How Flower & Glory began in Sevenoaks

Flower & Glory began on a Saturday. Deborah was forty-three, a European sales director with a daughter of five months, and she had got to know Sevenoaks well enough to be sure of one thing: it needed a really good flower shop. Blighs Meadow was newly built, so she asked the developer whether she could set up a flower stall under the arches on a Saturday, and he said yes.

For a year she did the stall on Saturdays while still working full time. Then she told her boss she would be leaving in a year, went to a four-day week and did Fridays too. Within the year she had given up the job, taken a small unit down by the Bat & Ball as a studio, and was at Blighs Meadow three days a week. A friend told her never to take a shop. She took one anyway: first up on Hollybush Lane, where the homeware began, and then the one she had wanted all along.

One Saturday, as she was clearing up, a man in a very weathered dinner suit and white trainers stood watching. "This is beautiful," he said. "Do you do this every week?" Only on Saturdays, she said. The market only ran on Saturdays. "Who says you can't do it more often? What about under the clock tower? Tell them I said you can have it whenever you want." He was Peter Kaufman-Kent, who had bought the old bus station and built Blighs Meadow out of it. When the phone shop on Blacks Yard came free she rang him and asked for it, and he let her have it. Flower & Glory has been at number 12 ever since.

Nearly twenty years on the range is still short on purpose. Everything is arranged by hand, to order, from what is at its best that week, so the collection shifts with the calendar and no two months look the same. Beyond the everyday bunches we take on weddings and events as full design projects: a consultation first, then a proposal built around the day, the venue and the season it lands in. And Home & Glory, the sister shop at 9 Blacks Yard, is the finishing touch for the house: the vase, the candle, the table and the flowers on it, all colour-coordinated and none of it something you would find anywhere else.