Quintessence
PORTFOLIO · FLORAL STORYTELLING · OCTOBER 2026
Mother Culture
Floral installation for Distant Hills Brewery, Glossop
Match Made in Business · Thu 8 Oct 2026 · In place through the weekend · Seven pieces
THE BRIEF
Something living, getting in.
In October 2026 I was invited to be guest speaker at Match Made in Business, held at Distant Hills Brewery in Glossop, and asked to create a floral installation for the evening. It stayed in place through the weekend.
Distant Hills is all timber and steel. Heavy beams, bare metal railings, a building made for work. Handsome in a hard, practical way, with not a soft edge in sight. I didn’t want to soften it with frills. I wanted to imagine something living getting in.
THE CONCEPT
Every brewery depends on a mother.
In fermentation, the mother is the living culture that everything else grows from. Every brewery depends on one: yeast, quietly feeding in the dark.
So the story begins in a forgotten urn in a dark corner of the brewery, where something left a little too long has bubbled over the rim and started to spread. I looked at slime moulds and creeping fungi. Organisms with no plan, only appetite, that creep, swell, burst and send themselves somewhere new. The installation imagines that organism colonising the building, from the first growth in the corner to smaller colonies surfacing across the room.
Gloss against papery. Velvet against dried. Living against fading.
Four decisions that shaped the piece.
COLOUR
Autumnal, not autumn
It wasn’t an autumn brief, but I wanted it to feel autumnal. Oxblood, rust, copper and burnt orange, with flashes of living green.
MATERIAL
Fresh beside dried
Fresh and dried material sit side by side. Some stays in water. Some curls, dries and changes while the piece is up.
THE BUILDING
Colonise the space
Material follows the railings rather than hiding them. There’s deliberately no neat point where the flowers stop and the building begins.
THE PIECES
One organism, seven forms
The Mother, where it all began. Spores, scattered across the room. The Fairy Ring on the main table. And four smaller colonies, each in an old chalice.
A FIELD GUIDE TO THE COLONY
Seven pieces, each after something real.
Each colony takes after a living organism. The piece on the left, the thing it learned from on the right.
01 · THE MAIN INSTALLATION
The Mother
It started in a dark, forgotten urn in the corner of the brewery. A yeast, left a little too long, bubbled over the rim and began to spread.
Hydrangea is its body, swelling in great soft bubbles. Celosia is its brain, folded and velvety, the moment it began to think. Physalis trails out in tentacles of seed pods, lanterns waiting to drop. And gloriosa has found the railings, grasping with its leaf tips and hauling itself along, which is genuinely how it climbs.
Everything else in the room grew from here.
Clathrus archeri
Devil’s fingers
Bursts out of its egg, arms first, and reaches.
02 · BUD VASES
Spores
Every organism wants to travel. These are the pieces that drifted off the main colony and settled wherever they landed. A single stem here, a seed head there, no two alike.
Small enough to miss. Which is exactly how an infestation gets going.
Physarum polycephalum
Slime mould
Not a fungus, closer to an amoeba. Sends itself everywhere at once.
03 · TABLE CENTREPIECE
The Fairy Ring
A fairy ring isn’t a type of mushroom. It’s something fungus does. It starts from a single point and spreads outward underground, year after year, with mushrooms rising at the edge to mark how far it’s reached. The middle is always the oldest part.
This is where the colony began. A mound of moss, soft and damp. Step inside a fairy ring, they say, and you’ll never leave. My business cards found that out.
And from the centre, a single chrysanthemum, the colony’s first true bloom.
Marasmius oreades.
Fairy ring.
A pattern, not a species. Oldest in the middle.
04 · HYDNELLUM PECKII
Bleeding Tooth
Pale flesh, beaded with red. As if the forest floor had cut itself and couldn’t stop.
So this colony bleeds. Hydrangea swollen and heavy in its chalice, red celosia crowding the rim, calla lilies and amaranthus slipping over the edge in slow, dark drops.
A cup meant for drinking, filled with something else entirely.
Hydnellum peckii.
Bleeding tooth
Found under conifers, oozing red when young.
05 · CLAVARIA ZOLLINGERI
Violet Coral
No cap, no gills. Just violet fingers pushing up through the moss, branching and reaching, as if something underground is feeling its way towards the light.
Here the colony has bruised. Hydrangea in plum and purple, and kniphofia rising straight up out of it, hot-tipped and searching.
Every colony has a strange one. This is it.
Clavaria zollingeri
Violet coral
Branching, fragile, rare in Britain.
06 · CORDYCEPS MILITARIS
Scarlet Caterpillar Club
It doesn’t grow on its host. It grows out of it. Bright orange clubs breaking through and rising, turning everything the host once was into reach.
Rust and orange chrysanthemums crowd the chalice, with amaranthus rising from it and collapsing back over the rim.
The chalice was a vessel. Now it’s the host.
Cordyceps militaris
Scarlet caterpillar club
Grows from buried moth pupae.
07 · CALVATIA GIGANTEA
Giant Puffball
It swells in silence, soft and round, until one touch splits it open and a cloud of spores rolls out into the air.
The youngest colony, and the softest. Hydrangea in blush and green, puffed up and ripe, cosmos already breaking loose on fine wiry stems.
Gathering itself to burst, and begin again somewhere new.
Calvatia gigantea
Giant puffball
Football-sized, then a cloud of spores.
I didn’t want to decorate the brewery with nature. I wanted to imagine nature quietly taking it back.
WHAT THIS IS REALLY ABOUT
Every place has an essence. Every brand has a story.
Mother Culture isn’t about autumn, or about flowers for a bar. It’s about taking the essence of a place, a brewery, its yeast, its timber and steel, and telling it as a story people can walk through, touch and talk about.
That’s the part that travels. A product launch, a new space, a brand that needs to be understood in a room rather than on a screen. Tell me what you make and what it means, and I’ll find the story in it and build it in flowers. Strange, playful, a statement, or quieter if that’s what the story wants.
Look closer.
Eight stills from the room, before the weekend changed it.
More from the practice.
What this grew from, and where it goes next.
BRAND & EVENTS
Brand & events
Launches, evenings and spaces, each told as a story in flowers. See what I do
PORTFOLIO
Gamesley
Where a show garden went to live. See its second life
PORTFOLIO
Between Chaos & Order
My first solo show garden at RHS Sandringham 2026. Walk through the garden
Good to know.
Is this a real fungus story?
Mostly. Slime moulds aren’t fungi, they’re closer to amoebas. A fairy ring is a pattern many fungi make, not a species. And Cordyceps militaris grows from buried moth pupae, not ants. That one is its cousin.
Is “the mother” a brewing term?
It’s a fermentation term, from vinegar, kombucha and starter cultures. Brewers have their yeast. I borrowed the word because it says what the piece is: the thing everything else grows from.
How long did it last?
Installed on the Thursday for the evening, left in place through the weekend and taken down on the Sunday. Some of it was changing the whole time, which was the point.
Could you do this for a launch?
Yes. A product, a service, a new space or an evening. Start with what you make and what you want people to feel about it. I’ll find the story and tell it in flowers, at whatever scale the room and the budget allow. Tell me about it.