It’s almost impossible to put into words what Carole Patilla meant to us, both as a colleague and a friend. But we’re going to try. 

She was no ordinary florist – she was an artist, a teacher and a warrior! We hope that she realised what her funeral flowers meant to the families who came to her – they signified real beauty at a time when that’s hard to see. She would meet at family’s homes and trawl through people’s own gardens to create things with real significance. She didn’t work from a brochure and was well known for her foraging skills! She found beauty in all of nature.

And this creativity came with huge generosity – she didn’t care if florists opened up competing with her, she just wanted people to stop using plastic and “do it properly!” We have lost count of the people who have told us they attended her workshops – something we too as a team have benefited from as she had us all round making Christmas wreaths in her workshops – her Christmas gift to us.

She co-founded the Farewell Flowers Directory in order to promote and create a platform space for seasonal, sustainable florists and growers, to make it easier to find those people all over the UK.

And this year, Farewell Flowers were the first people to ever display funeral flowers in the entire history of the Chelsea Flower Show. Carole knew that by getting that kind of publicity and exposure, then the conversation might start to change. And they only went and won a Gold Medal. She invited us to join her at Chelsea and we have never seen her so joyful – and exhausted from the immense amount of work that had gone into making that happen.

It is unthinkable that within a few short months she would become so very poorly and so suddenly. Pancreatic Cancer is a particularly cruel disease, which no one should have to suffer from. Pancreatic Cancer UK bring more breakthroughs through research, more change through campaigning, and more support through their expert nurses.

You can make a donation online in Carole’s memory by clicking this link.

We’re going to miss her terribly. She was funny, clever and a genuinely positive person. She was our friend.

We can never replace her creative eye, her understanding of nature, and her artistic instincts but we can keep fighting for the death of the plastic short stemmed, spray painted chrysanthemum graveyards of funeral flowers at every crematorium and graveyard, and keep making funerals as beautiful as she was.