THE JOURNAL / EVENTS & INSTALLATIONS
EVENTS & INSTALLATIONS

Something Fresh and Different

Sometimes the nicest jobs start with an idea that sounds slightly ridiculous on paper. For this one, hundreds of flowers in every colour imaginable were brought together around an old-fashioned English tea party — complete with a huge floral moongate and enough colour to make playing it safe completely impossible.
London Event Florist · Warren Bushaway · 16 August 2026

The job at a glance

The idea

An old-fashioned English tea party surrounded by flowers.

The look

Colourful, abundant and deliberately a little bit over the top.

The centrepiece

A large floral moongate creating the main focal point.

The flowers

Hundreds of stems grouped together in a full spectrum of colour.

Where it started

The brief was essentially to create something joyful.

Not pale, restrained or particularly sensible. Colour was the whole point.

Rather than mixing everything evenly, we grouped flowers together so each colour had its own moment. That gave the whole installation much more impact and stopped hundreds of different flowers simply becoming visual noise.

The tea-party setting gave us something quite traditional to work against, which made the flowers feel even more exuberant.

Colour works much harder when you stop being frightened of using enough of it.

colourful eclectic table centres
hanging tea cups
Warrens NOTE

Why grouping colour works

When you're using a lot of colour, the temptation is to mix everything together.

We usually find the opposite works better.

Putting similar colours together gives the eye somewhere to settle and makes each shade look stronger. From a distance you see big areas of colour; when you get closer, you start noticing the individual flowers.

It's a very simple trick, but it completely changes the way a large installation reads.

Building the moongate

The floral moongate became the thing that held everything together.

From one angle it framed the seating area. From another it became a backdrop. And once people started arriving it inevitably became somewhere everyone wanted to photograph.

That's something we think about a lot with larger floral installations.

They still have to look beautiful in the room, but increasingly they also need to work from a camera angle.

Ideally they should do both.

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