Roses are having a quiet renaissance — not the perfect hybrid tea of the florist’s fridge, but the loose, fragrant, slightly wayward garden rose that the old Dutch painters loved to overfill their canvases with.
In three studios across the city, a new generation of florists is working with a painter’s eye: one stem where ten would do, stems left to curve in their natural arc, and colour chosen by mood rather than by season.
“People ask for a bouquet,” one of them told us, “but what they really want is a moment.” The arrangement above was built in silence, in about four minutes, from a bucket of apricot roses and a single branch of olive.
We photographed the process, timed it, and discovered that the fastest arrangements are almost always the best ones.