Required Reading: The Surprising Life of Constance Spry - Gardenista
British florist Constance Spry’s image is at odds with who she was: a revolutionary flower decorator and intensely creative teacher, gardener, cook, and friend. Her life is described entertainingly in The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard. Photography by Georgie Newbery for Gardenista, except where noted. “Surprising” is an apt description of the life of Spry. Her artistic talent with flowers led her away from an early period of charity work and teaching in London’s East End to decorating shop windows in Bond Street, which she found difficult to square with her social conscience. Above:Photograph by Kendra Wilson. With the enthusiastic reception to her “country weeds,” Spry soon had her own shop called Flower Decorations (never “arrangements”). As with her flower choices, Spry’s use of materials was democratic: she saw vase-potential in objects discarded in the street and she invented new techniques to pull off the impossible. The black and white photos in The Surprising Life of Constance Spry ($15.44 from Amazon) are are only able to portray some of the spirit of Constance Spry’s designs. The answer is that we see her influence in every creative floral arrangement today. Though the circles in which they moved were not worried by unconventional behavior, they must have made a striking couple with Gluck only ever dressed in men’s clothes and Constance resembling the late Queen Mother. Snowdrops, pulmonaria, euphorbia, scented narcissi, willow, hazel catkins, honeysuckle, and one high-class bloom: amaryllis. Gardening contemporary Beverley Nichols explains this in the foreword to one of Spry’s many books: “Doing a Constance Spry… means suddenly stopping in a country lane, and noting for the first time a scarlet cadenza of berries, and fitting it, in one’s mind’s eye, into a pewter vase against a white wall.”