Meet
Our Gang
Greenery

Here at Huntsmill Farm, we are very lucky to have so many fantastic suppliers that we work with on our wedding days. With so many talented wedding professionals on our list, we’d love for you to get to know them better. It’s time for us to introduce you to another member of our gang, sustainable florist Kate, who runs Greenery.

Greenery is an independent floral design business with seasonal flowers and sustainable materials and methods. Florist Kate’s commitment to seasonality and sustainability helps her create stunning floral arrangements that look incredible and are environmentally friendly. You can read more about Kate and her sustainable floristry below to understand why we love having Kate with us as one of our gang!

Tell us about yourself

I’m Kate, and I founded Greenery in 2017, a year after beginning a floristry course at Moreton Morrell college. I live with my science teacher husband, two children, two rabbits and a very much doted on 18-year-old cat, and believe I’m still on the underside of ‘middle-aged’!

We live just outside Banbury (Oxfordshire), just inside West Northamptonshire, and I grow flowers at the farm I grew up on where my parents still live in South Warwickshire.

Why did you want to become a Florist?

I’ve always loved being outdoors, noticing nature and hands-on creative activities, but after working mainly in education and then an extended maternity leave, I ended up looking into floristry at my husband’s suggestion!

I’d had a meandering series of jobs following a journalism degree and PGCE, but nothing obvious to go back to when our youngest started school, and found that Floristry combined my love of making things with a sustainable natural and downright beautiful raw material. I started cutting and growing things to use within my floristry course and discovered the world of flower farming, which now has a burgeoning network in the UK.

Do you have a specific style?

I think that I have a specific style, but I’m not sure how to define it. I love a riot of colour and texture, but I also appreciate the simplicity of a bud vase with a single stem, or a bold vase of one variety.

The things I make are as diverse as my taste in music, but I think I like to make cut flowers look as if they still have life in them, almost as if they are part of a living, portable garden. The beauty of home-grown stems over commercial blooms is that, like wonky veg, they have character: I suppose my job as a florist is to position them in the best way to let them do their thing.

What advice would you give couples when choosing their flowers?

Get ideas from Pinterest, etc. that sum up a feeling, but don’t try to over-prescribe the finished effect. Figure out what element you like about those inspiration images or flowers without fixating on a particular outcome. It allows more potential for me to find flowers that might meet your brief – there are so many out there on the British flower market, and I haven’t found all of them yet, and most people can only name a tiny proportion of the flowers that are available to work with – usually those they are most familiar with from the international flower market. But there are SO many more!

What makes you happy?

Being outside, sunny days, especially in the spring and autumn, nice food (coffee, homemade cake, my husband’s bread, curries, patatas bravas, veg lasagne!) and low key days with people I feel relaxed with. Or inside with the cat on my lap and a good book.

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be and why?

No idea. I think everyone has lives we can’t imagine, and I don’t know how you would ‘be’ someone else for a day when you’d bring your entire life experience and baggage to that day!

What do you love most about your job?

Communicating via flowers – it’s a language people used to mark significant events and I get to be privy to those. I love arriving at people’s doorsteps with a bouquet, curating combinations to convey emotions, reflect the season and make you pause and notice. I also love the variation, working in both the garden and flower room, on-site and out and about, meeting people and hearing why they are sending flowers.

I appreciate the flexibility of self-employment and enjoy working on my own, though workshops and wedding days are such a positive way to collaborate with others. Ultimately, the variation of tasks in my working week and throughout the year keeps things interesting, although this can also be the downside, as weeks are very unpredictable!

What wedding trends are you loving at the moment?

The general trend while I’ve been involved in the industry has been towards unstructured ‘natural’ flowers, bendy stems, and asymmetry and, as I’ve said above, I completely embrace this. Likewise, I think the pressure of ‘shoulds’ has largely disappeared from weddings now and couples design their day around their personalities and guests, etc.

Celebrants bring something unique to vows, photographers steer clear of line-ups and offer the most intimate reportage, and there are as many floral styles out there to make your day reflect your interests and priorities as a couple.

What makes you unique?

The greenery business slogan is ‘seasonal flowers, sustainable floristry’, which fairly much sums it up. I love what some people might see as the confines of working entirely within the offerings of not just the season, but the month or even the week. It narrows the possibilities, but to a palette that naturally harmonises. I prioritise getting the most out of your flowers, sourcing with as small a carbon footprint as possible; considering what makes the most impact on your big day; and thinking about what will happen to the flowers themselves and the mechanics I use afterwards – with re-use and biodegradability as the aim.

Something that makes me unique is that I don’t work on a huge number of weddings, and I always devote myself completely to each when working on them. I deliberate over little designs and details far more than you could imagine, and a lot of planning takes place. I’m also very willing to try things I’ve never done before and in no way have a ‘catalogue’ of offerings – so you have to be prepared to not know exactly what you will get!

What’s your drink of choice?

It’s got to be coffee, but I love peppermint tea, red wine, and you can’t beat a sparkling elderflower when it’s hot outside!

Who is your dream celebrity wedding couple?

I hadn’t considered this before as I’m not really a ‘celeb spotter’! But I’ll choose Frances Tophill from Gardener’s World: she’s super down to earth and I just know she’d get excited about her flowers! That said, I’ve had the delight of working with the nicest of couples to date and also the cream of local venues, so if my dream celebrity was to approach me, I’ll have to advise her on location!

Find out more about Kate using the links below:

Website | Facebook | Instagram

It’s always a joy to see Kate’s floral displays here at Huntsmill Farm. We love having her here as one of our recommended wedding suppliers, and she’s in good company on our list with some other incredibly talented suppliers – we highly recommend you take a look!