Brigitte Girling is an artist, floral designer, gardener, teacher and podcaster enthralled by the wild beauty of East Anglia.

She taps into the rich biodiversity of Suffolk to inspire her UK grown floral creations, made foam, pesticide, and herbicide-free to truly let nature sing. 

Her love of nature has led her to focus on the seasonality of floral shapes and pass that appreciation on to her clients, students and audience. 

Oasis of Calm

My garden is my little oasis of calm, and last year I appreciated it more than ever as an escape from a strange new world, a place to observe nature, and a space full of beauty and peace. It’s natural, wild, woolly and just a little untidy. My garden style, like my floral design, is deliberately untamed, authentic, and a celebration of the brave and quirky. Whether it’s a tenacious self-seeder or pretty ‘weed’, most things are allowed to do their own thing. 

At just under an acre, over the last 20 years of living here, I have slowly turned a space overwhelmed with laurel, poplar, leylandii, conifer and little else into a haven for wildlife and a place to grow flowers for my floral arrangements. Wildlife and nature are fundamental to this garden. They were here before me, and I hope they will be here long after I have gone. My mission is simple; to nurture their environment and make it as safe and welcoming for them as possible.

I determined to never use pesticides or chemicals, to embrace wildflowers or ‘weeds’ as so many insist on calling them, and begin to plant for pollinators. The leylandii and thuggish friends were removed and replaced with mixed native hedging; spindle, hawthorn and field maple. The glorious old oaks, limes, beeches and plane trees that now remain are slowly stretching back up towards the sky like stiff old gardeners! I am fortunate to have a beautiful copper beech tree which I used as inspiration for a copper beech circle I planted up an untidy corner. This now surrounds a wildlife pond full of impenetrable nettles, honeysuckle and red campion. It is an area full of insects and birdlife and the occasional grass snake basking in the sun.



I have always been a gardener but working with flowers specifically began about 13 years ago. I freelanced for about 8 years (before I set up Moss & Stone) and I loved it. I loved the camaraderie, the continual learning, the madness of the floral community and the beautiful places I was privileged to work in. 

But slowly I realised this wasn’t enough. The flowers I generally worked with were imports, beautiful but characterless. I longed to work with true seasonality, flowers with shape, movement and personality. A twist, a freckle, a stretch and a scent. Not perfection. Frankly, perfection is boring to me. I wanted to celebrate the perfectly imperfect beauty of nature; natural flaws and blemishes, weather-worn good looks. I wanted, needed, to find true authenticity in my work. I needed to go back to the garden where my love affair with flowers began.

Coupled with this, I began to realise that many things we take for granted as florists are not sustainable or good for the environment. The ubiquitous floral foam for example, used everywhere, is actually, a block of non-biodegradable, microplastic. Who knows how long this will remain in the environment, soil and waterways? Much longer than us, that’s for certain. Similarly, a small but growing number of us in the floral world began to question why flying flowers across the globe, grown with chemicals and pesticides, was the norm. Discomfort set in.

I often say ‘you don’t know, what you don’t know’ but of course, once you do know, it’s time to make changes and do something about it. So, I went back to the garden. I began to use garden-grown flowers in my designs, I sought out the ever-increasing band of local artisan flower farmers. I began to teach other florists sustainable design. I started to educate my clients and explain the beauty of a peony in May rather than December, a hellebore in winter rather than summer. I used ‘weeds’ in bridal bouquets…shepherds purse being a particular favourite. I enjoyed the often-heard exclamations of ‘how beautiful this flower is’, and the conviction they’d ‘never seen it before’. I would quietly smile, wondering just how many they’d actually walked past that day and just not noticed! 

And as my floral work changed so did my relationship with my garden. It was now my larder, my inspiration, my guide. And I noticed more. When I grew pollinator-friendly plants, I saw more pollinators. And in turn, more birds and bats. Now the grass is left long creating a natural meadow with a few necessary but meandering mown paths for access. The insects are increasing, crickets are beginning to chirp, the varieties of grasses and wildflowers are expanding. I do nothing except remove the walnut saplings the squirrels seem convinced are a necessary addition! I love watching the gradual changes from year to year and I dream of one day finding an orchid. 

The self sowers, self-sow…I use the ground elder flowers, the bindweed, the lady’s bedstraw and plantain. Seed heads remain over winter, the goldfinches increase, ladybirds fill hollow stems. I am peat-free and no dig, piles of deadwood rot down, everything is composted and returned to the soil as a mulch and fertiliser. 

I am still constantly learning. I have become a natural beekeeper this year…simply providing a home and leaving their hard-earned honey. I am forever entranced and distracted by the creatures that live alongside me. The spotted flycatchers, the chiffchaffs, the swifts that return every year. The bedraggled blackbirds after brood three have finally fledged. The elephant hawk and hummingbird moths. The meadow browns, commas and painted ladies. Side-tracked and fascinated, I photograph, arrange, observe, wonder and enjoy. 

I now focus on teaching the art of garden-inspired floral arranging to florists and gardeners and no longer engage in event work. I only use the flowers from my garden. The imports will never grace my artists’ toolbox again and nor will floral foam. I write about seasonality, nature, sustainable floral practices and my garden in a national magazine column. My garden continues to inspire and inform me. And I hope to inspire and gently nudge others towards a more considered way of working with nature. It all starts with small steps.

I know it is often discussed, but the truth of a shifting baseline bias in our understanding of nature and the natural world does make persuading the need for change difficult. But when I moved here 20 years ago the dawn chorus was louder, fuller, more varied. It was raucous! But compared to the dawn chorus when I was a child, makes even the memory of twenty years ago a poor imitation. I also remember as a small child, the impossible extent of night insects and moths, scrapping across the windscreen as we drove in the dark, seatbeltless! I remember lanes being impassable as the toads migrated and stopping to help them move from verge to verge. The ditches were full, ridiculously full of primroses and cowslips and countless other wildflowers. Hedgerows and green lanes staggered through the countryside and along field edges apparently timeless, most sadly now a fond memory. But this is my memory of change. What would my grandfather see now? A land depleted and quieter I know. And his father…what would he see? I can’t imagine. And that is the point. ‘We don’t know, what we don’t know’. We won’t change what we don’t recognise as diminished, lost or dangerously declining.

By pledging my garden to WildEast and by gently encouraging others through my writing and art to be less tidy, less managed, more relaxed and natural in their gardens, I hope we can nurture that change. After all, nature and the natural world are fundamental to our well-being. We are all intricately woven together in a delicate and finely balanced, symbiotic relationship.

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