Inside the 'rule-breaking' school that's turning bankers into florists
There’s an atmosphere of calm concentration in the converted 17th-century stables where Rachel Wardley runs her floristry courses. The lesson of the morning is how to make hand-tied bouquets, and the students are picking blooms from jars of British-grown flowers around the studio, lining them up on a table.
“Enjoy yourselves and have fun with this,” says Rachel as she shows how to do it in one hand, adding flowers and foliage stem by stem and twisting her wrist incrementally after each addition to form a spiral.
“Try not to be influenced by what you think it should look like or what other people are doing. Let your flowers do the talking.”
Encouraging budding florists to express their creativity is a defining feature of the courses at Rachel’s Tallulah Rose Flower School in Cumbria.
“My approach is to allow people to be free and not feel bound by rules that say there have to be so many of flowers of this shape and that height,” says Rachel, who works from the former stables at Levens Hall on the edge of the Lake District. “I encourage everyone to look at what the flowers are telling them, rather than saying each arrangement has to be a certain way.”
Nurturing a new career
Since she opened Tallulah Rose in 2009, Rachel has built up an international following. Her four and two-week career-change courses have given hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers, shop assistants, marketers, fundraisers and City high-flyers the knowledge and self-belief to launch new lives as wedding florists, funeral florists, high-street florists, floral stylists and flower farmers.
“I can make someone a florist even if they’ve never done an arrangement before,” Rachel says. “If they have a passion for flowers and are willing to work hard and keep learning, I will give them all the skills they need.”
It’s a beguiling promise, and anyone sitting at their desk post-holiday, feeling they’re in the wrong job, might want to proceed with caution before reading the Student Stories on the Tallulah Rose website. “Rachel and the team make you feel like you can conquer anything,” reads one of dozens of testimonials from former students – the “Tallulahs” – who’ve opened studios, shops and home-based enterprises in the UK, US and Europe. “[Rachel] stretched my imagination and enabled me to achieve things I did not think possible,” reads another. “I left the course inspired, full of confidence and with a very clear direction for my business.”
Rachel’s own floral epiphany came in 2005, when she was working as an accessories buyer in London for brands including Topshop and Debenhams.
“A friend bought me a day workshop at the Jane Packer Flower School as a thank you for being her birthing partner,” she remembers. “I was doing a part-time course in millinery at fashion college at the time, but I’m quite impatient and realised that with flowers I could create something beautiful in minutes.”
When Rachel and her husband Martin, a songwriter and business coach, decided to leave London, it was the push she needed to swap fashion for floristry. She went back to the Jane Packer school to take a four-week course and opened a flower shop in Bath, where she and Martin relocated.
Three years later, however, she realised her vocation lay in teaching when she created a career-change course at the request of a customer and saw a gap in the market for one that taught business skills as well as technical ones. She then closed her shop and founded Tallulah Rose Flower School shortly after, moving the business to Cumbria in 2019.
Green economy
Around a quarter of the modules on Tallulah Rose career-change courses – which are also available online – focus on business skills such as accounting and social media, while every practical lesson includes discussion about sourcing and costing.
But one of the most important lessons Rachel wants to pass on is that sustainable floristry can also be profitable. She has banished flower foam – a single-use plastic – from her studio and pledged to use only chemical-free British-grown flowers from 2025, her motives being aesthetic as well as ethical.
“I’m known for a more natural style – I like to allow beautiful flowers to do what they do,” she says, looking round the studio, where dahlias, daisies and cornflowers, many from farms in Cumbria and neighbouring counties, tumble out of vintage vases and students’ bouquets.
“The range of flowers from UK growers is now so much greater than you’d get from a wholesaler,” she says, explaining that because they travel such short distances, they don’t have to be as robust as air-freighted, pesticide-laden imports. “British growers can experiment with more delicate species, which also tend to be more heavily scented because they haven’t had the scent bred out of them.”
British flowers will not be on the curriculum at every course Rachel is teaching next year, however. She is taking Tallulah Rose on the road to the US and Holland. It’s thrilling, she says, to be welcoming so many new recruits into her fold. She is also always on hand to nurture her graduates and runs a student forum where current and former students seek advice from and mentor each another.
Rachel smiles as she observes the supportive huddle of Tallulahs-in-progress admiring and photographing bouquets.
“I teach in small groups because I want it to feel special for everyone,” she says. “They all have different skills, reasons and backgrounds for being here, but they end up being really close. There are always floods of tears at the end.”
You Might Also Like
