Venture to the English Countryside with Stokesay Flowers
Meet the English flower growers behind our Chelsea in Bloom display.
True to this year’s Chelsea in Bloom theme of ‘British Icons’, our Sloane Street store has been transformed into a spectacular ode to Constance Spry. A pioneering floral designer, educator and author whose work defined an era, Spry was famously commissioned to design the flowers at Her Majesty The Queen’s coronation in 1953.
The search for English flower varieties to bring our Spry-inspired vision to life led us to the heart of the Shropshire countryside. Nestled inside an idyllic walled garden within Stokesay Court, Barney and Victoria Martin tend to a sprawling selection of English garden flowers, foliage and vegetables.
Come with us as we learn more about how Stokesay Flowers came to be, their favourite flower varieties, and what a typical summer’s day looks like at the garden.
The walled garden at Stokesay is so picturesque. How did it come to be?
The walled garden was built around 120 years ago by the late Victorians, as a productive kitchen garden for the big house, Stokesay Court. By that time, the engineers of walled gardens had learned all there was to know about how to construct these buildings to maximise productivity in our cold northerly climate, and today we still benefit from their planning and attention to detail. From the gentle south-facing slope to the high brick walls to retain heat and keep out predators, it is an ideal growing environment for the kind of cut flowers we like to grow. This enables us to grow all our crops outside in the open garden, with only a small space undercover for propagation.
After the Second World War, the kitchen garden slowly drifted into decline. Ten years ago we took on the lease and began growing cut flowers here. At first this was annuals as we slowly learned the ropes, and gradually adding perennials, bulbs, shrubs, trees and roses over the years, until now we have a beautiful mature cutting garden.
With so many varieties to choose from, how do you choose which flowers to plant each year?
We mostly plant exactly what we like ourselves from a long list of things that we know enjoy our conditions. We find the flowers that like it here — phlox, hydrangeas, peonies, foxtail lilies and above all roses — and then seek out unusual and beautiful varieties. Knowledge of what is liked by our favourite florist customers also guides us. Luckily our tastes almost always coincide!
How did the flowers in our display go from your garden to our London store?
First, we walked around the garden to get a feel for what we’ve been growing here and discussed various shapes and textures, keeping in mind the Constance Spry-inspired vision for the display. After the brief was honed a little we selected the best and freshest – and hopefully most fascinating – material that would work for the vision. Everything was picked a day or two before the installation was created and delivered to the store in our van.
Do you have a favourite variety of flower?
We cannot resist roses. Especially the old kinds bred before 1900, which seem to have an unfair reputation for being ‘poor doers’, but can be some of the most mesmerisingly beautiful things we have ever seen. We especially love the huge rambling version of Cecile Brunner, with her little furled buds of sugar pink opening early in the season to exquisitely scented porcelain blooms; the magnificent old climber Gloire de Dijon, which is a bowl of clotted cream in flower form; Variegata di Bologna, striped and stippled and globular with a very scrumptious scent; and the magical neat single flowers of La Belle Sultane, a rich damson with dancing golden stamens.
What does a typical day look like at Stokesay now that we’ve reached the warmer months?
This morning the team was divided into pickers and gardeners. The energetic pickers spent the morning pushing their water-filled Dutch buckets around the garden in wheelbarrows, gradually filling them up with flowers and foliage from the pick list. The more sedate gardeners were weeding and mulching the ground, and planting out annuals for us to pick in a couple of months’ time. This afternoon we mowed the grass paths between the long narrow flower beds.
Our display will be in full bloom at our Sloane Street store until Sunday 29th May.
141-142 Sloane Street
SW1X 9AY