The blooming celebrity of florist Hamish Powell

It’s the first day of the year that really feels like spring – the sky is a deep blue over south London, and the plane trees are unfurling fresh, green leaves across the city – and Hamish Powell is standing in the refrigerated aisles of New Covent Garden Flower Market doing his best Eliza Doolittle impression among buckets of sweet violets and nodding lilacs. “A cockle for a bunch!” the fashion mega-florist calls, thrusting a dripping spray of ranunculus towards me. In theory, I’ve joined him on an early-morning quest for guzmania, which he plans to use in Loewe’s flagship boutique on Bond Street. But the 27-year-old can barely make it three steps without becoming distracted by English-garden flowers: pausing to gasp at the season’s first anemones (“As tall as you like”), to inspect a bunch of Ribena-coloured campanulas (“They’re known as fairy bells,” he says, like he’s my teacher), and to breathe in the powdery scent of early sweet peas. “My job on this earth,” Powell says, wafting a handful under my nose, “is to combat plant blindness in a concrete world.”

Powell launched his own floristry studio in 2022 and has since established a reputation as “a floral artist” – an epithet often preceded by the adjective “multidisciplinary”. He has meticulously documented his process online, amassing more than 400,000 followers across platforms – and counting. Picture him suspending hyacinths in midair at Milan’s Salone del Mobile, or recreating the lantern-lit garden in John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose for a magazine shoot. The denizens of both the fashion world and Hollywood have taken notice. In the last year, he’s built a giant orb of yellow oncidiums for the Vanity Fair Oscar party and created a “bouncy, flouncy” spray of cosmos and didiscus for Charli xcx’s wedding, a turn of events that floored him so much he “nearly tossed his phone across the room”.

Powell’s longer-term goal is to make floristry more accessible to the wider public. He recently acquired a larger studio on Camden Road with the aim of launching an “experiential, object-curation event space”, essentially a coffee house-meets-flower shop – a place where anyone can go to revel in “floral beauty” in central London for the price of a latte. Powell is vocal about the need to reduce waste in floristry, but is savvy about the fact that, between “development, planting, watering, harvesting, shipping, wholesaling, delivering and arranging”, every bouquet supports the employment of hundreds of people; and while he keeps his practice as sustainable as possible – including banning the use of microplastics-laden foam – he’s clear that he never judges others’ choices, especially when there are so many financial considerations in play. “Not everyone has access to the same resources and conditions – we’re all just trying our best.”

Conceived to spark public interest in horticulture, its more distinctive features will include Wisley-grown delphiniums in honour of the King (as Charles puts it: “Magnificent, gloriously apparelled” flowers with an “impeccable bearing”); seven raised beds in a nod to Beckham’s football shirt number; and a convention of gnomes painted by, among others, the actor Cate Blanchett, Queen’s Brian May and – Powell’s favourite – the Bake Off alumna Mary Berry. Earlier this year, Powell arranged blue irises alongside Berry at another RHS event, “both of us plugged into Britney mics”. Powell now calls her Maz, affectionately. Halfway through the event she declared him “fruity”, and so he “upped the flirt”, he says. (“By the end the Dame and I were practically snogging.”) His favourite moment, though, came during the grand reveal of their final arrangements, when Berry gently trolled him after his bouquet received fewer cheers than hers did. “As if, cow!” he hoots now, absolutely delighted.

Powell is looking forward to seeing her again at Royal Hospital Chelsea, where his efforts will focus on what an RHS press release calls “a beautiful oak building representing a ‘museum of curiosities’,” and what Powell calls “a shed – but I’ll get told off for that”. Either way, come tomorrow, Powell will have installed a sculpture using herbaceous perennials inspired by King Charles’s Gloucestershire residence, Highgrove, and the English shrub roses named for each of the garden’s ambassadors by Shropshire’s master breeder David Austin. The King’s Rose, a striped fuchsia variety, is already well-known, as is Titchmarsh’s soft-pink whorl. But Sir David Beckham, a white, musky cultivar that Harper Beckham dedicated to her father as a recent 50th-birthday gift, will be making its debut at the festival, featuring prominently in both the Curiosity Garden and Powell’s arrangement. Developed over a decade, it’s a rose important enough in the gardening sphere for Country Life to publish a nearly 2,000-word feature on it last year. “Although its namesake is widely known,” reads the sober report, “there yet may be rose lovers all over the world who do not recognise him and will plant Sir David Beckham in their gardens.”

If Powell is as serious about flora as both His Royal Highness and the editors of Country Life, he’s somewhat less restrained in his enthusiasm. “That is fucked,” he trumpets excitedly, when he spots a Gloriosa lily across the market, much to the entertainment of the traders within earshot. “Look at that! It looks like a coral reef!”

Powell is dressed simply, in a Champion hoodie and faded jeans, but he’s been known to turn up here in a crop top and cowboy boots at 6am, making him a character familiar to most of New Covent Garden Flower Market’s 10 acres of wholesalers. “I don’t mind being the personality hire,” he jokes – though 20-odd minutes later he’s hiding behind a rail of chicken wire in the garden supply area, wincing with embarrassment. “I’ve got mon-nay,” he’d quipped in line at the register. “I know,” came the deadpan response from a poker-faced Cockney behind the till. “I’ve seen you on TikTok.”

It’s been fruitful training for this month’s Chelsea Flower Show, held, as it has been since 1913, over 11 acres of Thameside grounds at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The 2026 festival marks the first year the King’s Foundation has produced its own garden for the event and the Royal Horticultural Society has tasked Powell with contributing an installation. Bar a coronation or a royal wedding, this is about as prestigious as floristry commissions get on British soil, and yet “I still don’t think I’ve really practised enough gratitude on this,” Powell says. (He’d been “trying to jostle” his way into the RHS’s orbit for months.) Titled the Curious Garden, the sustainable, concrete-free plot has been designed by Gardeners’ World’s Francis Tophill, with input from an unlikely triumvirate: His Majesty King Charles III himself, doyen-of-British-gardening Alan Titchmarsh, and – in full Cotswolds-gent mode – Sir David Beckham.

Before long, he’d started playing around with £1 tulips from Lidl back in his student bedroom, and he found expressing himself through plants rewarding enough to trade his expected postgrad career – genetically modified organism development at a biotech giant – for an entry-level position at McQueens, the floral supplier to many of London’s five-star hotels. The hours were brutal. Most shifts began between midnight and 2am (“No one wants to see us: we’re service providers”), and while he learned a good deal, he quickly tired of being “a cog in the machine” of a large company. He founded his own one-man-band operation from a Bethnal Green flat-share aged just 23.

From the beginning, Powell’s self-generated PR strategy involved leaning into what he calls his online “niche” as “the sexy florist”. On his Instagram profile, he posts according to a “selfie, flowers, flowers, selfie” formula; imagine Powell shirtless by an LA pool, in a Hockneyesque shot, followed by a suit he made out of Somerset daffodils and narcissi a few springs ago. On TikTok, where his handle is @gaymish, he posts clips of pandanus foraged from Tanzanian mangroves alongside videos of him weeping through the Heated Rivalry finale. (“Maybe I need to have a brand meeting with myself about that,” he told me.) If he finds “cashing in” on what he calls his “pretty privilege” a bit cringe, it’s nevertheless landed him representation with the talent division of Storm Models, which is still best known to the general public as the agency that discovered Kate Moss, and helped to establish him “as a person, not just a service provider”. In March, he not only supplied the flowers for the Vanity Fair Oscar party but also attended the event, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he caught up with the singer-songwriter Troye Sivan and compared calla-lily tattoos with Paul Anthony Kelly, who was fresh from playing JFK Jr in Ryan Murphy’s Love Story. “Paul was like, ‘I’ll show you mine,’” Powell says. “Then he unbuttons his shirt and takes his full pec out…” His response to these moments, he says, ranges from “queening out” and “being, like: I’m a florist – why am I here?”

Admittedly, Powell is at a strange point on the 21st-century fame index. There is a disconnect between the perceived glamour of his image and his everyday life. If many of his clients are near-synonyms for luxury (see: Hermès), he still works out of an old falafel shop on Camden Road that comes with the lingering scent of frying oil. Even though he employs five freelancers and a studio manager named Doreen (“My crutch in this life”), he’s often pulled in too many directions at once, sometimes with comical results. The first night he met Tom Ford’s creative director Haider Ackermann at a brand dinner at Claridge’s, he had to race there from doing the florals for Jessie Ware’s Superbloom album cover, manically gelling his hair and changing into a borrowed suit among the floral detritus in the back of his van. He only landed on Charli xcx’s radar because he still hand-delivers specific bouquets. As Powell tells it, one day he turned up at Aidan Zamiri’s front door with an arrangement, and The Moment director answered the knock on FaceTime with the prototypical Brat. “There’s Charli, in my face,” Powell recalls. “Me! Making eye contact with Charli xcx! I was like, ‘Hi, Charli, babes.’ She was, like: ‘Oh, you’re that florist – love your work.’ I was, like: ‘Well, you don’t follow me on Instagram.’ Sure enough, that evening…”

Behind the flamboyant-artist persona, though, Powell insists he’s still “a left-brain person”, as comfortable speaking about “the photosynthetic rate of a sunflower leaf” and the evolutionary mimicry of Ophrys bombyliflora as the floral still lifes of Rachel Ruysch or the Taoist influence on ikebana. It’s this botanical double vision that makes him so appealing to the likes of the RHS – and capable of taking on projects that require a degree of scientific nous. When, post-Claridge’s, Ackermann tasked him with “developing the floral language” of Tom Ford’s autumn/winter 2026 collection – in layman’s terms, choosing the flowers for runway models’ lapels – Powell sourced thousands of pounds worth of rare orchids for a teaser shoot in Paris, effectively smuggling the plants on to Eurostar. When I ask the total cost, he says, simply: “A lot of money was spent.” But most of the stems ended up not being used. “Someone outside of this world might say, ‘Oh, my God – all of that for that!’ he says, showing me the finished 12-second clip. “But it’s just part of the process.”

It will be a long while before said bricks-and-mortar site fully opens, but he likes to plan ahead. At the flower market, he launches into a monologue about various ideas he’s already had for his funeral when the time comes, culminating in “an acorn being planted either in or above my skull” after he’s buried. “That way,” he continues happily, “when the tree grows, its roots wrap around me and absorb my nutrients and when someone touches the branch, it’s the same carbon my body was made of.” He throws his arms up, thrilled. “And then I can live for ever, as a plant, like I’ve always wanted.”

But first, there’s Sir David Beckham to arrange.

Floral set by Hamish Powell and Doreen Men