Garden Museum, London
The designer who became the toast of London with her floral arrangements using vegetables and weeds is celebrated too as an entrepreneur and educator in this comprehensive show
When Miss Betsan Horlick married Mr John Coats at Southwark Cathedral on 31 October 1933, the former debutante was attended by no fewer than 16 bridesmaids, each one dressed in a cape styled to reveal a flash of its coloured lining. Five of these were blue, five were chartreuse green, and the remaining six (worn by her best friends) were gold; the wedding procession, it was said, had the “harmony of a rainbow”. But it was the flowers that stole the show. Horlick, in white velvet, carried a shower of startling blue gentians into a church decorated with 12 foot-high stands of green hydrangeas and pampas grass. As for her cavalcade of bridesmaids, en masse they resembled a collection of human pillars, their improbably huge bouquets of arum lilies and eucalyptus seeming almost to have taken root on their exteriors. As Vogue reported excitedly, all this was “completely novel”.
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