Creation is theme for 2024 Festival of Flowers in Chichester Cathedral

Tickets for the Festival of Flowers 2024, with Hannah Howell as festival designer, are on sale now. Tickets cost £18 per person. The Festival is open from 9.30am with last entry session starting at 3.30pm. Tickets from www.chichestercathedral.org.uk or call 0333 6663366.

“I have always loved the Festival of Flowers,” Kate says. “I go every other year which is how often it happens – just as a punter because it is such a beautiful and celebratory use of the cathedral and also because it is an unsung art form. The skill to tell these stories in flowers and to create these tableaux in flowers is as much an art or craft as sculpture or painting. It's just it's a very transitory medium, something that lasts just a short space of time. But I've always loved walking around it and I've always loved the imagination that you see in the approach and in the way it uses the cathedral.

“I'm not a flower arranger myself and that's why I admire the skills and the artistry so much. I did my flower-arranging badge in the Girl Guides in the 1970s, and the badge was stitched on by my mother but I think it's because it is not something that I do as a pastime that I admire the art of flower-arranging so much.

“The cathedral has got an incredible record of having these amazing cathedral events. It is very much the cultural heart of Chichester. I was first there when I was taking part in school things when I was at the Central School and I was there when I was at the Girls High School and I played in the County Youth Orchestra and we would do end-of-year concerts in the cathedral which were always on Cup Final day which is why there weren't so many dads there! And I even played God in the cathedral a couple of years ago in Benjamin Britten’s Noye's Fludde. They had to get special permission from the Britten estate for a woman to do the voice of God!

“The theme this year is creation and I can't wait to see how people are going to respond to that. Some will take it very literally and some will take very figuratively. It will be wonderful.

“People can sponsor certain parts of cathedral and certain flower arrangements and I have sponsored the Arundel Tomb because it is where in 1956 Philip Larkin visited Chichester Cathedral and then wrote the poem An Arundel Tomb. It's a poem about everlasting love and it is so tender and so beautiful and for me it was a real light bulb moment. It was the moment I realised that writers live in the real world, that writers are not just dead names on books. This person was looking in the cathedral in a place that I loved so much and the inspiration for the poem was this place that I loved so much. It was an amazing realisation.”

The Festival of Flowers celebrates such connections: “And I would like to pay tribute to the incredible committee that works so hard over two years to make each event so special and so unique. It's one of the most extraordinary flower festivals and I'm very proud to be part of it.”