Why I started Hana Blossom

I started Hana Blossom in March 2019, in Chile, after a year in Medellín that changed what I thought I was going to do with my life. I was working in customer experience for an airline at the time and had never once thought about flowers. The business came to England with me and now works out of Epsom, in Surrey, mostly on weddings and events. This is the long version.

Medellín is called the city of eternal spring. I had heard that before I went and assumed it was the sort of thing a tourist board says. It is not. There are flowers planted through the streets, whole festivals built around them across the year, and a climate that simply does not stop.

I was there for most of 2018, working on a customer experience project for LATAM Airlines. I had spent years thinking about how people move through an experience and how it makes them feel, which turns out to be closer to this job than it sounds, though I could not have told you that then. What I can tell you is that I had never looked at flowers properly in my life. Not once. Not as a thing a person could make something out of.

Then I took a floristry course, because it was there and because Medellín makes you curious about them. That was it. Not a slow realisation. I did a course, and by the end of it I had decided.

Learning it properly

Back in Chile at the end of 2018, I did the unglamorous thing and studied. Course after course with Chilean florists, working up from how to tie a bouquet to how to build the large structures that hold an installation together.

I mention this because the internet has made floristry look like something you either have an eye for or you do not. There is an eye, and mine is mine. But the reason an arch does not collapse at four in the afternoon is mechanics, and mechanics is taught.

The first one

I opened in March 2019 and the first thing I was paid to make was a bridal bouquet.

I remember it mostly as fear, and the fear had a name: gerberas. They look like the easiest flower in the world and they are not. The stems are hollow and soft, and a gerbera will snap at the neck if you so much as think about it wrongly. To use them in a bouquet you have to wire each one internally, running the wire up through the stem so the head has something to hold on to. It is a technique, and at that point it was a technique I had just learned.

I spent that whole ceremony watching the bouquet instead of the couple, waiting for a head to go. Not one of them did. I have never been able to look at a gerbera casually since.

That is the thing nobody tells you about this work. A bouquet is not decoration, it is a small piece of engineering that somebody is going to carry down an aisle on the most photographed day of their life.

Then, nothing

The pandemic stopped the business.

What I did with that time was build my first website. I taught myself design properly, which I had never done, and I spent months on something with no customers at the end of it because there was nothing else to do with my hands.

Then deliveries were allowed again, and I came back for Mother's Day. That was the restart. It is a strange thing to be grateful for a quiet year, but I learned something in it that I use constantly, and I would never have sat still long enough to learn it otherwise.

Starting again, in a country I did not know

We moved to England for my husband's job. I brought the business with me, which sounds neat and was not.

Almost nothing transfers. The flowers are different, the seasons run to a different calendar, the growers are people I had never heard of, and everything I knew about what is available in November was knowledge about the wrong hemisphere. I have spent a lot of this year asking questions I could have answered in my sleep in Santiago.

I am not going to pretend that was graceful. It is, though, why I am now fairly obsessive about what is genuinely in season here, and fairly impatient with anyone who uses the word loosely.

Where the name comes from

Hana is Japanese for flower. I chose it for two reasons, one of which is slightly silly.

The silly one is that in Spanish my name is pronounced with the same soft breath at the front, so Hana and Javi sit next to each other comfortably. It sounded like me.

The other reason is the one that matters. Japanese floral design holds something I want in my own work and find difficult to describe in English: arrangements that are light and look entirely natural, while being quietly modern and almost sculptural underneath. Nothing crowded. Nothing that looks like it is trying. Every stem placed deliberately, and none of that deliberation showing. That is what I am aiming at, on the days it goes well.

What I am actually for

Three things, and I have got more certain about all of them.

Installations, and work that asks something of me. I like the jobs that are slightly too big. They are where the good ideas live, which is why I keep saying yes to Fleurs de Villes, first at Kew and this year at Somerset House.

Not the classic version. I am not the florist to come to if you want the arrangement you have already seen. I would far rather try something, and I will tell you honestly when the something does not work.

Nothing standard. Every scheme should belong completely to the person it is for. If a wedding I have done could be lifted whole and handed to a different couple, I have not done my job.

What is next

Growing this properly in Surrey, and taking on destination weddings, which is the part of the work that most resembles why I started: somewhere unfamiliar, flowers I have to learn, and a reason to be curious again.

I am going to write here most weeks now. What is in the market, what I am making, and what I am getting wrong. It will be more honest than a shop window and shorter than a newsletter.

If you are planning a wedding or an event and would like it to belong completely to you, tell me about it.

Written by Javiera Troncoso, founder of Hana Blossom. Medellín, Santiago, and now Epsom.