Floral art with The Flower Hunter
Celebrated floral stylist Lucy Hunter shows us how to make a beautiful Autumnal table centrepiece.
‘The Flower Hunter’ Lucy Hunter is an inspiration to anyone who wants to change professional direction and live a more creative life. After giving up an unsatisfying job at the Bank of Scotland in Chester, Lucy is now one of the most in-demand landscape designers and floral stylists in the country; she even has her own brand name - the Flower Hunter.
‘I’d actually done a Fine Art degree at Liverpool University and spent three wonderful years at colleagues wafting around in dungarees with a paintbrush in my hand,’ she says, looking back at her twenties. ‘But there’s definitely pressure on people to have a proper job and I needed to earn money, so that’s how I ended up at the bank. I managed to stick it out for 8 years but that life wasn’t for me.’
Getting married, moving to a cottage in North Wales and having a baby was the catalyst for change. ‘I decided to retrain as a landscape designer and my new career evolved from that.’
Lucy started with small jobs, but before long, had won a lucrative garden design commission for a high-net worth individual in the North West.
‘But as my business grew, I started getting bogged down by administration again; the VAT returns and the spreadsheets. So when my sister asked me to do her wedding flowers, I jumped at the chance. That led to a floristry course, which led to Instagram and teaching myself photography and taking pictures of my arrangements. The book deal for The Flower Hunter came from that.’
Lucy calls her a ‘restless creative’. She’s certainly a prolific creative, with a portfolio that covers landscape design, floral styling, photography, Instagram, teaching and creating show gardens for the RHS. Author seems like a natural extension for someone who is clearly a storyteller at heart.
I was lucky enough to do a floral art workshop with Lucy last week to celebrate the launch of her second book The Flower Hunter - Creating a floral love story inspired by the landscape and it was a joy to watch her work. The meditative process of selecting flowers, snipping stems, and transforming a selection of Autumn blooms into a sweet-smelling work of art that was as beautiful as any Rococo painting.
‘Flowers are food for the soul,’ she agrees. ‘We don’t allow ourselves enough time to be creative and I think that’s because we live in a capitalistic society, one that values productivity, which makes many of us feel pressurised to be productive all the time. I really got into arranging over Lockdown because it gave me the time to be creative. Now flower arranging is my time-out. It forces you to slow down. It forces you to look. And we should always take the time to smell the flowers.’