Petals Pressed into Clay

Between May and September, across a stretch of Derbyshire and the edge of Staffordshire, villages make large pictures out of flowers and put them up beside their water.

They are not arrangements. They are pictures — figurative, framed, often eight feet high, showing a biblical scene or a local subject, rendered in full colour, and every particle of colour in them is a piece of a plant.

How it is made

The method is unforgiving and it has barely changed.

A wooden tray, usually made in sections, is soaked in a pond or a stream for several days until the timber is thoroughly waterlogged. Then it is packed with clay that has been puddled by hand and mixed with salt, and the surface is smoothed flat and wet.

The design is drawn on paper, laid over the clay, and pricked through so the outlines transfer.

Then the filling starts, and it must be done in a few days because the clay is drying from the moment it goes in. The outlines go in first — usually alder cones or coffee beans or bark for the dark lines. The lettering follows. And then the areas are filled with flower petals, laid one at a time, overlapping downward like roof tiles so that rain runs off them rather than under.

Everything must be natural. Seeds, moss, lichen, bark, berries, eggshell, wool, sheep’s fleece, hydrangea and delphinium petals, and — for the fine gradations in a face — petals torn to size.

Village halls fill up with people doing this for a week, in shifts, with buckets of petals sorted by colour.

And then it dies

A finished dressing looks its best on the day it goes up. Within about a week the petals have dried and faded, the clay has begun to crack, and the picture is going. Then it is taken down, the clay is dug out, the boards are stacked, and next year somebody starts again with a different design.

Nothing is kept. Nothing is reused except the frames. A village will put several hundred hours of skilled work into an object with a life of six days, every year, and has been doing so for a very long time.

Why

Nobody knows, and the candidates are all attractive and all unproven.

The most-told story attaches to Tissington, which dresses on Ascension Day: that the village came through the plague of 1348 and 1349 without loss, and that this was credited to the purity of its springs. Another version attributes the custom to the drought of 1615, when Tissington’s wells kept running while others failed.

The third explanation, and the one most beloved of the pamphlets, is that this is pre-Christian water veneration, continued under a Christian gloss.

None of these can be demonstrated. The documentary trail for most village dressings runs back to the nineteenth or twentieth century, and a considerable number of them were founded or revived within living memory rather than handed down.