Constance Spry, the high-society florist who never wilted

Cut flowers, cooking, adjusting the garden: summer holidays are with us again, the weeks that an overstretched reader has just summed up for me as “visitors and vegetation”. Over mine presides a past British authority, Constance Spry, who sets standards I will never meet.

I have her books on flower arranging and two of her famous white vases. I also have her huge Constance Spry Cookery Book, bound in 1956 in rose pink, which is never short of advice: “Iced coffee . . . one of the devastatingly simple things so difficult to make.”

She can still complicate an entire afternoon, but she insisted, “I was first, and hope last, to be a gardener.” Is gardening the key to her many-sided life, or does such a life never have a single key?

Spry conjures up varied memories for older readers: flower arranging, cookery lessons, her shops in London and Manhattan and her recipes for anything from braised lettuce in cream to devilled leftover turkey. She had
a pink, myrrh-scented double rose named after her, still good as a bush or climber.

She loved philadelphus and, like me, had an avenue of its scented flowers. She drew heavily on her garden for flower arrangements, but amazed high society by including hedgerow flowers too. She was already sympathetic to a bit of wilding.

Her stratospheric career as a florist began by chance in 1927. Sidney Bernstein, the impresario, came to lunch and was impressed by her garden’s natural look, seeing its potential as decor for his cinemas. It took her to royal weddings and bouquets, including those at the last coronation, where she also commanded the menu. She devised a new “coronation chicken” for the occasion.

Last Friday I ate a derivative of it with a notable amateur cook. She served the update, called “cold curried chicken”, from a 1970 cookbook by Katie Stewart, saying it was better: it omits Spry’s tablespoons of apricot purée.

There are still female survivors of her schools and classes, trained in domestic skills and cooking at Wingfield House in Berkshire, which she bought as a wreck in autumn 1946. She made it into the finishing school of choice for society girls who needed to run postwar houses without their mothers’ servants.

I sometimes wish for a Wingfield alumna to come and take over my life. I particularly wished for one last weekend when my attempt at iced coffee went badly wrong.

Until September 26, an evocative exhibition at London’s Garden Museum looks at Spry’s achievements through photos, items and paintings. It is a fascinating cameo of social mobility. Female education, gender and business, fashion and high society interlock with sex and orientation.

Spry, born Fletcher, married in Ireland in 1910, had a son in 1912 and then began an affair with Henry Spry, the head of her office in London’s wartime Ministry of Munitions. She divorced her Irish husband and lived with Spry but never married again.

In 1932, aged 46, she called on a new client who was ordering bunches of her well-chosen white flowers: the artist Hannah Gluckstein (“Gluck”). At first sight, high voltage sizzled between them and for four years, they had a passionate affair.

Meanwhile Spry encouraged the head of her London flower shop to have an affair with Henry Spry, her male partner. Gluck then fell in love with another woman. Spry had to rally and cope with spiralling demands from high society for her flowers. She never wilted.

In 1937, she did all the flowers for the wedding of Wallis Simpson to the Duke of Windsor. It was marked with a flowery photo of the bride by Cecil Beaton, on show at the Garden Museum. “To Mrs Spry who made my wedding so lovely,” Simpson signed her copy, though Spry was not married.

During her affair with Gluck, she had bought a striking picture by her called “Flora’s Cloak”, showing a naked young Flora in a cloak of flowers. Even after their split, it continued to hang in her flower shop and was known fondly as Inter-flora. In 2018 it was bought for the Tate to mark the centenary of British women’s right to vote.

In 2010 Sue Shepherd, then at the BBC, published The Surprising Life of Constance Spry, which lived up to its title. In 2013 the dramatist Alison Burge wrote Storm in a Flower Vase, which ran well in London’s West End and focused on the relationship of Spry and Gluck. As it opened, I heard a recording of Spry on BBC Radio 4: “Let your inhibitions go . . . if in doubt, ladies, leave it out.”

She championed restrained arrangements of flowers, not the crammed displays of modern florists in foyers. She even referred to her “male counter-principle: if in doubt, stick it in”. I nearly drove off the road.

The presenter of Woman’s Hour then interviewed a former employee at a lowly level in Spry’s office. She began by stressing that “Mrs Spry was very well connected” but when pressed about the lesbianism, remarked: “If you went into her office you could catch a whiff of it.”

The exhibition does not dwell on that scent too much. It is accompanied by an excellent little book, Constance Spry and the Fashion of Flowers, which I strongly recommend. It has superb photos of her life and excellent chapters by Shane Connolly, himself a major flower arranger and curator of the exhibition.

Flower arranging was a profession for young women, partly for their dexterity but also because the wages were low. No doubt Spry loved presiding over as many as 70 female employees but her orientation was not the key to her life.

What comes out is her profound commitment to female education. She came from a working-class family in Derby and first trained as a health lecturer. She began her career, aged 19, in rural Ireland, travelling in a caravan and instructing mothers how to care for their babies. After the first world war, she returned to the UK and ran the Homerton and South Hackney Continuation School for Girls.

Gardening had been her solace in her unhappy marriage and so flower arranging was already on the curriculum. Styling the coronation was miles away, but the teaching in her books, and her courses at Wingfield, had deep roots.

In 1937, she shipped over to America for a gruelling itinerary of lectures from coast to coast. She was delighted by American ladies’ keen interest in their homes and gardens. She also discovered Sellotape and its use as a fixative for wobbly flowers in vases.

From the 1930s, fascinating photos record the vast crowds and her flowery extras at high-society weddings. At one, the bridesmaids’ dresses were colour coded according to their degree of intimacy with the bride. Try it post-lockdown: gold is for absolute best friends only.

I much like the show’s memories of her, written by Helen Kirkpatrick. “She had an insatiable curiosity and an extraordinary talent for arousing it in others. Her opposition to mediocrity in any form and a rollicking sense of humour made her a rare human being. She was always so alive and so full of fun and enthusiasm: we never noticed she was growing older.”

A born teacher, I sense, whom we would all have loved in lockdown. That cookbook on my shelf has come to life.

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