On Saturday, September 6, 2025, the Castle Gardens of the Warsaw Royal Castle in Poland turned into a lively outdoor stage. The lawns, paths, and beech hedges became our canvas. Families rolled in with strollers, kids chased bubbles, and music drifted over the terraces. This was Piknik na Dworze – (Picnic at the Courtyard) – an open-air day of music, theater, and craft in the Ogrody Zamkowe.
My job for this picnic? To bring a slice of courtly elegance to life with flowers – big, visible, and photogenic, yet honest in craft. I teamed up with my friend and fellow floral designer Sylwia Bednarek. Together, we staged our design show, 'A Fan of Courtly Tales', during the main program.
Courtly Floral Stories at the Warsaw Royal Castle
When you work inside a garden with real paths, hedges, and wind in the leaves, your flowers behave differently. They breathe. For our 'A Fan of Courtly Tales' show at the Royal Castle in Warsaw’s Castle Gardens, Sylwia Bednarek and I leaned into that reality. Instead of staging pieces that fight the setting, we designed for it, letting the garden do half the talking.
Court life gives you clear signals: fans, pleats, ribbons, and measured movement. We echoed that in layered structures that open and close like a hand fan. Think pleated foliage for cadence, arching stems for posture, and blossom groupings that read like embroidered motifs on a gown. In a garden, scale is your friend; the sky is the ceiling, and hedges are your walls. Our installations near the beech hedges were built to sit comfortably against that green architecture—never pasted on, always growing from it.
Material choices mattered. We paired roses with textural branches, tucked in herbs for quiet scent, and used grasses to soften edges. The goal wasn’t to outshine the garden, but to tune into it. If a breeze lifts a Dahlia face or a Rosa spray sways against clipped Fagus, the piece feels at home. That little play between cultivated design and living backdrop delivers character without shouting.
Flowers in the Garden, Garden in the Flowers
Throughout the day, the gardens hosted workshops that echoed the same idea: put the person in the landscape. Flower-crown sessions 'Flowers Look Good on You' reminded us why wearable florals keep returning: they move with a body the way vines move with a trellis. Crowns, boutonnieres, and small wrist pieces become micro-landscapes. For florists, it’s a good exercise in restraint and rhythm – two things gardens teach better than any classroom.
The 'Royal Garden Herbarium' watercolor and herbarium workshop offered another useful practice: slow looking. Sketching a leaf’s margin or mapping the geometry of a seed head sharpens your eye for proportion and repetition. Back in the studio, those drawings translate into cleaner lines and better balance. You start seeing negative space the way a gardener sees winter form.
Small Hands, Big Future
My favorite sight? Kids in 'Become a Royal Gardener'. Planting herbs, potting seedlings, and rolling seed bombs turns curiosity into action. For our industry, these moments matter. You can talk about sustainability all day, but letting a child press soil around a young root system explains it faster. If you run a shop or studio, consider a five-minute 'plant a pocket-garden' station at your next community event. It’s simple outreach with lasting roots.
The day ends with a polonaise in the garden. That detail shaped our layouts. We kept clear walking lines and framed photo points where couples and families could step in, take a picture, and move on. In public spaces, flowers serve two audiences at once: the live visitor and the camera. The trick is designing forms that read well at three distances: detail (hand), portrait (torso), and landscape (group). If it holds at all three, you’ve got a solid piece.
Takeaways for Fellow Florists
Let the site set your scale and palette. Borrow patterns from fashion and gardens: pleats, repeats, and gentle arcs. Then build in movement: grasses, airy stems, and hinged mechanics that flex. Give people a way to wear or take part in the flowers. And design for the photo without losing the live experience.
In the end, the Castle Gardens didn’t compete with our work; they completed it. That’s the sweet spot for outdoor floral design: flowers that feel like they’ve always belonged, just dressed a little finer for the occasion.
Credits: On stage master florist Sylwia Bednarek, Agnieszka Żukowska (manager of Castle Gardens), my assistants Marta Rubinkowska-Świątczak, Małgorzata Wróblewska -Tylus, Magdalena Płoskonka, Łukasz Malinowski, and Tomasz Podlipny. Stylit Lehner Wolle. Photos by Łukasz Giersz.
