Human Flower Project

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Before There Was Martha Stewart…

Museum retrospective of florist Constance Spry sends England’s designers topsy-turvy.

Long before Martha Stewart taught Americans to twist holly into seasonal napkin rings, there was Constance Spry.

Spry (1886-1960) turned from Red Cross worker to school headmistress to free-lance florist in her native England. She caught public attention in 1928 by using wildflowers in a big arrangement for a Bond Street business and was off like a rocket. Spry set up a hugely successful florist shop in London, opened a design school, and authored 13 books on home decorating. She landed the most hot-shot floral commission of her generation in 1952: “to arrange the flowers at Westminster Abbey and along the processional route from Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.”

So we’re told by the Design Museum (London) which has mounted a retrospective exhibition of Spry’s career. The show runs through November 28.

Today’s Guardian reports that the museum’s director has resigned in protest over the Spry show, complaining that it represents “lack of content.” and strays too far from the museum’s mission “to explore the industrial design of quantity-produced products.” The Guardian’s James Fenton defends Spry. Perhaps it’s overreaching to call her a “social reformer,” as the Museum does, but Spry certainly did encourage a wider and less rule-bound use of flowers, showing thousands of Brits what imaginative design looks like, pointing out that hedgerow flowers and wild roses can be as beautiful as exotics, and then urging everybody to give it a go.

The museum catalogue explains that when Spry began teaching floral design, in the 1920s, “flowers were the preserve of the wealthy, who could afford to buy cut flowers, and middle class families with large gardens. Constance taught her students that everyone’s lives could be enlivened by flowers, even in the poorest homes, and that all you needed was imagination, not money, to create a flower arrangement, which would be all the more satisfying if you made it yourself.”



The disgust that the museum director and others have expressed for Spry seems to me an echo of the resentment that locked-up Martha Stewart here in the U.S. The artistic avant-garde and arbiters of high culture hold in grandest disdain those taste-makers who manage to embolden the general public.

Decorative Kale, 1937

Photo: Constance Spry Ltd.

Anyway, how could any self-respecting conceptual artist or cutting-edge designer not love a woman who designed kale?