Meet Zanna Hoskins From Spindle Flowers

Meet Zanna Hoskins of Spindle Flowers-grower of British flowers & foliage, event florist, wholesaler, and teacher.

I absolutely love visiting Zanna’s beautiful flower field here in West Dorset. My photographs in this journal post are over several visits to the field in late Spring, early and late Summer and early Autumn, making the most of the golden hour evening light. There is a really lovely interview with Zanna for you to enjoy reading too.xx

Golden hour light in amongst the poppy flowers.

      Tell us a bit about your creative journey into floristry, & growing flowers and foliage?

My creativity is absolutely rooted in nature - for A-level ceramics I carved a series of delicate bird skulls out of porcelain. I swooned over Hardy and DH Lawrence poetry at school, I read English at Nottingham University, discovering Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. I wrote a novel set on the canal in Oxford in my 20s and joined my local environmental group and lived on a boat, living in amongst the kingfishers and natural world. I later went to work on my Uncle’s farm, learning the practical skills of coppicing, fencing and lambing.

 It was after deciding to become a flower farmer that I learned floristry. I am mostly self-taught, with some very useful pointers along the way from kind and talented florists. I found deep joy in that creative process, and realised I was good at it. I’m so happy to say that that joy has never left me. 

Summer in the flower field.

Late Spring in Zanna’s field with flowers & foliage from the garden.

     Your beautiful flower field is in the West Dorset countryside, what brought you to Dorset?

My husband, Jonny, also grew up in nature – he used to play truant from school to go fishing, and he learnt a lot about birds from his time sitting alone on the riverbank. He and I always knew we wanted to own land but, having looked and looked in Oxfordshire and found nothing, we decided to move to Dorset. We had visited our friends in Powerstock several times, and so we rented a gorgeous, run-down thatched cottage there, tucked in amongst the trees. While my twins were babies I was taking cuttings of viburnum, cold-stratifying astrantia in the fridge and reading as much as I could. It was a time of preparation. We bought the land in Wootton Fitzpaine a few years later.    

      What inspired you to create your flower & foliage field?

Rachel from Green & Gorgeous in Oxfordshire started me on the journey of flowers. I recognised that she had found the perfect balance of bringing localism, environmentalism, practical horticulture and beauty together. It was a penny-drop moment. THAT’s what I wanted to do.  

Foxgloves in the flower field in the evening sunshine.

      What do you love most about your flower field?

Most of the planting was done 8 years ago, and it’s amazing how the field has changed over that time. What was once a rather marshy pony paddock is now full of shady trees, shrubs and flowers, and is a haven for wildlife.

Cutting flowers in the field in golden hour.

      Have you always loved nature & growing?

Because my father was born and raised in Tanzania and my mother is English, I grew up in both Kenya and England. My brothers and I spent our school holidays learning about the plants, birds, and animals of the African bush. I also remember as a child walking the country lanes of Oxfordshire with my grandmother who first showed me the vibrant pink and orange spindle berries. She told me that of all the flowers, spindle was her favourite thing of all.

Early Summer flowers all picked from the field.

     Are there any gardens or growers who really inspire you?

It wasn’t until Rachel Siegfried, who I’d known when we were in our twenties, started Green & Gorgeous that I realised what I wanted to do with my life. Having been involved with the Environmental movement in Oxford in the 1990s and deciding that my destiny didn’t lie in either getting arrested or following any particular political party, I spent some time in West Sussex where I had the good fortune to live very near Charleston House. The garden there stirred a deep sense of longing in me. I recognised that deep chime from my childhood, spending time in the garden with my mother and grandmothers. 

     How do you describe your floristry style?

I would say my floristry style is led by the materials I am using. If I am using tendrils of jasmine foliage for a bouquet, I allow the movement of the stems to follow their natural direction, and I work around them. I try to balance the framework of foliage with focal and filler flowers, supporting, and accenting it all with texture, scent and colour so that the result is balanced, but not too perfect or dome-like.  

Collecting armfuls of foliage from the field.

      Tell us a bit about your teaching and workshops?

I love teaching and feel really content when I’m sharing my passion for flowers and foliage. The people who come on my courses are often so interesting too, coming from all walks of life and bringing their own approaches to the work in hand. I find the way different people think fascinating, and I love to see the very varied results of floristry work, when everyone is using the exact same materials.

 Teaching foliage-growing is different to teaching creative floristry. We spend time discussing pruning, coppicing and pollarding, weed control, optimum harvesting times, and soil health. I love the challenge of this, coming from a creative background. But this is so much more scientific, and I have found I need to constantly ‘up my game’, matching my enthusiasm for British grown foliage with solid facts. I plan to do the RHS level 2 in horticulture this autumn at Kingston Maurward, to fill in any gaps in my knowledge. I am absolutely passionate about quenching the thirst for knowledge that my flower-farmer students bring and being part of the movement for change towards more sustainable practice in the British floristry industry.

      What do you love most about your work?

I think I love the foliage and flowering shrubs. Their solidity and subtlety, their scent, their textures, the crazy shapes they throw just make me happy!

     What does a typical day look like for you in your flower field?

Well, it depends on whether it’s a harvesting, a maintenance or a floristry day.  For wholesale harvesting, it’s pruning saw and secateurs in my back pockets, elastic bands in front pockets, and head-first into the shrubbery. On a maintenance day I might be putting up support netting for my perennials or spraying the spindle trees (with my home-made organic recipe of diluted veg oil, bicarb. and eco-washing-up-liquid), for aphid rust. On a floristry day I’ll be stripping stems into buckets of water in the barn, prepping urns with re-useable chicken wire instead of floral foam, or making intricate flower crowns with tiny florets and leaves.

A huge thank you to Zanna for this interview and for our shared joy of flowers, nature & ducks! xx

You can find out all about Spindle Flowers on Zanna’s website www.spindleflowers.co.uk