From Petals to Purpose: A New Era of Sustainable Event Floristry with Mary Jane Vaughan Designs
Mary Jane Vaughan Designs is a creative event floristry studio based in London and are one of our trusted floral suppliers. Their business started 40 years ago as a flower shop in Fulham and has grown to a flourishing luxury florist. With over 40 years of experience, they are experts in the ever-changing landscape of the industry, including the increasing importance of sustainable event floristry. In this blog post, they share their experiences weaving more conscious choices into their business strategy…
Our respect for the natural world is at the forefront of all we do, and we always try to reflect the seasons in our designs; by embracing British grown flowers and foliage in the months that they are available and incorporating them whenever we can in our work.
Our use of floral foam has decreased significantly over recent years and we will always avoid it where possible. We have developed techniques to make even large-scale arrangements without the use of foam and find our natural floristry style lends itself to more environmentally friendly floristry methods. We have invested in vases and mechanics that support foam free designs without ever compromising on style.
We also focus on the re-use of cut flowers post event where possible. Post event cut flowers are carefully gathered for collection by the Confetti Club – a not-for-profit organisation that turns petals into sustainable confetti. For a recent luxury brand event, we sourced all or the roses from a beautiful walled garden in Shropshire and the petals from which made for the most perfect confetti!
We are very proud to support the charity for homelessness, St Mungo’s in their ‘Putting Down Roots’ initiative, a horticultural therapy and training project, using gardening as a tool to help people in their recovery. As often as we can, we design with them in mind – proving that plants can be a stylish and sustainable option for beautiful and elegant events. For a recent event at Chelsea Design Centre, we included 150 beautiful perennial plants for a sculptured, container garden inspired entrance design. All of the arrangements for the indoor spaces were foam free, English flower filled displays and the plants were donated afterwards to St Mungo’s.
In July 2024 we sourced a new service for the recycling of our green waste and partnered with COM:POST who collect our organic waste. Since the start of our partnership, we have produced over 5 tonnes of nutrient-rich compost.
From the beginning of 2025 we are offering a wedding flower collection named ‘at first light’ for which we will source all flowers and foliage from British farms. It is the first time we are advertising an offering that we have been working towards for years, which is so exciting. The flowers featured in the designs for C&M’s wedding at Kew Gardens were led by what was most beautiful in the cutting garden at the time, including foxgloves, peonies, roses, honeysuckle, campanula, sweet rocket, cornflower, astrantia and daisies.
One of our creative team has been recently accredited as a member of the Sustainable Floristry Network (SFN), independent education and membership organisation for florists, and has committed to transforming our floristry practice for a sustainable future.
As we look to the future, we have ambitions to further our work in all areas of sustainability. We will continue to research and develop ways to offer floristry designs that are more sustainable – using flowers that are sourced and grown sustainably, and championing designs that avoid the use of floral foam.
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