Come and spend a few hours in London’s oldest botanical garden for a festive workshop and learn to craft a beautiful centrepiece for your Christmas table, guided by Alice McCabe, a mixed media artist and director of Metafleur, a sustainable floral installation studio.

Alice will share her expert techniques, introducing creative approaches and demonstrating the art of table centrepiece design. With her guidance, you’ll explore harmony and balance as you build a moss base for locally grown spruce foliage. Learn essential wiring techniques to secure stems, decorations, and candles, using a blend of fresh and dried British foliage, flowers, and seed pods.

By the end of the session, you’ll have a stunning, handcrafted centrepiece to take home, ready to make your Christmas celebrations even more special.

Afterwards, you can take your time in exploring the Chelsea Physic Garden and visiting the Physic Garden Cafe. Entry to the Garden is included in your ticket.

These workshops are incredibly popular and sell out quickly, so we recommend booking early to avoid disappointment.

Tutor Bio

Alice McCabe

Alice McCabe is a multi-media artist creating floral installations, paintings and performances often with foraged and found materials of an ephemeral nature.

Integral to her practice as a floral artist is to create both sustainable and conceptual designs drawing attention via flowers and their meanings to point to other contexts alongside their beauty. With over a decades experience of working as a florist she set up her floral art business Alice McCabe Flowers – creating installations bordering on artworks and assisting contemporary artists wishing to work with flowers – in 2016 followed by Metafleur – a design studio offering sustainable floral designs for large scale events and commissions – in 2020.

Recent projects include the creation of large-scale floral displays for an arena event launch of the BBC’s Blue Planet II, One Planet: Seven Worlds and Perfect Planet, all at M&S Arena, Liverpool 2017, 2019 and 2020, and flowers for World Oceans Day at National Maritime Museum in 2019 and 2020. Perfect Planet was awarded 3rd place at ICE Awards for sustainable event design in 2020. Recent exhibitions of newly developed floral tapestry works have been held at Ken Space, Windows135 in 2021 and Glass-cloud Gallery and JGM Gallery 2020.

Significant collaborations include setting up the Permaculture reading group with Amy McDonnell during the first lockdown 2020 and The Cultivar Residency, sponsored by The Museum of the Flat Earth, Fogo Island project ‘Adventitious Routes and Rhizomes’ exploring political displacement with Amy Ash in 2019. She has created flowers for artists Anish Kapoor, Raqib Shaw, Haseeb Ahmed and Livia Rita’s “Avant Gardeners Collective.”