, hundreds of people were queuing at the entrance to the Corn Exchange in Dorchester where floral history was about to be made. For over a century country people had held flower, fruit and vegetable shows there, displaying their giant marrows and lavishly coloured dahlias, and sometimes there would be a table with a selection of amateur-looking vases of flowers. But here was the first ever show exclusively dedicated to flower arranging. Similar to the shows Connie had visited on her pre-war trips to the United States and organized by the newly created Dorchester Floral Decoration Society, over three hundred exhibits were imaginatively displayed along benches, separated into individual niches of corrugated cardboard painted in pearly apple-green.
The great hall was overflowing with flowers arranged in every imaginable way by every kind of participant: simple groupings and glorious ones, miniature and massive, ranging from grand pieces that would grace a Dorset manor house to jugs and bowls holding cottage-garden bunches. There were children’s flowers, individual and classroom efforts; dish gardens, teacup posies, miniature gardens made on plates and trays and a doll’s house with flowers in perfect proportion in each room. There were arrangements from countrywomen living on remote farms and from townswomen with tiny gardens or window boxes. One farmer’s wife had arranged woodland moss, leaves and fungi together. All her work went into the farm, she explained; she had no garden but found inspiration in everything growing in the countryside. Mrs Steele, wife of a house-painter, had travelled twenty miles from her village bringing her own homegrown anemones arranged in a small brown pie-dish. Everyone was eager to look, admire and offer criticism and advice. But the real excitement, the star of the show, though she would prefer not to have been a distraction, was the great flower arranger herself: Mrs Constance Spry.
Just before Christmas the previous year, Connie had been lecturing at Yeovil when she was approached by Mary Pope, a member of the wealthy Eldridge Pope brewing family, who owned a large and beautiful garden. Mrs Pope was a dynamic young woman, passionate about gardening and flower arranging and a keen member of the panel of judges who toured county flower and produce shows. It had been her idea to create a society devoted wholly to flower decoration, and when she described it to her, Connie expressed interest, but some doubt: ‘I admired the grand idea, but wondered if it might be fraught with peril.’ She was concerned that members would not really enjoy having their arrangements judged. ‘Criticism and advice, even of the most constructive kind, no matter from whom, is not always a soothing affair,’ she told Mrs Pope. ‘I don’t think it will work, but I’ll give you a year, and I’ll be your patron if you’re still going at the end of it.’
Six months later, on that hot June day, Connie kept her promise and attended the show as its patron. Her response was one of amazement and pleasure; for here was exactly the spontaneous expression of delight in flowers, shared by all social classes, that she had longed to see. ‘I saw wild flowers arranged with almost lyric beauty and found myself, on seeing the children’s exhibits, envious in retrospect that such clubs did not exist when I was a child.’ The event was entirely non-competitive, which to Connie was its greatest attribute. There were no prizes, no medals or ribbons, no descending order of merit. ‘This’, she wrote, was ‘something new, something good, and something democratic. No one is shut out because she (or he, for why shouldn’t men enjoy this too?) has no garden or can’t grow flowers, or doesn’t quite know how to start, or is shy.’
Dorchester’s success fired others, and three more societies rapidly started up: one in London, one in Colchester and a third in Leicester, where Connie was guest of honour at the inaugural meeting and met its president, Isobel Barnett, who became a close friend. Two years after the Dorchester show, these four societies staged the first Floral Academy Show in the New Hall of the Royal Horticultural Society, whose president, Lord Aberconway, opened the event. Again, there were no prizes. Mary Pope explained to the press:
It will not be in any way like an orthodox flower show, nor will it be competitive. It is felt that where flower decoration is competitive, the full beauty of the individual arrangements is often lost to the public by the unavoidable comparison with other exhibits. In such events, people tend eagerly to seek out the first, second and third prize exhibits, and in their enthusiasm for competition, are moved to judge the class themselves – thereby very often missing the individual beauty and grace of any particular exhibit or even missing the whole purpose of its design.
This press notice so entirely reflected Connie’s own passionately held views about competition generally that it is very likely that she either wrote it herself or suggested its content to Mary Pope. It is also possible that she threatened to remove her support if the shows did become competitive – which, of course, they soon did.
Clubs sprang up all over the country, many of them founded by former Spry trainees such as Dora Buckingham, who had taken a course at the London Flower School in its early days. Connie opened new clubs, lectured with untiring enthusiasm and without charge, attended shows and wrote careful little notes of praise and comment for each arrangement. The first tent devoted solely to flower arrangement at the Chelsea Flower Show was in 1956, and the flower-arranging tent continues to be one of the most popular features every year. In January 1959 the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies (NAFAS) of Great Britain was formed, with Mary Pope as its first president. It was a triumphant mass movement with Connie as its inspiration and figurehead, a position she held with enormous pride but also sometimes with embarrassment. Her initial fears, expressed to Mary Pope nine years earlier, had been realized. In a long, carefully diplomatic chapter in Favourite Flowers Connie outlined where she felt things had gone wrong in the flower-arrangement movement. The strong feelings, tempered with polite tact, that she expressed were almost identical to those in her Garden Notebook written back in 1939 when she had criticized the competitive American shows. In twenty years, Connie had not changed her views: ‘I feel so strongly that the art of flower arrangement should be a means of self-expression for everyone and that nobody should be afraid to express their feelings for colour and line through this medium.’
But it was inevitable that people would want to pit their skills competitively and show something outstanding, special and different. What Connie called the pitfalls of exhibiting were all too common – exhibitors straining after effect to ensure that their arrangement stood out, thus ending up with over-extravagant use of materials, too many flowers and far too much ornament. She was not alone in her concerns. One lady wrote to the Gardener’s Chronicle:
There seems to be a growing tendency to over-arrange flowers. The pendulum has swung too far from the dreary carnation-and-maidenhair-in-narrow-glass-vase effect of pre-war years to the over-lush, unspontaneous effect exemplified, for
example, in the floral arrangement tent at the Chelsea show, where to my mind, the impression was of laboured and unspontaneous effort and the effect, though truly gorgeous from the point of view of colour, was stiff and stereotyped.
Of course there had to be some rules for the show bench, but rules seem to beget more rules, and yet more regulations regarding size, style and so on were introduced. Soon there was a plethora of carefully stratified classifications under which increasingly complex arrangements could be submitted.
Will Ingwersen, the great plantsman and horticultural journalist, joined the debate by denouncing the ‘silliness of flower arrangement’. He wrote in the Gardener’s Chronicle of being driven to frenzies of rage and despair by ‘the raids of demented female flower arrangers, to whom nothing in the garden is sacred’. One Brigadier Lucas Phillips agreed that the proper place for flowers was in the garden, unless arranged in the simple, natural manner. He loathed the current trend for ‘artificial, precious arrangements which reek of self-consciousness’. He continued:
This craze for flower ‘arrangement’ has gone altogether too far. It has passed from the hands of the really few people engaged in it who really understood flowers to those who have no sense or feeling for them whatever and who regard everything in the garden as mere ‘material’. Many do not even know the names of the flowers they use and frequently ‘arrange’ them in a manner that completely destroys the flowers’ character. To a gardener they are mere vandals.
Lady Ramsay-Fairfax-Lucy concurred that many arrangements were becoming stiff and unreal. She too wrote to the Gardener’s Chronicle: ‘Perhaps we are all guilty of creating a too carefully built-up arrangement for exhibition or competition, but is not the true venue of these arrangements our homes, where we want lovely colour, shape and charm of texture?’
This, for Connie, was the nub of the problem: were flower decorations intended to beautify the home or were they designed solely to win prizes as exhibits in a show? When in America before the war, she wrote, she had at first misunderstood their flower shows and was bemused with the shadow boxes, the lighting and the exotic accessories as well as the considerable influence of the Japanese style. It was only later that she came to appreciate that there was a distinction to be made between arrangements for show and arrangements for the home. In America not everyone possessed a garden in which to grow flowers for cutting, which she seemed to assume was the case in England. Somehow she still nurtured a hope that English flower arrangement would preserve its ‘suitability’ to our home background.
As the debate raged on, Connie travelled all over the country, lecturing and appearing on radio programmes. Sometimes there would be difficult questions or a bit of heckling, largely because of the excesses of the flower-club movement, for which she was held responsible. But she had always enjoyed a good argument and dealt with all comers as cheerfully as she had handled the obstreperous parents of Homerton. ‘You shall have your turn later,’ she would tell an objector, and when the lecture ended she would stand on the platform with a cheerful grin and say, ‘Now then, you, let battle commence.’
Connie had wanted flower arranging to become popular, ‘democratized’ and open to all. But she had found the whole NAFAS fracas upsetting. The debate had opened up her own methods and style to public scrutiny and she herself was attracting plenty of criticism. But with age Connie seemed to have found a feisty ability to defend and explain herself. Her old adversary Will Ingwersen wrote an article in Gardener’s Chronicle expressing disapproval of her method of defoliating flowers: ‘I hate to see plants taken out of character and maltreated to conform to the arbitrary demands of “line”, “colour” and “composition”.’ This stung Connie, who cared little for the opinions of people in high society, but those of her horticultural peers were important to her.
In reply she conceded that in the past she had occasionally been guilty of overdoing defoliation to the degree of making flowers ‘look like plucked chickens’. But, she pointed out, many flowers cannot be used in arrangements if their leaves are left on; lilac, for example, has too much weight of foliage, while lime flowers are hidden under their cloak of leaves. She agreed that the character of the plant was important when selecting them for an arrangement: ‘Most of us certainly deplore the sight of flowers used badly, used with no feeling for their personality, particularly when they are chopped about and distorted to follow a forced and arbitrary line.’ But, she argued, for the flower decorator plant material is the artist’s palette of colours and textures, and must be used as though it were paints.
Connie’s lectures were usually attended by the armies of ladies who ‘did the church flowers’ and never failed to ask, ‘How do you decorate a church?’ – to which Connie would reply, ‘What church, for what occasion, and with what flowers?’ These women took enormous pride in doing the flowers for their parish on a voluntary roster, and inevitably some element of competition and snobbery crept in; many felt their efforts were being picked to pieces during the sermon. Churchwomen who used flowers mostly grown by themselves were enthused by Connie’s free and easy approach to arranging produce from their gardens, including the vegetable patch, and from the hedgerows and woods. They went home with the watchwords ‘simplicity’, ‘dignity’ and ‘suitability’ ringing in their ears. But church decoration generally continued to be heavy and formal, and there were always the die-hards for whom carnations, chrysanthemums and gypsophila remained the bedrock of church vases. Harvest Festival, in particular, was still celebrated with great vigour in the traditional way: festoons of flowers would be draped over pulpits and galleries, along the bases of screens and at the tops and bottoms of fonts, and garlanded round pillars; copious sheaves of corn would fill every available corner.
Connie had always regarded the decoration of churches as a particularly interesting challenge. In 1950 the Dean of Westminster asked her to help members of the London Flower Guild to decorate Westminster Abbey. He hoped she might inspire them with some new ideas that would filter down to the armies of lady volunteers up and down the country. On this occasion the ladies of the Guild were asked to bring flowers from their gardens, and Connie, with Sheila and Robbo, were to give advice on how best to arrange them. Two large lead garden urns were brought from the shop and placed ready for the arrival of the flowers. But the few dozen stems of delphiniums, lilies and pink pyrethrums that arrived were such a disappointment that Connie realized the Abbey could never be adequately supplied by small private gardens. She offered to provide flowers for the Abbey at cost price, which her staff would arrange on a voluntary basis. This arrangement continued until the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies took over the prestigious task. How the ladies of the London Flower Guild felt about the snub is not recorded.
Meanwhile, Connie kept up her personal appearances at shows; she was terribly anxious that the flower-arrangement movement should succeed and, though reluctantly, began judging as well. She tried to ameliorate some of the worst extravagances by suggesting prizes for newcomers, and did concede the necessity for a few rules – for judges, for categories, for themes, for size, style and colour; and there would also be increasingly complex rules concerning measurements and geometry. But when members of a judging panel pointed out that a piece she favoured broke some rule, Connie would firmly answer, ‘I could live with it.’
The competitive fire in some shows was too much even for Connie’s reserves of tact and patience. George Foss recalled how at one show she was expected to judge a class called ‘Interpreting Swan Lake’. One competitor, with infinite care, had plucked a hundred white carnations to create a large swan and set it on a piece of mirror. Connie did not give it an award and the disappointed woman pursued her across the showroom shouting furiously, ‘Why didn’t you give me the prize?’ Connie was terrified; the experience summed up all that she had most feared would happen. Vulgar artificiality and mean-spirited competitiveness had overtaken any wish to create something beautiful for its own sake. Shortly after
this alarming incident, Connie wrote to Ingwersen: ‘You will hardly believe that only last week, I saw a rose dressed up with a blue crinoline of heads of delphinium, with pins stuck in to represent eyes, and labelled ‘My Fair Lady’. I do so dislike these interpretative classes, and I cannot see any charm or any beauty in them.’
She tried to persuade clubs to ease up on competition and regulations – for example, to offer a class where people could do what they liked without feeling the need for ‘stunts’ or ‘whimsies’. She would cry with great vehemence: ‘Never, never, be funny with flowers! . . . Just be natural and let the rules go hell . . . Is there true grace and charm in a triangle of tulips, in an L of gladioli, the flowers cut off by their ears? . . . Does the disposition of flowers stated in terms of geometry really charm the eye and delight the heart?’
Nevertheless, Connie continued to care about the growing popularity of flower arranging and she was happy to see it spreading into all kinds of flower clubs and shows, charity events, church decorating and the Women’s Institutes and Townswomen’s Guilds. Flower arranging was even offered in further education courses and evening classes – the kind she would have loved to have attended as a child. The important thing, as ever, was that everyone could do it – and if perhaps some wanted to win prizes, did it matter so very much? ‘I expect by now I have irritated many whom I have no wish to annoy,’ Connie wrote in Favourite Flowers. She certainly did not wish to alienate herself from the great popular movement that she had striven for for so long, even if its members, like wayward children, chose to go in directions she had not foreseen and could not agree with. ‘I certainly have offered myself as a very perfect sacrifice to the winners of medals and trophies, who might fairly point out that I have never won anything and am hardly qualified therefore to talk about competition.’