Divine arrangements: Constance Spry, genius of floral design
An inspiration to flower folk, Constance Spry is the subject of a new exhibition. Here, guest curator Shane Connolly shares tales of treasures unearthed, memories shared – and sleepless nights
Tomorrow, a new exhibition opens at the Garden Museum in London. Its title is Constance Spry and the Fashion for Flowers and I am the lucky guest curator of the show. I should immediately lay my cards on the table and confess that this is the first exhibition I have ever curated in my life. In the real world I am a florist, or floral decorator as Spry would have said. In fact, until about two years ago, I could not have told you what curating something actually entailed. Though I certainly could now.
An exhibition celebrating Constance Spry was the brainchild of the Garden Museum’s director, Christopher Woodward. He mentioned Spry as a potential topic several years ago, after a talk I’d given about her in the museum, and I immediately seized on the idea. Like most floral folk, I have long been a devotee of the inspirational Mrs Spry.
Spry has actually enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity in recent years. Her particular approach, with its celebration of place and season, sets standards and gives inspiration to many 21st-century florists searching for more sustainable ways of using flowers, or growing them commercially. And her work in advancing the education and independence of women also deserves greater recognition. Not to mention her recent fame as an LGBT icon, after her four-year affair with the artist Gluck (born Hannah Gluckstein) was revealed in Sue Shephard’s 2010 biography, The Surprising Life of Constance Spry.
Then reality began to set in: how could I give breath to the extraordinary narrative of her life? How could I fit it into a defined space in a museum? How would I find the right objects and write the right words to do her justice?
Spry described sleepless nights, filled with gnawing self-doubt, before the Queen’s coronation, which she art-directed behind the scenes. I shared those same heart-pounding nights of doubt.
Luckily, the Garden Museum has a full-time curator, Emma House. Unlike me, she has done this sort of thing before. Many times. And has been the most wonderful, calm and patient mentor and guide throughout. So we sat down, about two years ago, and started to plan.
We knew that we could not make an exhibition filled with flower arrangements for the four-month duration of the show – and plastic flowers would be an insult to everything Spry believed in. We’d also risk caricaturing her work, with poor imitations taken out of time and context.
So I came to the conclusion that I needed to find people who had actually known her, and hear their thoughts, before I could plan the exhibition.
As Mrs Spry died in 1960, this was not
an easy task. Those who knew her best had already joined her in the great flower shop in the sky. But I did find some wonderful, ancient stalwarts of the Spry empire, and the sons and daughters of her enormous band of friends and colleagues, too.
They all remembered her vividly, and were incredibly generous with their memories. Even more importantly, they were willing to share things they’d inherited from Spry: her signed books, her beautiful vases and the treasures and prized possessions of a lifetime spent bargain-hunting and junk shopping, when she wasn’t doing the flowers. The exhibition now began to take a vague shape in my mind.
Someone once said that you only really need two things to get something done: a budget and a deadline. By now we had a deadline, October 2020. We still needed a budget.
Finding the budget was, luckily, never in my remit. Though it was a good excuse for a wonderful few days in New York, in late February last year, for a fundraiser hosted by our generous new American Friends of the Garden Museum. They took over the rather swanky Metropolitan Club for a Constance Spry Coronation Luncheon and called in the A-listers, including Spry’s contemporary American counterpart, Martha Stewart, not only for a re-run of the coronation lunch, but floral talks and general financial fishing. It was a riotous success and definitely girded the loins and encouraged us in our belief that a Spry exhibition was, as Martha herself might say, a “good thing”.
Then, just as we landed back in the UK at the beginning of March, our proverbial luggage filled with enthusiasm and dollars, the world began to split in two. The pandemic had arrived and soon put paid to any thoughts of an October opening. It also made it impossible to continue meeting with my aging Spry contacts as the iron curtain of shielding and isolating swiftly closed around them. Could we pursue Constance during Covid?
It would seem that, just as the Lord taketh away, the Lord also giveth. In early summer, the Royal Horticultural Society agreed that we could view the Constance Spry archive, which is held in the Lindley Library. They also agreed that we could borrow from it for the exhibition – the first time its contents have been shown publicly. This was a major ray of light.
Emma and I spent a magical two weeks in October, between lockdowns, going through 35 boxes filled with Spry’s life; the stuff of curatorial dreams and the perfect backbone for our exhibition. Another miracle came in October. Thanks to the persistence of Christopher Woodward and Christina McMahon at the Garden Museum, we finally got our budget in the form of a Cultural Recovery Fund grant from Arts Council England (and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and HM Treasury). The Spry show was on the road again.
And so was the race to complete the story it would tell. We appealed to the public for more Spry memories and memorabilia, through social media, the press, and the Spry network I had begun to explore before lockdown.
Many more gems appeared: one of Spry’s charm bracelets; exquisite photographs of wedding flowers in the 1930s from grandchildren of the bride and a daughter of a bridesmaid; a copy of Vogue from 1937; jardinières made from old meat cloches and used at the coronation luncheon in 1953. We had our treasures; we now needed to work out how to show them to the public.
The last pre-Covid exhibition at the Garden Museum was an extraordinarily beautiful and elegiac celebration of
Emma and I spent a magical two weeks in October, between lockdowns, going through 35 boxes
Constance Spry was exceptional; she had enthusiasm, charm, energy and resolve
Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. I felt that Jeremy Herbert’s recreation of Jarman’s Prospect Cottage was inspired and exactly the route we should take too. Sadly, one of the many things I have in common with Spry is an inability to draw in any logical or accurately scaled way; so we needed a designer who could put my ideas onto paper. I asked Robin Lucas to come on board the Spry ship. Robin is a multidisciplinary designer and an Instagram wunderkind. He is deeply rooted in nature and his garden, so I knew he’d get the aesthetic I wanted and enjoy the challenge of a tight budget to create it with.
Spry was exceptional in every way; she had enthusiasm, charm, energy and resolve and accomplished so much at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything at all. She had an extraordinary life before she even started her flower business at the age of 43, and an even more extraordinary life because of it.
We hope we have captured some essence of Spry and her life and times in the exhibition we have so lovingly, and miraculously, put together in spite of this pandemic year.
Shane Connolly was born in Northern Ireland and trained at Pulbrook & Gould. He holds a Royal Warrant of Appointment to HRH The Prince of Wales and HM The Queen.
The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Rd, London SE1 7LB (020 7401 8865; gardenmuseum.org.uk).