The empathy of jeweller Phoebe Walsh
When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, British jeweller Phoebe Walsh, who works with natural materials, could not simply stand by. She sought a way to help Ukraine.
In the archives of the London Garden Museum, Phoebe found letters from British soldier George Marr, who wrote to his beloved during the First World War and enclosed wildflowers from the battlefields in his letters. These herbariums told a deeply personal love story on the one hand, and on the other, a story of war and faith. Despite destruction and death, flowers are associated with rebirth and the triumph of life. The museum also preserved the herbariums of Jane Lindsay, a girl who collected flowers in 1956 at the sites of the bombing of London during the Second World War. Phoebe was struck by how ruins, where hundreds of people had died, were overgrown with grass and flowers just a few years later.
These stories inspired her to create miniature books with pressed flowers collected on the new front line – in Kyiv. This is how the idea emerged to combine art, nature and memory, making flowers a symbol of survival and hope.
Walsh, who was friends with Philip Norman, a long-time employee of the Garden Museum, decided to create a collection of jewellery called Letters To Kyiv – a tribute to the city and its struggle.
In March 2022, she began searching for Kyiv artists who were active on social media, and that is how she met Olha Morozova, a Kyiv resident. At that time, Olha was staying in Kyiv with her mother and two teenage sons and was working on a new series of paintings: “I immediately felt a kindred spirit, even though we had never met in person. We only corresponded by email,” says the artist. She was the first to agree to pick flowers from a park on the left bank of the Dnipro River in Kyiv and send them to Phoebe. They became the basis for the books and a symbol of the transformation of space – from a place of rest to a line of defence for one’s own city.
The project later expanded to include Olha’s paintings, which captured the changes in the surrounding world. Many people joined the initiative, helping with materials, logistics and ideas, and so Flowers from the Frontline became a visual archive of time.
“Phoebe first asked if we needed food, clothing or anything else, and only then did we start talking about flowers and collaboration,” recalls Olha Morozova.
Thanks to the project, young people, artists, and military personnel joined the process. Philip Norman came to Ukraine in person, bringing a bouquet from the British Prime Minister as a gift and a gesture of solidarity. Later, this bouquet was also turned into a herbarium, making it part of the exhibition.
Bouquet Kyiv Stage and cultural diplomacy
From 14 to 17 August, the Bouquet Kyiv Stage art festival was held at St Sophia’s Cathedral, which became the perfect venue for presenting the project.
It is symbolic that a festival with such a name could not be without flowers of war. The Metropolitan House presented: jewellery and books with dried flowers by Phoebe Walsh; herbariums from the front lines in Ukraine and copies of herbariums from the First and Second World Wars from the collection of the London Garden Museum, brought by Philip Norman; as well as three series of paintings by Olha Morozova: Fortification of the City – realistic paintings of fortifications that appeared in Kyiv parks in the first months of the invasion, supplemented with texts from the times of Kyivan Rus; Flowers of War / Flowers of Hope – works created using dried flowers; Forest Stained Glass – bright stained glass paintings, a symbol of escape into a world of beauty and fantasy.
Flowers that live and at the same time become herbariums give the viewer a new sense of time, memory and transience. This project is about the forces of life amid destruction. Flowers from the Frontline has already been presented in several countries: in addition to the London Garden Museum, it has been shown at the Palo Gallery in New York, the British Bedales Memorial Library in 2023–2024, and now in Kyiv at Bouquet Kyiv Stage.
