RARE BLOOM
From reproducing old Dutch Masters to influencing of new generation of designers and photographers, the colourful life and craft of Constance Spry is a constant source of surprise and inspiration. By Jenny Liglan
“Flower pieces are the craze of the moment,” wrote Constance Spry in BAZAAR in May 1932. At the time, her own exuberant arrangements were f illing the houses of the great and good, including ravishing concoctions reproducing old Dutch Masters: “Against the Queen Anne green and gold of the drawing room or the pine panels of the dining room they unobtrusively add a graceful and personal f inale.” That theatrical “f inale” is the giveaway. Spry liked drama, wowing society by mixing hot-house f lowers with old-man’s beard and kale leaves, using lichen-covered branches, decorating tables with massed violets, standing an amazing cactus in the hall. The unexpected was key: Her f lowers were always a talking point. In BAZAAR, her advice sometimes sounded rather tongue-in-cheek. Did the debutantes of 1935 really wear 1850s-style crowns of fruit “à la Pomone” and “shoulder knots” of lilies? Did mothers really plan children’s parties with tarlatan tablecloths, small trees with “glass or silver fruits” and frosted pies full of toys, as “a charming surprise”? Perhaps they did—but Rex Whistler’s comic illustrations undercut any seriousness. Spry revelled in extravagance. For a ball at Ham House she created parapets of Madonna lilies on the terrace, an avenue of lemon-trees in the ballroom and green garlands with “pomegranates, pears, apples, Indian corn and small melons”. However, she was also knowledgeable and passionate, and these qualities lit up the gardening articles that she wrote for BAZAAR from the 1930s onwards. Snapshots of the current taste—pieces on Ladies’ Horticultural Societies, visits to nurserymen, ordering seeds for borders of annuals—also reveal her own enthusiasms, like her then-unfashionable love of traditional roses. Here, as so often, she was ahead of her day.
Spry sparkled in the glamorous age of Cecil Beaton and Syrie Maugham,Maugham but this was not her own background. Born ConstanceConsta Fletcher in Derby, she was the daughter of a railwayrailwa clerk. Having studied hygiene and district nursing, she was a secretary of the Dublin Red Cross during WorldW War I, and by 1921, was the head of an adult-educationadult-e school in London. By then, she had f led a violentviol marriage to James Heppell Marr, taking her son AnthonyAnt with her, and begun a complicated, lifelong relationshiprela with Henry Ernest Spry (though she took hishi name, they never married), whom she met while workingw at the Inland Revenue. In 1932, when she wrotew for BAZAAR, she was plunging into an affair with the painter Hannah Gluckstein. As she soared to success, beginning with arrangements for friends, then commissions for Granada cinemas and Atkinsons’ deco perfumery on Old Bond Street, she hid her turbulent private life from her grand clients. But she always sympathised with awkward passions: In 1937, she went secretly to France to arrange the f lowers for Wallis Simpson’s wedding to the Duke of Windsor. It took time for her to be forgiven,f yet 10 years later she was in chargec of the f lowers for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, andan in 1953 she also worked on the Coronation displays.di By the mid-1950s, Spry had an additional career,car relaunching the Cordon Bleu culinary school with Rosemary Hume, founding the domestic-science collegecolleg Winkf ield Place, where she taught cookery and home management, and writing her bestselling The
Constance Spry Cookery Book.
After she died in 1960, Spry was dismissed as fussily oldfashioned. But no longer. Last year, the 130 th anniversary of her birth, the designer Jonathan Anderson staged an exhibition for the fashion house Loewe in Madrid, starring massive f loral dis displays, f lanked by Steven Meisel’s photographs of stunning Spry-inspiredSpry arrangements. She would have enjoyed this f lamboy lamboyant tribute, that rightly presents her as the daring, rule-breaking pioneerp of style she was.