About Pip's & Her Vases

So how did vintage flower vases become a business for Pip?

Pip’s mum June Silverton had been an antique dealer for over 30 years starting with a simple stand at Woburn Abbey but swiftly moving up to a large shop in Ascot.

A simple desire to own a Constance Spry vase triggered a collection and Pip discovered she had inherited her mother’s love of the hunt for something special.

During covid Pip sold her collection duplicates online and what started as a short term measure quickly became a real passion for Pip.

Selling online was the start but Pip now shows her vases at various shows and markets. This year she will be at Kensington Botanical Market on the first Saturday of each month, at Frome Flea and Craft Market on 9th August, doing her new talk The Vase Lady at Warsash Flower Club on 20th August with a sales table of goodies and she will be at the “Rooted in History” flower festival by the Rooted Florals team of designers at Hodsock Priory between 23rd and 25th October 2026.

Biography

Pip has always had flowers in her life. She remembers clearly all the flowers in her childhood garden and her Grandfather starting to teach her to care for them. Strangely it took her a few years to realise they could provide a career for her. Cornwall proved a trigger with her gorgeous but neglected garden on the banks of the Fal Estuary giving her a whole new challenge. A year in college followed by the best possible grounding in a Cornish nursery owned by great plant lovers kicked off a long career.

Three years followed as landscape architect to a billionaire financier at his Berkshire manor house widening her horizons.

The garden centre world then beckoned and after working on a super independent nursery near Newbury in Berkshire her thoughts turned back to one of the world’s most special nurseries, Hillier.  She started as a plant area assistant but was moved up right through the company over 27 years and finished up in the exciting position of Plant Buyer for the group of centres.

For 25 of those years she was editor of the Hillier Gardening Club Magazine, producing 3 or 4 issues every year including special “live” issues for the Chelsea Flower Show. She also wrote The Hillier Gardeners’ Guide to Climbers and Wall Plants. A book based on all the questions customers always ask and packed with pictures and information.

During those years a chance job assisting director, Andy McIndoe, with a Christmas flower arranging demonstration triggered an urge to explore working with cut flowers. Some creative streak buried deep had been awoken and from a few local lessons she started competing and discovered a talent for doing the unexpected. This turned into wins at National and International level. She has also been lucky enough to have won three RHS Chelsea Gold Medals as an individual and been involved in producing 23 Chelsea Gold Medal winning exhibits as part of the Hillier Nurseries Staging Team.

A natural progression was to become a NAFAS accredited judge, first at Area level then at National Level. As a regular team leader of the Hillier Chelsea Flower Show she was very honoured to be asked to become an RHS judge in 2013, first as a Floral Art judge in the Floral Design Marquee, then as a Floral Judge judging nurseries in the main pavilion at Chelsea and the other major RHS shows throughout the year. She is also an RHS moderator, the most senior type of RHS judge. She moderated in the Floristry & Floral Design section of Chelsea in 2024 & 2025 and returned to chair the Cut Flower Panel at Chelsea in 2026.

Requests to tutor workshops started to arrive and so Pip now offers several options for contemporary flowers clubs along with classes for beginners and also for more advanced arrangers. Whether you want to fine tune your competitive edge or simply learn to make your first floral design with everything provided for you we can craft a course for you. Pip was accredited as a NAFAS National Teacher in 2019.

In 2015 Pip left Hilliers and carved a new career in floristry. Pip's background in horticulture brought a special twist to flowers with a real understanding of plants and flowers and a world of contacts so that she could source the very best flowers from all around the world but also from every corner of Britain.

In 2020 covid hit and all Pip’s work for the coming year quickly evaporated. Quick thinking on the part of her daughter Ellie led to the birth of The Vase Lady project. Initially a short term idea to sell any duplicates in Pip’s rapidly growing personal collection of vintage flower vases inspired by the great Constance Spry’s mantle vases it soon grew into an integral part of the business.

As the vases took off it became apparent that Pip couldn’t follow both paths and in 2026 Pip made the difficult decision to retire from floristry after 11 years and focus fully on her much loved vases. She continued her workshops and talks alongside this.

Pip had always done presentations at Hilliers and so she went ahead and did her Area Speakers Test with NAFAS and speaks about Chelsea, Flowers for Cutting, Climbers, Floral Design at a competition in China and creating the Winchester Cathedral Flower Festival. In 2023 she qualified as a National Speaker in NAFAS. She created a new talk in 2026 about her passion for vintage flower vases.

Pip has been co-chairman of her NAFAS flower club, Wessex Free Spirits, Judges’ Representative and Media Officer for her NAFAS Area, part of the NAFAS HQ Strategy Team and from 2022- 2025 was Chairman of the Wessex and JerseyArea of NAFAS.

Pip is also a tutor at Learning With Experts, the top online gardening school. Climbers are her subject there, so if you want to know more visit www.learningwithexperts.com.

She has been one of the regular experts on BBC Radio Solent's gardening question time, Grow It, where she answers questions from the public on a Sunday since the 1990s.  A chance meeting at a Flog It programme recording introduced her to a BBC Radio Surrey and Sussex producer who invited her to join the Gardening Team there too and so she joined as a regular on the Dig It programme with Joe Talbot until it went off air in 2024 as part of the BBC reorganisation.