Let nothing go to waste

By using flowers that would be otherwise thrown away, The Flower Bank provides affordable blooms for all and runs floristry classes in the community.

“I’ve always liked flowers,” says Ursula Stone (above), who admits that she would take any opportunity to give flowers – whether it be popping round to a friend’s, being invited for dinner, and even coordinating events in her work for Haringey Council in London. “But I never thought that floristry was actually something I could do.”

When her mother moved away from their hometown and was no longer able to tend to her husband’s grave, Ursula looked for a service that would do it for her. Unable to find one, she signed up to a six-week floristry crash course so that she could set one up herself.

“That six weeks turned into three years,” she reflects. It was while on work experience with a large central London florist that she realised there was so much more she could do, and so the idea for The Flower Bank was born.

“For an event, people would spend tens of thousands of pounds on flowers that at the end of the day would be pulled apart and thrown away,” she says. “Then a friend of mine died and had to have a pauper’s funeral. I begged the local supermarket to give me the flowers they were going to throw away so that we could have them at the service. That’s when I realised I could use what would otherwise be wasted in a different way, for the benefit of the community.”

Now, as well as tending graves for people, she takes leftover flowers from events and supermarkets, to make up bouquets, bunches and buttonholes so that people with very little money can have flowers for the likes of weddings and funerals.

In 2019, she opened a shop in New Barnet, north London, where she sells flowers at minimum cost and hosts floristry classes. Her mind is always set on benefitting the community – for the last four years, for example, she’s run weekly workshops with young offenders.

“They wouldn’t be caught dead

“I realised I could use what would otherwise be wasted to benefit the community”

with a bunch of flowers on the street!” she laughs. “But they really get into it when they’re here, something they can say they’ve made themselves.”

Often these creations are given to people living in residential care, while Ursula also partners with local charities that help the elderly to run workshops in care homes.

“It’s a way for them to keep in touch with the outside world,” she says. “Just this week we used some flowers from a tree they could see outside their care home window so it was very personal to them. That’s the thing with flowers – there are so many colours and textures and they bring you into the present. Even in people with dementia, you can see that moment of satisfaction in what they’ve made. It’s magical.” theflowerbank.org.uk