The Roakebook: Nic Lovegrove
The Roakebook is back, and this time it’s the turn of the fantastic florist (and Roake Studio customer, naturally) Nic Lovegrove. Nic’s bouquets from her beautiful business The Floral Boutique have been bringing us joy for years, so we were thrilled to catch up with her where the magic happens in a floristry barn in her garden.
“Flowers arrive at about 8 o’clock,” she explains. “What I’ve ordered over the weekend arrived with us this morning. I do the school run with the children, come back, unpack and strip everything, cut everything, fill the vases up, and everything goes in for a good drink for at least an hour or two.”
As a result, we’re surrounded by a plethora of huge headed hydrangeas, vibrant dahlias and even sprigs of oak leaves. It’s really a delightful place to be.
But working from the barn, with all the flexibility that brings to raise a young family and run a business, came about recently, and by accident. Shops were everything Nic knew from a young age; she opened her first shop at just 22, and with nearly ten years of experience as a florist under her belt already, having landed her first job at a local florist’s at the tender age of 13. “I was a Saturday girl. You get all the rubbish jobs at that age, like cleaning cauldrons of stinky water. But I still loved it. Then, the day before I was due to start my A-levels, my boss phoned and said ‘do you want a full-time job?’ And I said ‘yeah, I don’t like school’. So I went straight into it at 16.”
Nic then worked at various florists across the Island, but there was nowhere local doing the traditional style of floristry she loved; instead there was lots of artificial green foam and cellophane. After a trip to Holland to visit a floristry friend, she was inspired to start up on her own.
“[In Holland] they do really lovely textures using lots of mosses and grasses. It’s all really natural. And then I came back to the florists, whacking the same old stuff together thinking ‘this isn’t what I want to do’. So I sold my Beatle, bought a white Belingo van and signed a lease for five years.”
It was a good decision. The Floral Boutique’s shops evolved and got bigger, and Nic’s loyal customers followed her along the way. “We have a couple of customers who were our first ever customers who still buy from us now”, she says. Coincidentally, while we’re discussing this, one happy mother-of-the-bride pops into the barn to drop off a thank you bottle of wine for Nic’s wedding handiwork the previous weekend.
“I don’t sleep the night before a wedding because I want to see the reaction to the bouquet,” says Nic, who takes being part of other people’s big day very seriously. “But I drive away on an absolute high. The hairdresser’s there getting it all ready so you see glimpses of the wedding in the morning.”
It was the pandemic that brought about a pivot in Nic’s business model. “We had to close the shop during Covid, but I carried on working because the rent was due.” She moved out to the barn, which at the time was a storage area full of paint and old tools. Working late one night on orders, Nic’s husband came out to the barn and delivered an epiphany of sorts, as Nic explains. “He said ‘Everyone else thinks this is the end of the world and you’re still out here whacking bouquets together just to pay your rent.’” She goes on to say that he suggested working from the barn full-time. “I was really lucky. The landlady was really lovely. We had a rolling agreement and she was really easygoing.” Six weeks later, they were out.
The Floral Boutique has always strived to be as sustainable as possible, but moving to the barn has allowed Nic to be even more mindful and in control with the way she runs her business. “There’s so much we can do here that we couldn’t do at the shop. Now we can compost our waste, we save water where we can and we use water butts. We try to use UK-grown flowers, and there are about three different growers on the Island. We also grow and cut our own foliage where we can, like mint, olive, eucalyptus and rosemary.” The Boutique offers Florist’s Choice bouquets, which feature seasonal flowers, making them the best quality, freshest, but also better value.
Nic has also introduced a sustainable funeral range, which replaces standard synthetic bases with cardboard and a biodegradable fibre foam suitable for natural burials. “Funeral flowers are such a personal thing. I always want to know what the person had in their garden, what colours they loved. People don’t talk about the funeral side of floristry because it is such a painful thing, but flowers can bring just that little bit of softness and joy.”
Although she’s scaled back some aspects of the business, doing fewer weddings and not having a shop, it works perfectly for family life.
“I can pick up the children and take them to school, or take my son to football on Saturdays. This just works.”
And local community word-of-mouth on this small Island means that Nic is still always busy in the barn, just on her own terms. “Being on an island is positive for us. We’ve been doing it for so long that people know our style and they know our values. I love it here.”
Nicwears our Elsie Long Sleeve in Khaki & Tangerine and our Nicole Jacket in Midnight Blue.
Interview by Hannah Rochell.