Last month I signed up for two day class with AESME. I am so inspired by Alex And Jess, the founder of AESME. I have been a big fan of their work since last year and it was such a dream came true to be able to visit their studio, meet them and learn from them personally. After I finished my second day I asked them whether I could have a short interview with them, and they were happy to do it!

What is your background?

Alex: We have no background in floristry, we both had careers before floristry. I worked at events and fundraising for Oxford University, and Jess worked for an editorial office in Oxford, we tried lots of different things before. And then we came to floristry because it was a flower arranging hobby of mine, we want to run our own business and do something creative. So I did an internship in New York for a flower studio called Saipua. I wrote to the owner called Sarah asking for an internship and was not expecting her to say yes and asked me to come on the next spring.

Jess: I did not come along with Ally to New York because I was working at that time and it is kind of of Ally’s hobby at that stage so I was just interested in watching what she was doing.

Alex: I went to the the studio for two weeks and worked on couple of weddings and workshops. She gave me some classes with her privately, was amazing and I was completely in love after that! Came back to London and went for coffee with Jess and I was like “This is what I want to do with my life, I finally found it!” and Jess was like “cool, let’s do it together!”.

How did you come up with the name ‘AESME’?

Alex: Esmé is the traditional French name that we like, it is the character in a couple of books that we really love and it is just a name that we always loved, but we wanted to create a name that was objective so it did not mean anything. We adapted the name Aesme by adding an “A” to the front, we want five letter words that look really beautiful in paper and sounding nice. So we basically made it up. So it is an adaptation of the name that we love.

Jess: And it looks strong but it sounds soft. It took a while to come up with that.

Who is your biggest influence and where do you look for inspiration?

Alex: Probably Constance Spry, we love her books, we got lots of her books here and we use the same methods that she used with chicken wire & kenzan, not using foam also using containers that is basically like kitchen containers or the antique vessels that we used for jams or for pickles or some kind of foods, so we like to use those kind of old containers. We are also influenced by garden designers as well. There is a garden designer called Jinny Blom who creates really beautiful naturalistic gardens.

We also go visit gardens a lot around the country because there is so many beautiful heritage English gardens. We go and see what is growing, how plants grow together and we come back with lots of ideas of things that we want to grow in our gardens also ways of arranging them as well so they look really natural. That’s the big inspiration, gardens.

Jess: And then also things outside of flowers, floristry and garden such as fashion, clothes, architecture, food, and lots of different things.

How do you describe your style of arrangement?

Alex: Garden inspired. Because it really is. The ingredients all have all been cut from our garden throughout the growing season. So they are genuinely garden ingredients, but also we take inspiration from the garden where we cutting. So if we are doing a spring class, it will be very seasonal ingredients we will forage four blossom and particular types of foliage that look amazing in spring. So everything is very in tune with the setting, the weather and what is going on in the landscape.

So, garden inspired, naturalistic, seasonal, quite romantic and a little bit rambling. Because in gardens can thrive to look a certain way but nature will always take over again, so it will always go back to being wild and overgrown. So we want an element of that like it is not perfect, it is not straight, it is kind of wild and natural.

What do you see in the future of floristry industry?

Jess: I think now people started aware of where thing is coming from. There is greater demand and bigger market from home-grown produced, so small artisanal growers. In the same way that has been a revival in a small farm and buy biodynamic farm growing vegetables. There are lots of small growers and that has happened from the past 10 years and that is affecting market, because brides are seeing British flowers and naturalistic garden flowers and that’s what they are wanting and it is in tune with the fact that they are start thinking about where those things come from and the impact on environment that things are having.

So, the British flower styles not only garden style but also the sustainable practices, because floristry is incredibly unsustainable industry that uses huge amount of energy, water, chemicals. That is a pushback against that at the moment, like Phillipa Craddock who did the Royal Wedding and she did incredible archway and she did not use any floral foam, she just used water vessels and that is a really big flag in the industry to say we have going to stop using these things, because you are selling a natural product and you are talking about nature that is meant to be about the flowers and you are using things that is that is completely counterproductive to that. So it think it is going to be a big shift in sustainability and more mindful ways of sourcing flowers. And in relation to that, when it comes to design shape and form, just like food people are more flexible about things because they know if it is organic and you want it to be organic, you need to be more forgiving about the nature of materials.