R achel Siegfried began her career as an estate gardener for the Sainsbury family in a Victorian walled garden, where a course with Sarah Raven first turned her toward cut flowers. In 2008 she founded Green and Gorgeous with her partner Ashley Pearson on a six-acre site in South Oxfordshire, growing British cut flowers alongside vegetables, fruit, bees and chickens. From March to October the farm gate is open on Saturday mornings — visitors wander the rows and leave with stems arranged by Rachel and her team.
The farm sits within the wider movement back toward seasonal, locally grown flowers — a direct challenge to the air miles, pesticides and forced uniformity of the imported trade, and one Siegfried has helped articulate through her teaching and writing. Her arrangements, much-photographed for the press, are characterised by a willingness to let stems twist and branch as they actually grow, rather than the geometric stiffness of the wholesale bouquet.
Her book The Cut Flower Sourcebook distils years of trialling at Green and Gorgeous — 128 perennials and woody plants she has come back to season after season — into a working philosophy for anyone making a garden for the vase, with an emphasis on the long-lived plants too often passed over in favour of annuals.
