Jane’s blooming passion

Jul 2 2009 By Ian Halstead

running the business, dealing with flower importers, travelling to Birmingham, and studying at night proved just too demanding, and the lease was reluctantly relinquished.

Jane’s dreams didn’t fade though and, after spotting a job offer in a trade magazine, she was soon heading farther afield than Bournville.

“There was a vacancy at a florists in Gibraltar. I’d never been there, and didn’t know much about the place, but I felt like a change, so I sold my little bungalow and was off,” she recalls.

“I ended up staying three years. I arranged floral designs for an Arab prince, who always liked his yacht to be full of flowers, and for the local cathedral, where they seemed to have wedding ceremonies every 15 minutes,” she says.

“The Mediterranean climate meant we were working with lots of exotic blooms and, although Gibraltar is very British, the community was multi-cultural, so you were working for lots of different nationalities.

“We also had regular power cuts, so you had to work by candle-light, because many of the orders were rush jobs, and you hadn‘t time to wait for the power to come back on.”

Back home in Wolverhampton, she returned to her studies, taking City & Guilds Level Four Floristry, before sitting her first Society of Floristry examination at Nottingham University.

It was the mid-90s, and in a fast-changing and competitive market, British floristry needed to become more sophisticated.

“The society recognised that our style of floristry had become rather staid, that we needed – as an industry – to become more confident in our selection and use of flowers and other materials,” says Jane.

Jane was now working with a florist in Stafford, and soon helped her open a second outlet in Wolverhampton. Trade was brisk, which was the catalyst for her teaching career, initially with the Adult Education Service.

“We needed to sign up 15 students for the flower course to go ahead, so I used to collect names from customers who were interested in floristry,” says Jane.

“On the first night, 27 turned up. It was absolutely nerve-wracking, but it went very well, and then in 1995 I got a teaching job at City of Wolverhampton FE College.

“It began as a part-time position, but the tuition was so popular that now I’m full-time, as co-ordinator for all their floristry courses.”

Jane’s skills were so much in demand that she also began working occasionally for Albrighton-based Country Flowers, which led to the most intriguing work of her career.

“The lady who ran the business was the ‘house florist’ for Weston Park, which was where all the heads of state and VIPs stayed during the G8 Summit in 2000,” she recalls.

“The Foreign & Commonwealth Office brought a florist up from London but, although he spent days and days there, no one was happy with his designs, and I was called in to create new displays, and improve his work.

“The security was intense. There were helicopters buzzing overhead all the time, and they even scanned each bottle of milk to make sure they were not contaminated,” says Jane.

“At 6am on the day of the summit I was arranging a display for the grand dining table, using white roses and alchimilla mollis, using an antique silver vase taken from the Weston Park vaults.

“We also had to place flowers throughout the house, including the entrance hall, library and meeting rooms, and do vases of seasonal flowers for all the bedrooms, including President Clinton’s.”

As an influential figure in British floristry, Jane is eager to see the industry evolve to meet the economic challenges ahead.

“Florists have never been good at marketing, and even in a sizeable city such as Wolverhampton, only three have even a basic web presence,” she says.

Jane believes florists who wish to prosper will also have to offer increasingly sophisticated ranges of flowers and blooms – and to introduce eco-friendly floristry.

However, one thing has never changed for Jane. Although she has worked with exotic blooms by the lorry-load, her favourite flower remains the simple yellow and white daisy.