Flowers have always been a language unto themselves at the British court — a means of expressing power, grief, celebration, and identity without uttering a single word. From the garland-strewn banquets of the medieval monarchy to the carefully sourced seasonal blooms of a modern coronation, the florists who serve the Royal Family occupy a role that is as much diplomat as designer. Their story is one of tradition, prestige, and an evolving understanding of what it means to dress the nation’s most important moments in petals.
The Royal Warrant: A Mark of Crown Approval
To understand royal floristry, one must first understand the Royal Warrant of Appointment — the formal mechanism by which the Crown endorses its preferred tradespeople. The system has roots stretching back to the 1400s, when the Lord Chamberlain, as head of the royal household, began formally engaging suppliers on behalf of the monarchy. By the reign of Henry VIII, the breadth of talent employed in royal service was already extraordinary; the lavish summit known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 — named after the expensive fabric woven with silk and gold thread that adorned the tents and costumes — offered an early demonstration of the scale and quality demanded by the Crown.
Over the centuries, the Royal Warrant evolved into a codified system of recognition. Granted by a senior member of the Royal Family, a warrant allows the holder to display the royal coat of arms on their branding, signalling to the world that their goods or services meet the exacting standards of the monarchy. It is not given lightly, and it is not permanent; warrants can be, and are, withdrawn. For businesses, it represents not merely prestige but a deep, ongoing relationship with one of the most scrutinised institutions on earth.
Florists, naturally, have always featured among the warrant holders. Flowers are essential to royal life — for ceremonies, state occasions, private grief, and public celebration — and the standards expected of those who provide them are correspondingly high.
Grace & Favour: London’s Oldest Royal Florist
No name is more durably associated with royal floristry than Moyses Stevens. Founded in 1876 by Susan Moyses and her husband Edwin Downer Stevens, the company opened its first shop on Victoria Street in London and quickly became a fixture among the city’s fashionable elite. Its Berkeley Square shop in the 1920s was reportedly described as “a veritable Chelsea Flower Show every day of the year.” The firm is also credited with introducing the hand-tied bouquet — a technique now universal in floristry but revolutionary in its time.
Moyses Stevens’ royal connections run deep and span generations. In 1947, the company prepared the bridesmaids’ bouquets for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten. In 1953, they arranged the flowers in Buckingham Palace for the State Banquet following the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In 1973, a bouquet of white roses prepared by the firm was presented to Princess Anne at the door of Westminster Abbey before her wedding.
Over the years, Moyses Stevens held a Royal Warrant for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and today holds the Royal Warrant by appointment of His Majesty King Charles III. As London’s longest continuously operating florist — now with multiple shops across the capital, including a concession in Harrods, and a Flower School at Battersea Power Station — the company remains a living embodiment of British floristry’s royal tradition.
Pulbrook & Gould: Elegance in Belgravia
Another firm long associated with the Royal Household is Pulbrook & Gould, established in 1956 and based in Belgravia. Known for their elegant and timeless floral designs, and with a strong emphasis on seasonal, British-grown flowers, the company built a reputation for the kind of restrained luxury that the Royal Family prizes. Shane Connolly himself trained there for two years before striking out on his own — a detail that speaks to the firm’s enduring influence on the highest level of British floristry.
Shane Connolly: The Modern Royal Florist
If any individual florist has come to define royal floristry for the contemporary era, it is Shane Connolly. Born in west Belfast in May 1963, Connolly’s path to the palaces of Britain was anything but conventional. His father was a dentist, his mother a social worker, and his earliest ambition was to become a singer. Persuaded instead to study something more practical, he read psychology at the University of Ulster before moving to London in the late 1980s to work for the Ministry of Defence.
It was in London that flowers found him. Unhappy in his civil service role, he began assisting a florist at weekends and during his holidays, discovering both a passion and a talent that his formal education had never anticipated. He made the acquaintance of floral arrangers Michael Goulding and Elizabeth Barker, who mentored him and helped him find a position at Pulbrook & Gould — the very establishment with its own royal pedigree. After two years there, Connolly founded his own company, Shane Connolly and Co., in 1989.
His rise was steady and his reputation grew. Then, in 2005, came the commission that changed everything.
A Royal Brief: Charles, Camilla, and the Beginning of a Partnership
When Camilla Parker Bowles approached Connolly to design her bouquet and all the other flowers for her marriage to the then Prince of Wales — including the service of dedication at Windsor Castle — he entered the royal orbit for the first time. It was an introduction that would define the next two decades of his career.
In recognition of his work, Connolly was awarded a Royal Warrant of Appointment to HRH The Prince of Wales in 2006, designating him “Supplier of Flowers for Events.” The warrant was both an acknowledgement of work already done and a formalisation of a relationship that would endure through the most significant ceremonial occasions of the age.
Westminster Abbey as a Garden: The 2011 Royal Wedding
Connolly’s most celebrated commission — and arguably the most watched floral installation in modern history — came with the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Appointed as Artistic Director for Flowers for the ceremony, he was tasked with realising Catherine’s vision: something English, seasonal, unpretentious, and deeply rooted in nature.
The result was extraordinary. Six field maples and two hornbeams — trees of twenty feet or more — were brought into Westminster Abbey, lining the great nave and transforming one of the world’s most formal ecclesiastical spaces into something that felt, impossibly, like a woodland walk. Connolly had originally planned to use trees in blossom, but the season was not favourable, so he pivoted to field maples. After the ceremony, the trees were planted at Highgrove House, King Charles’s private home.
The brief, as Connolly described it at the time, was clear: “The aim is that the Abbey looks unpretentious and simple and natural and that it reflects the fact that Catherine is a country girl at heart and that the couple are the best of British.” Every element was English in origin, seasonal, and sourced from royal estates or British growers. Nearly 30,000 individual flowers were used across the Abbey and Buckingham Palace. Catherine’s shield-shaped bridal bouquet included lily of the valley, ivy, hyacinth, sweet William — a quiet tribute to the groom — and royal-favourite myrtle, a plant that has appeared in royal bridal bouquets since Queen Victoria’s time.
The Coronation of Charles III: A Sustainable Crown
When Charles III was crowned at Westminster Abbey in May 2023, Connolly was once again at the centre of proceedings — his third major royal commission and, by his own description, “the greatest moment of my career.” The arrangements he designed reflected the King and Queen’s deep affection for the natural world and their shared passion for gardening, while also serving as a landmark statement in sustainable floristry.
No single-use plastics were used. There was no floral foam — a synthetic material long standard in the industry but deeply harmful to the environment. Instead, Connolly worked with Flowers from the Farm and the Royal Horticultural Society to source seasonal flowers and foliage from every corner of the United Kingdom. More than 120 varieties were used, including lily of the valley and auriculas that had featured in Camilla’s wedding bouquet, and hellebores — a particular favourite of the King’s — that had appeared in his buttonhole at his 2005 wedding. Branches from beech trees planted by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in 1978 were incorporated, connecting the new reign to the old.
The RHS contributed large cuttings of azaleas, rhododendrons, and apple blossoms from its five member gardens at Wisley, Hyde Hall, Rosemoor, Harlow Carr, and Bridgewater. At the Great West Door of the Abbey, tall yew topiaries were underplanted with a meadow of wild grasses, cowslips, primroses, and violets. After the ceremony, those yews were replanted in the new biodiverse topiary garden at Sandringham, open to the public — a living legacy of the day.
After the coronation, volunteers from the nonprofit Floral Angels dismantled and redistributed the arrangements to hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices across the country.
Honoured by the Crown
In January 2026, Shane Connolly received formal recognition from the nation he had served so faithfully. At an investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle, Princess Anne presented him with an MBE — Member of the Order of the British Empire — for services to sustainable floristry. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had spent nearly four decades not only adorning the most historic occasions in British public life, but quietly and persistently arguing that how flowers are grown and used matters as much as how they look.
His is also a Royal Warrant holder, with two warrants of appointment to His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen. In the span of twenty years, the boy from Belfast who once wanted to be a singer had become the most trusted florist in the kingdom.
The Language of Flowers at Court
What emerges from this history is the understanding that royal floristry has never been merely decorative. Every bloom chosen for a coronation, a wedding, or a state funeral carries meaning — historical, personal, national. The myrtle in a royal bridal bouquet traces back to a sprig from Queen Victoria’s own wedding. The field maples brought into Westminster Abbey spoke of England, of the countryside, of a couple’s quiet values. The beech branches at a coronation carried the memory of a late queen.
The florists who serve the Royal Family are custodians of that language. They are required not only to be craftsmen of the highest order, but to understand protocol, history, symbolism, and secrecy — the last of these perhaps most of all. As Connolly has noted, confidentiality agreements mean that private commissions remain private, and that much of the most intimate floral work done for the Royal Family will never be known publicly.
From Susan Moyses opening her Victoria Street shop in 1876, to Shane Connolly sourcing wildflowers from across the Commonwealth for a king’s coronation a hundred and fifty years later, the story of royal floristry is one of service, skill, and an enduring belief that even in the grandest of public moments, nature — handled with care and meaning — is always the finest decoration.
Other Royal Florists include:
Grace & Favour – florist to Colonial British Hong Kong before the handover
