Are we Encouraging the Next Generation of Florists?

I fell in love with flowers as a little girl, I was fascinated by their colours, their scents, the myriad of shapes and when my Auntie Queenie took me to the florist shop her friend Newton Flanders owned I was sold!

At 19 I started my training, a good old-fashioned bench trained apprenticeship, with regular assessments from outside assessors.  It wasn’t glamourous that’s for sure, I bleached many buckets, made many cups of tea and swept acres of floors, but I also watched and listened and absorbed everything I could.  It was hard work, cold, physically demanding, long hours and sometimes weirdly smelly and awful pay, but I loved it all.

Nowadays floristry is sold with a much more glam edge, lots of floaty frocks and wafting through meadows and that in my humble opinion gives us somewhat of a problem.  We all struggle with the florists popping up with no training offering weddings and flowers at peaks and honestly its really annoying, isn’t it?  But how easy is it to actually access solid training these days?

There are fewer and fewer colleges offering floristry; I live bang in the centre of the flower growing area near the Fens of Lincolnshire and there is not a college offering Floristry for miles.  If you find a college course you then need to access up to 150 hours of work placement time.  Not easy now when so many florist shops have closed, or have minimal staff with free time to offer mentoring.  Lots of florists have now become studio based and may concentrate on events and weddings so cannot offer regular hours or a broad curriculum.

Many private training course literally cost thousands of pounds with few guarantees of quality and it can be hard for a new florist to know where to spend their money to get a decent experience.  Lots of florists on Tik Tok and Instagram are saying training isn’t necessary and making people believe self-taught is the way to go.

None of this is good for the industry as a whole, we absolutely need new blood joining us in this amazing flowery world but we also have the responsibility of looking at how we help those people access really good quality training and calling out those courses that teach nothing of use.

So, what can we do?  Firstly, if you, can offer experience hours to a student or maybe think about taking someone on and give them an apprenticeship (information is available about offering this on the Direct Gov website).  As an event florist, can you offer days of experience to a student or new florist and let them shadow you and learn whilst offering a free pair of hands? Even simply sharing in Facebook groups for florists, details of really good training that you have had can be a help.

If we don’t support those who are joining our industry behind us and extend a welcoming hand to them where will our industry be in 10 or 20 years’ time?  Will it be the preserve of those rich enough to access private training or heavens forfend florists with no training at all and how will either of these things keep our beautiful industry alive?

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Viv Bradford trained in West Germany in the late 1980s before returning to the UK, where she has pursued many roles in the industry from running retail premises, teaching floristry, working in wholesale, business coaching florists and running an award-winning studio florist specialising in weddings. Viv also created and runs Facebook group The Floristry Geek for students and those new to the industry which concentrates on educational content.