"Winter & Spring Flowers Arranged by Constance Spry" 1953 Spry, Constance

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SPRY, Constance

Constance Spry OBE (née Fletcher, previously Marr; 5 December 1886 – 3 January 1960) was a British educator, … Read more SPRY, Constance

Constance Spry OBE (née Fletcher, previously Marr; 5 December 1886 – 3 January 1960) was a British educator, florist and author in the mid-20th century.

[140] pp.

J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd

1953

Second Impression

10" x 7 5/8"

Illustrated w/ 24 hand-coloured photographs and 12 monochrome plates

Companion volume to "Summer and Autumn Flowers". Expert instruction and Exquisite Floral arrangements. Includes Church Decorations and Flower Shows, Christmas, Hyacinths, Camelias, Tulips, Tree Peonies and much more.

Spry gave up teaching in 1928, to open her first shop, "Flower Decoration", in 1929. After securing a regular order from Granada Cinemas, she caused a sensation in fashionable society by creating an exquisite arrangement of hedgerow flowers in the windows of Atkinsons, an Old Bond Street perfumery in the West End of London, as part of the decoration undertaken by the theatrical designer Norman Wilkinson. Spry ransacked attics for unusual objects to use as containers and drew inspiration from the Dutch 17th- and 18th-century flower painters, while she popularized unusual plant materials to offset flowers, like pussy willow, weeds and grasses and ornamental kale. The biographer Diana Souhami revealed the painter Gluck had a romantic relationship with Spry, whose work informed the artist's admired floral paintings.

When she opened a larger shop in South Audley Street in Mayfair in 1934, Spry was already employing seventy people. In the same year, she published her first book, Flower Decoration, and established the "Constance Spry Flower School" at her new premises. During this period she hired the Australian Patricia Easterbrook Roberts, who later opened the Roberts School of Dramatic Floriculture in Detroit, Michigan. In 2012 English Heritage marked Spry's tenure at 64 South Audley Street with a blue plaque.

Her company created the flower arrangements for two royal weddings: the November 1935 nuptials of the Duke of Gloucester to Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott, held in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, and the more private wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in June 1937. Public interest from these commissions led to two tours of the US. Later, she arranged the flowers for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and for that of Princess Margaret.

When World War II began in 1939, Spry resumed her teaching career and lectured to women all over Britain. In 1942, she published Come into The Garden, Cook, based around French cuisine, hoping to help the war effort by encouraging the British to grow and eat their own food. Her company continued to provide floral decorations at weddings.

In 1946, she opened a domestic science school with her friend, the accomplished Le Cordon Bleu cook Rosemary Hume, at Winkfield Place, at Cranbourne in Winkfield, Berkshire. Constance lived at Orchard Lea, across the road, and then over the stable block at the Place. In 1953, Spry was commissioned to arrange the flowers at Westminster Abbey and along the processional route from Buckingham Palace for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The flowers were supplied as gifts by Commonwealth nations. The Le Cordon Bleu students at Winkfield were asked to cater a lunch for foreign delegates, for whom Hume and Spry invented a new dish – coronation chicken.

She was appointed an OBE in the 1953 Coronation Honours.

At Winkfield Place, Spry devoted years to the cultivation of particular varieties of antique roses, which she was instrumental in bringing back into fashion; David Austin's first rose introduction, in 1961, was named after her and is considered to be the foundation of his "English rose" series.

In 1956, she and Hume published the best-selling Constance Spry Cookery Book, thereby extending the Spry style from flowers to food. On 3 January 1960, she slipped on the stairs at Winkfield Place and died an hour later. Her last words were supposedly, "Someone else can arrange this". See less