There’s an atmosphere of calm concentration in the converted 17th-century stables where Rachel Wardley runs her floristry courses. The lesson of the morning is how to make , and the students are picking blooms from jars of around the studio, lining them up on a table. “Enjoy yourselves and have fun with this,” says Rachel as she shows how to do it in one hand, adding flowers and foliage stem by stem and twisting her wrist incrementally after each addition to form a spiral.
“Try not to be influenced by what you think it should look like or what other people are doing. Let your flowers do the talking.” Encouraging budding florists to express their creativity is a defining feature of the courses at Rachel’s in Cumbria.
“My approach is to allow people to be free and not feel bound by rules that say there have to be so many of flowers of this shape and that height,” says Rachel, who works from the former stables at Levens Hall on the edge of the . “I encourage everyone to look at what the flowers are telling them, rather than saying each arrangement has to be a certain way.” Since she opened Tallulah Rose in 2009, Rachel has built up an international following.
Her four and two-week career-change courses have given hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers, shop assistants, marketers, fundraisers and City high-flyers the knowledge and self-belief to launch new lives as wedding florists, funeral florists, high-street florists, floral stylists and flower farmers. �.