The Farewell Flowers Directory (TFFD) is primed to stage the first ever display of funeral floristry at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025 and it will do it with the support of New Covent Garden Flower Market.

In an historic first for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, TFFD - a not-for-profit that aims to connect people to independent florists offering personal and compostable arrangements and eventually remove plastic from funeral floristry - has been invited to stage an exhibit of funeral floristry at the heart of Chelsea’s Great Pavilion.

The creative display will demonstrate that you do not need to sacrifice beauty for sustainability. To spread the core messages, it will feature exclusively British-grown cut flowers and foliage and be entirely free of plastic floral foam and single-use plastic.

TFFD is the brainchild of Gill Hodgson MBE of Fieldhouse Flowers in Yorkshire and founder of Flowers from the Farm (pictured above), and florist and funeral floristry tutor, Carole Patilla of Tuckshop Flowers in Birmingham. It is an online listing that describes itself as a “positive, practical response to the huge issue of plastic waste in funeral floristry…on a mission to change the world of funeral flowers one compostable arrangement at a time”. As well as its environment-friendly approach, the florists and growers behind the movement also want to personalise the funeral experience.

Gill says: “An unsustainable circle has evolved in funeral flowers over recent decades. In founding The Farewell Flowers Directory, we aim to break the chain. We want to make people aware of the many talented florists creating fully compostable, plastic-free floral designs and inspire more florists to make the switch. We want to demonstrate just how beautiful, personal and sustainable funeral flowers can be.

“Funeral flowers don’t have to look funereal, they can be anything you want them to be. We hope that our Chelsea exhibit will help start conversations and let people know that they have a choice. You can choose to celebrate and reflect a life with fresh, seasonal materials that are natural, beautiful and resonant with meaning. And you can choose for your tributes to tread lightly on the planet.”

The Chelsea installation by TFFD will take the form of an artistic interpretation of a funeral scene. Its centrepiece will be a soaring arrangement of vibrant, wildly natural seasonal garden flowers and foliage that appears to burst out of an open willow coffin held aloft on white birch pallbearers.

Watching on will be the wirework forms of a man and his dog by artist, Susan Nichols. Nestled nearby in the grass by the gravestones will be personal funeral flower tributes from walking boots filled with fresh flowers to casket sprays, wreaths and arrangements designed to be divided and shared with family and friends.

There are powerful mental wellbeing benefits associated with flowers and gardens and the process of working with flowers can be soothing at a stressful and difficult time. Florists from TFFD take the time to talk with the family and draw out the details that will inform their designs. Many are happy to incorporate flowers from the family’s garden or welcome families to choose flowers from their plot or even join them in the studio to help create the flower arrangement.

“As funeral florists, we know that personalised and thoughtful funeral flowers make a difference because people write, call or even pop by to thank us," says Carole. "People often say how the beauty of the flowers helps to get people talking, provides a point of beauty to focus on and makes the experience of funerals that little bit easier.”

Founded in 2024, TFFD already has around 200 member florists across the UK. Its Chelsea exhibit has also been generously sponsored by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM), Green Funeral Flowers by Tuckshop Flowers and Workplace Bereavement.

Walk on with personal tributes

Having designed this beautiful walking boots arrangement, Carole Patilla understands both the power that well-designed flowers can have and the need for a more sustainable approach. She explains: “A family came to me saying that they wanted something for their husband/dad but he wasn't really a flowery person. Veg was more his thing as a gardener. Initially they were keen to have a vegetable based arrangement, but when they went over to my website, they saw some hiking boots I'd arranged previously and fell in love with them and switched from veggies entirely.

“He'd loved walking and the countryside, and they asked me to include heather in them as a nod to moorland hikes. I made them as wild-looking and unflowery as I could, whilst still making them lovely. They asked me to include red roses as he'd worn a red rose buttonhole at his wedding. They supplied the boots, and I placed jam jars with water inside each boot and filled them with flowers. The design was meaningful, simple, seasonal, beautiful and free of plastic waste.”

Surveying the London funeral flowers scene

Fran Bailey, who runs The Fresh Flower Company, is a supporter of TFFD and we asked her about the business of flowers and floristry for London funerals.

She says: “We work closely with a funeral directors called Poetic Endings, in Forest Hill, which offers a totally new approach to delivering funerals. When you walk in there, it doesn’t feel like a funeral directors and they make it clear from the start that you can have the funeral that best suits you and the person who has died. You don’t get the morbid sense of a funeral, more a celebration of life and thinking about what the person loved and what they would have liked at their farewell.

“The vast majority of people don’t know what they want or even that they have options. Most funeral directors would automatically steer customers down the route of the Victorian style funerals that we have become accustomed to over more than 150 years – the formal burial, the limousines or horse drawn hearses, the familiar coffin styles and floral name designs.

“I’m not saying that’s wrong, but there is a realisation now that you can do something a little more personal; a funeral that reflects the person who has passed away. I wholeheartedly agree with that. There are beautiful cemeteries in places like Camberwell and Nunhead in South East London, but if you visit a grave four or five months after a funeral, often what’s left of the floral tributes does not reflect what the people who left them initially intended. There are a growing number of natural burial sites being opened inside the M25, allowing families and friends to commemorate and celebrate the person who has died and bury them in woodland. Plastic of any form is banned, as the burial has to be done in a fully biodegradable and sustainable way.”

The switch in emphasis and the advent of Farewell Flowers has inspired a growing movement in Flowers From the Farm, which is a “very giving community”, according to Fran, that shares huge amounts of information. “Even for someone who has been around as long as I have, the Instagram and YouTube demos are very useful. I can remember the days before we predominantly used foam, but it’s still good to be reminded how to work with moss,” she says.

“I am realistic and I do still provide customers with the floral tributes they want. But the changes I’ve seen are being driven by the customers and increasingly, I’m finding that they want seasonal – which generally means British when possible – natural and no foam. This is a nationwide trend, although I’d say in London, funerals are perhaps more traditional than elsewhere. You still see a lot of horses! “It isn’t a case of one way or the other in my view. You can juxtapose the two – you can follow tradition and still incorporate natural flowers. Using seasonal flowers and being foam free is the core Farewell Flowers message, of course, but it’s a year-round business, so there has to be a realistic approach.

“I think the Flower Market is very good at catering for funerals – like I say there is still a demand for very traditional funerals in London and for some florists, it’ll be 20% plus of their turnover. A lot of the traders come from floristry backgrounds or have florists in their family, so they are very aware of that.

“Outside of the funeral market, plenty of venues and other organisations have also started to prohibit their preferred suppliers from using floral foams. I’m a recommended supplier of the RHS for instance. They have done that. It’s the way it’s going and it calls on florists to be adaptable and more creative," Fran says.

“We recycle as much soft plastic as possible, minimise the amount of plastic packaging we use and it makes sense to reduce the use of foam too. There is still a debate about its use, as it is convenient and quick to use. Using moss, I think you can be more inventive and create more natural pieces, but you definitely have to get into the workshop earlier and also do everything on the same day!

"Across the industry though, there is a definite willingness to do what we can to reduce plastic waste.”