This year our director, Clare, attended RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Here she tells us why she is passionate about flowers and how she brings horticulture to her table.

What brings you back to Chelsea Flower show each year?

Chelsea is an annual celebration for gardening and gardening design. It shows off some of our leading British design talent in the show gardens of various styles and sizes and they are inspirational to watch over the years. It showcases trends in planting style and plants, some of which seeps into one’s own creative choices in one’s own plot at home. As a nation, including myself, we have a  love of our gardens and this reflects back into our choices as we entertain with friends; be that a posy on the lunch table; a garden table under a rose covered pergola or a meadow design on a paper napkin.  Thus my business and personal interests nicely collide at Chelsea! As the Chelsea Flower show takes place a few miles from the Talking Tables office, I am lucky enough to be able to escape each year for an afternoon entry and I stay later into the evening to see the show gardens as it becomes more peaceful.

How do you bring the garden to your table?

I do this in several ways. I love my Ella Doran photographic place mats with handsome vegetables printed on them. I will also often have a flower inspired print on a paper table napkin. And since January, my new year resolution has been to bring in some flowers form the garden every Sunday after a day’s work in the garden. I am using small bud vases for relaxed arrangements.

What do flowers mean to you?

Flowers mean many things to me: first and foremost they mean colour. I warm to yellows; oranges and the bright greens of euphorbia’s.  They also reflect a calming link to the natural world as they respond to sun, soil and climate; flowers will only come back year after year when they are happy in their place in the hedgerow, meadow or flower bed. Selecting and arranging flowers in a garden is a never ending creative outlet; arranging patterns of contrasting foliage and flower heads over the seasons and over multiple years. They are a meditative outlet.

We hope we’ve inspired you!

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