Updating our skills in France 2023

One of our main events in the year is our tutors’ trips to the International Tutors workshop in France. Hosted by Floriform and organised by the Floriform president Didier Gilles with top international floral designer Gregor Lersch. This is an amazing opportunity for us to update our skills, get inspired and make new friendships, whilst learning from the best, so we can share what we have learnt with our students.

The key questions we always ask when choosing any opportunities presented to us at the Academy are ‘will it be fun, will it be innovative, and will it create family?’; the key values of our business. This journey spoke yes to all three so we set about seeing which of the team would like to join us. Julie, Amanda, Sarah Hills-Ingyon (honouree team member) and I (Tina) chose to take this opportunity.

A train journey was agreed as the best way to get there so on Saturday 4th Feb we boarded a train heading to London. From London we joined the Eurostar to Paris and after a slight challenge with timings in Paris we boarded our final train to Nimes.

Awaiting us in France was a friendly hotel in the small village of Remoulins which was to be our home for the next 4 days and the workshop venue was a beautiful church at Saint Hilaire-d’Ozihan. We had been warned to wrap up warm as the church had limited heating (an understatement). But with the beautiful blue skies and the warmth of the other wonderful international floristry tutors we began a floral exploration into three key areas that Gregor prosed as interesting and pertinent to our current times and potentially the future.

Day one was focused on creating mats (flat, filled, wall hung, layered, or included in a structure). Day two’s focus was Minimalism/purism and day three was focused on technique driven design with winding and wrapping. I have included some photos of designs we made with some shared thoughts on the process.

We did get cold during the morning discussion and demonstrations with at least 5 fabulous designs created by Gregor each day to help us visualise his concepts but maybe a little adversity (the cold) encourages a more caring collaborative group. This was definitely our experience and this year’s attending tutors were really fantastic, very generously sharing their knowledge, ideas and gifts of food, wine and a little something sparkly (which always helps the creativity I think).

The countries represented included France, Italy, Spain, Israel, Lithuania, Germany, the Netherlands and England. The discussions during the workshop and afterward over dinner created loads of interesting ideas, teaching methods, concepts, connections, orders and thought processes. The floral design work produced was of such an innovative and high standard, we could not help but be inspired by both the amazing Gregor Lersch and all the talented tutors who were attending. As for the lovely Didier who organised everything and translated for the French tutors, he was as fabulous as ever.

Did it do what we hoped for…. yes, it strengthened and developed our team friendships, created new international friendships and connections, broadened our understanding of the challenges facing international students, florist, tutors and the industry. It definitely stimulated our creativity and as to the innovation, well, we will let our lovely students be the judge of that…

Take a look at some of the amazing designs created below!