At home in Brixton with the founder of JamJar Flowers
Melissa Richardson intends to write a book one day, but until she does, those who know her are the lucky audience for her stories. She has a witty turn of phrase and is an excellent raconteuse, but when describing Long House in Sussex, her childhood home, she becomes almost poetic. ‘I was raised in a beautiful place and my father was a wonderful gardener. Flowers crowded out of beds and onto paths. Clematis, honeysuckle and roses climbed up and tumbled over soft, rosy brick walls to reappear on the other side. And beyond the walls were deep woods, where as children we would pick wildflowers to bring back and put in jam jars on the kitchen table.’
Naturally, the teenage Melissa could not wait to get away from this bucolic idyll. But for many years, Long House remained a retreat where she could recharge her batteries from her busy London life. ‘It was eventually sold and then radically altered by its new owners, so it could only exist in my mind and memory. Jam jars full of flowers became the inspiration for my business, JamJar Flowers, which I started in 2009, after 27 years of running a model agency.’
Melissa married Charlie Alexander, an independent specialist tour guide, in 1986 and they have three grown-up children: Finn, Scarlett and Melissa’s stepson Joe. The family lives in a double-fronted Victorian villa in Brixton. ‘We found it when we were driving around one hot summer day in 1990 with a little boy and a tetchy baby. I shouted to Charlie, “Stop, that’s the house I want,” and he said, “Well, you can’t have it because it isn’t for sale.”’ Miraculously, several weeks later a For Sale sign appeared and they bought the house. ‘It seems to expand to fit in three children, two cats and a nanny, and then magically shrinks back down when there are just the two of us.’
The villa, which is called Chaucer House, is furnished with finds from Ardingly and other country antique fairs. The atmosphere is relaxed and an open-plan layout is perfect for the seamless overlap of Melissa’s social and working life. No doubt the garden owes its inspiration to Long House, being fragrant and romantic while offering, for a compact London garden, a surprising number of quiet nooks.
Joe is now 36 and is a writer and filmmaker; Finn, 29, left his career in finance to partner Melissa in the running of JamJar Flowers; and Scarlett, 27, runs the Piccalilli Caff on Surrey Docks Farm, a charity farm in south London, and is a drummer in a band called Khartoum. ‘My father was a visionary,’ remembers Melissa. ‘He encouraged my sister, my brother and me to start our own businesses, and now his grandchildren have done the same. I started Take 2 Model Management with two friends in 1982 and we traded successfully until 2009, when I found the industry was changing in a way I no longer enjoyed. I just had this yen to arrange flowers for people who like what I like: simple, beautiful and seasonal flowers.’
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Melissa’s original intention was to work only one day a week, but within two years JamJar had become a full-time job, as a go-to florist’s for London’s top restaurants and fashionable events. It had outgrown Melissa’s kitchen table, so a Dickensian shop and studio was found in Peacock Yard in south London, where her clever idea of scaffolding across the inside of the windows provides shelving for bottles and jars, which look iridescent when lit by natural light from the outside.
Amy Ireland is Melissa and Finn’s fellow director at JamJar. The team also includes production assistant Ella Bandtock and head florist Talena Rolfe, as well as a fluctuating number of freelance florists known affectionately as ‘Jammers’. Courses in floristry and flower pressing take place in the upstairs studio. Pressed flowers are a theme for JamJar, which has taken on the challenge of producing bespoke wallpaper and is now contemplating fabric. Melissa and Amy recently started JamJar Edit, which sources, commissions or makes plant-related products.
Melissa sources her flowers largely from nearby New Covent Garden Market and meets her prospective wedding and event clients at the studio, but much of her week is spent zooming around London between her various projects.
One client is the chef Skye Gyngell, whose restaurant Spring is housed within Somerset House’s west wing. The classically proportioned room is majestic in scale, but the decoration is sleek and modern. Jane Scotter and Harry Astley of Fern Verrow, a biodynamic farm in Herefordshire, provide all the flowers for Spring. ‘They produce blooms totally unlike the uniform ones that grow in polytunnels. Theirs have personality and action, which is what I like,’ says Melissa.
At Chiltern Firehouse in Marylebone, there is a garden created by the US-based designer Miranda Brooks. ‘Miranda asked me to help with maintenance, which is not what we normally do,’ says Melissa. ‘But I asked my friend Annabel Dallas, a brilliant amateur gardener, to advise. We didn’t want the garden to look corporate.’ Today, Tilly Dallas, Annabel’s daughter and a professional gardener herself, works with JamJar to keep the garden looking beautiful.
Sketch restaurant in Mayfair hosts many art and design projects. One of these is the annual Mayfair Flower Show, for which Sylvain Chevelu, the restaurant’s artistic director, invites florists to pitch an idea and then chooses five of the schemes to be created. In 2017, Melissa was one of the chosen five. Having characteristically read up on the subject, the JamJar team recreated a seventeenth-century May Fair based on the annual markets that took place in early summer, when Mayfair was ‘a stinking suburb where people buried their noses in pomanders and danced around a Maypole’.
For the Daylesford shop and cafés, Melissa was commissioned to create a ‘hanging meadow’ of dried flowers: ‘The skill to this is in the timing, as flowers dry at different rates. I always test and experiment.’ Melissa’s shop window display at Brora on Symons Street won a silver medal in 2017 in the Chelsea in Bloom flower show. It featured a huge jungle Jeep, in keeping with the ‘Floral Safari’ theme.
At the end of the day, it is a respite for Melissa to pop into Chelsea Physic Garden for a wander, before she heads back across the Thames and home. ‘The Physic Garden is a secret oasis of calm. It is a wonderful little “lung” in the middle of London. I believe in the healing powers of beauty as well as its soothing qualities.’
JamJar Flowers: jamjarflowers.co.uk
JamJar Edit: jamjaredit.co.uk
Helen Cathcart1/18The front of the Victorian villa.
Helen Cathcart2/18A view from the hall to the music room, with art by Sarah Stitt, Claudia Legge and Jess Illsley
Helen Cathcart3/18The garden at Melissa’s house in Brixton, furnished with tables, chairs and a daybed from various antique markets.
4/18Lunch from Piccalilli Caff, owned by Melissa’s daughter Scarlett, laid out in the kitchen.
Helen Cathcart6/18Melissa at JamJar’s studio in Peacock Yard, south London.
Helen Cathcart7/18Director Amy Ireland in the studio.
Helen Cathcart8/18Freelance florist and regular ‘Jammer’ Flora Wallace (on left) with head florist Talena Rolfe.
Helen Cathcart9/18Pressed flowers ready for a JamJar Edit workshop.
Helen Cathcart10/18
Helen Cathcart11/18Melissa and Amy outside the shop front, with bottles and jars lined up in the windows.
Helen Cathcart12/18A JamJar Edit test-tube-holder arrangement of garden flowers.
Helen Cathcart13/18Melissa and Finn at JamJar with flowers in a wooden cigar press.
Helen Cathcart14/18Flora preparing deliveries; the nineteenth-century pictures on the wall were given to Melissa by her father.
Helen Cathcart15/18Melissa walking through Somerset House to Spring restaurant for which she provides the flowers.
18/18Stopping at Chelsea Physic Garden on her way home after work.
