Helen Floto has a magic touch with flowers and foliage, creating arrangements that bring the garden into your home. Lisa Millard smells the roses
Tucked away in the picturesque village of Elsworth, nestled under a thatched roof and embraced by borders of feathery fennel, bushes of blowsy roses and boules of fragrant lavender, is the lovely home of Blossom and Berry, Helen Floto Designs.
“I’m fascinated by the language of flowers, the meaning of them, and how you can pass on that joy to other people” says Helen, a Cambridge University graduate who also studied at Capel Manor College, as she picks a selection of flowers to create a pretty posy for these pages. Freddie, the family’s black flat-coated retriever, bounds around the gently-sloped garden that combines pleasingly curvaceous borders, wild meadow, vegetable plot, tree house and even a turf sofa, designed and made by Helen and her two children, Anna and Ben, which sits, all green and fluffy, at the top of the garden.
Helen designs flowers for a range of venues and events, including the Old Bridge Hotel in Huntingdon, Childerley and South Farm, specialises in border designs, and runs bespoke workshops demonstrating how to create floral arrangements from garden posies and rose bowls to winter wreaths and autumnal displays.
“I designed a bouquet for a spring bride earlier this year and filled it with cow parsley, bluebells, hawthorn, honeysuckle and aquilegia. Each May she will see her bouquet blossom in the countryside. Flowers can be so evocative and, to me, that’s very special. I am creating memories from what nature does naturally.”
Helen has a connection to flowers, she understands what works and her eye is well honed to the wild beauty in nature. She passes me a heart woven from hazel, which she hires for weddings and events,made by her friend’s niece, Emily, and called Emily’s Hearts. “The hazel comes from a bluebell wood and Emily, who has been very poorly, made them with her aunt who told me that the day making the hearts was full of laughter.
“It makes the hearts very, very special,” says Helen, draping one with ivy and tying a cornflower and wispy love-in-a-mist posy to the pointed tip, transforming the structure into a thing of breathtaking beauty. “That’s an important part to what I do. It’s the special ingredient.”
Helen’s garden is testament to her talent and provides a place that is a constant source of comfort and joy. A former television producer and campaign film maker, Helen moved back to Cambridge to base her life around family.
“In recent years there have been life-changing losses that have floored me. But I have learned to pick myself up and my garden has been my salvation,” she smiles. “I am becoming the person I was, the person I want to be, and I think that comes out of loving what I do.”
As Helen picks the final flowers to make two ‘how-to’ displays for Journal readers, Sheena, the Elsworth postie, arrives with buckets of sweet peas grown in her greenhouse. Sheena, pictured below, supplied her flowers to a Gold Medal winner at Chelsea this year and her sweet peas can be bought from the Elsworth Community Shop.
“I think the beauty comes from the combination of flowers, textures and scent,” says Helen, smelling the delicate sweet peas. “People come to me because they have heard about what I do and they put their trust in me. It’s a huge accolade.”
Blossom and Berry, Helen Floto Designs, can be contacted on 07789 560646.
To see more of Helen’s designs, see www.facebook.com/pages/Helen-Floto-Designs. Email Helen on helen.floto@gmail.com
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